Eric Alterman's "the Top 6 Things Wrong with Main-Stream-Media" (below, DOESN'T BEGIN TO SCRATCH THE SURFACE of the SHEER, disgusting, craven, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the Main Stream Media whores.
Need an example? In South Florida, they are pumping RAW SEWAGE into the ocean.. via a huge pipe less than a mile off shore of Broward-Palm Beach County beaches. If the winds and tide are heading back towards shore, the sewage comes RIGHT BACK TO THE BEACH - where it wipes out the fragile reefs, and of course forces swimmers to swim in it. Well, maybe it isn't RAW sewage... maybe it is "once treated" sewage, or even "twice treated" sewage.
WELL, WE DON'T KNOW.. because ALL THREE of South Florida's WHORE "major media" newspapers WON'T COVER that disgraceful scandal! THEY ARE TOO BUSY SELLING LIES, GARBAGE INFORMATION.. and now SHIT,
LITERALLY!
"WELCOME TO FLORIDA! COME SWIM IN OUR SHIT!" should be the new tourism motto of Broward, Palm Beach, and Dade counties. Never in human history, have so many benefited so much from the cheap, renewable, all-but-free natural resource that is the thin line between land and surf of Florida's beaches. (Any "cost" to "maintaining the beaches" involves, not the beaches themselves, but INFRASTRUCTURE adjacent to or on the beaches, or roads and buildings leading to the beaches. Even "beach renourishment" projects, no matter how costly, are about rescuing the DEVELOPMENT threatened by retreating shorelines,.) Florida's once pristine beaches have created MILLIONS upon BILLIONS of dollars in tourist revenue for South Florida's businesses... but they, the ENTIRE region and state of Florida, will do NOTHING to PROTECT those beaches - from the sewage that beach tourism development has created over the years! Not only that, they- South Florida businesses and especially MEDIA WHORES - CONTINUE TO LURE TOURISTS to VISIT Florida, presumably to SWIM IN THOSE now polluted with fecal bacteria waters!
Florida papers and press have also renounced ANY RESPONSIBILITY to oversee the $7.8 BILLION Everglades Restoration program. This allows the Republican state house to treat the federal TAXPAYER MONEY like a PRIVATE SLUSH FUND - to dole out huge funds to friends and crony contractors, especially connected landowners paid INFLATED PRICES for land that the state would CONDEMN in a New York minute if it was in the way of a highway interchange, but receives prime suburban valuations from the Restoration plan, despite being out in the middle of nowhere. Further, the properties in question would be worthless to agriculture or owners without extensive drainage and water subsidies, yet property owners demand, and get, massively inflated prices because business and the state house look at the "Restoration" project as their cash cow.
ALL THREE SOUTH FLORDIA PAPERS - the PALM BEACH POST, Ft. Lauderdale SUN-SENTINEL, and MIAMI HERALD - are party to these SCANDALS - ENTICING TOURISTS to SWIM IN SEWAGE, and allowing Florida officials to SQUANDER BILLIONS OF DOLLARS of taxpayer restoration funds. And that is just TWO little issues, at three little papers.
The GROSS, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "Major Media" extends from STOLEN ELECTIONS, to WHITEWASHING 9-11 culpability, to pretending that ffemale privates, ordered to "abuse" prisoners at US run Abu Ghraib prison, were acting as "rogue operators" - at a time when the Secretary of Defense, Vice President, and President were OPENLY ASSERTING the " RIGHT" to TORTURE prisoners... TO DEATH! And what is with the Orwellian "DETAINEE" designation for prisoners that the Media Whores and War government love to use? You are "DETAINED" if you are stopped for a few moments, or even hours, or days. When someone is "detained" as a teenager, and remains in American prisons 5 years later, that isn't "detention" - that is prison.
The SHEER, VILE, ABJECT CORRUPTION of the "American Major Media" is BOTTOMLESS, and the NEW YORK TIMES, FOX 'news" and other corporate media whores ARE STILL LUSTING to BOMB MORE COUNTRIES, and KILL MORE MILLIONS of Mid-easterners.
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What's Really Wrong With the MSM?
Eric Alterman "the liberal media" at theNation.com
posted December 6, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/alterman
Of course, far more is wrong with the mainstream media than can be described, or even enumerated, in one column. But let's give it a shot, using only items that have come up since my last column, all of which speak to the issue of why its members have forfeited our collective trust.
1. Its members consistently defer to conservative Republican Presidents with a history of deliberate deception, allowing them to define their terms. "One of the reasons for not [calling chaos in Iraq a civil war] was, you know, honestly, a concern that because the White House has contended that this is not a civil war, that using the phrase amounted to a kind of unnecessary political statement."--Bill Keller, executive editor, New York Times.
2. Its members invite Republican Congressmen, known to be not merely unreliable but delusional, to lie about Democratic Congressmen. When challenged, they reply that they cannot be bothered to discern the truth: Time's Joe Klein, a pundit who terms the Democratic Party "a party with absolutely no redeeming social value," one whose members "make fools of themselves even when they speak the truth," recently informed the magazine's readers that "tone-deaf" Democrats in the House had passed legislation that "would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only," and thereby "give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans." The liberal blogosphere, led by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, demonstrated that this statement was categorically false, as the bill reads: "A court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." Time eventually printed a correction but refused to adjudicate between truth and falsehood, claiming merely that Democrats and Republicans interpret the bill differently. Klein shrugged off criticism by saying, "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." Later Republican Peter Hoekstra, who is also on record insisting that the United States had discovered a WMD program in Iraq but that the CIA had conspired to cover it up, revealed that he had been a key source for Klein's reporting.
3. Its members invite conservative Republican individuals known to be insane, unbalanced and unconcerned with the truth to lie about Democratic presidential candidates on the front page of their newspapers and when confronted respond that it is not their job to determine the truth. The Washington Post's Perry Bacon published a recent front-page article giving voice to right-wing paranoids, racists and assorted hatemongers who insist that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim. Sources included the Moonie-financed Insight online magazine, Human Events (home to Ann Coulter), demagogues Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh, and some guy who posted on the Internet somewhere. Beyond the Obama campaign's denials, nowhere in the piece did Bacon inform readers that these allegations are demonstrably false. In an online chat, the paper's Lois Romano explicitly defended the practice, claiming that "airing some of this and giving [Obama] a chance to deny its accuracy could be viewed as setting the record straight."
4. Its corporations fire, and then buy the silence of, their own reporters in order to hide the truth, when it involves the draft records of certain conservative Republican Presidents. After being fired by CBS News as the chosen fall-person for Dan Rather's story on George W. Bush's draft avoidance, producer Mary Mapes published Truth and Duty, a book that insisted the story was true, the documents were real and she had been the victim of a deal between CBS's parent, Viacom, and the Bush White House to quash the story. After the book's publication, CBS paid Mapes an undisclosed sum to settle her lawsuit against the company and required her to sign a confidentiality agreement covering the deal. The three other CBS staffers working with Rather on the story were also fired and given settlements, one reportedly worth $3 million. Recall that the documents in question, while never authenticated, have never been proven to be forgeries, and CBS's own committee of inquiry took no position on their veracity.
5. Its members are so in thrall to the powerful conservative Republican figures they cover that they make up excuses for their self-serving behavior. Appearing on Brian Lehrer's WNYC radio show, Mark Halperin, former political director of ABC News, now a top analyst for ABC and Time, offered his views on the reason Senate minority leader Trent Lott was resigning: "I think that this is a true 'wants to spend more time with his family' case." Halperin was apparently unaware that Lott--whose politically connected brother-in-law was recently indicted on bribery charges--himself failed to offer this lamest of excuses and also that his resignation came just in time to avoid the enactment of a tough new ethics law relating to retiring legislators and their future lobbying practices.
6. Its members ignore the substance of politics and instead focus obsessively on atmospherics, leaving voters clueless about the politicians for whom they are expected to vote. "I've always felt that we did a disservice to voters and the public by filling the news hole with too much horse race and not enough information to let them make a decision on who the best President would be," Halperin explains in a new book. "We should examine a candidate's public record and full life as opposed to his or her campaign performance," he then added in a widely quoted mea culpa on the New York Times op-ed page. Alas, within a week of writing those words, Halperin published two pieces on the Time website that focused exclusively on the various campaigns, with nary a substance-related syllable in either one.
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