Amy Goodman does it again hosting on Democracy Now! veteran broadcast journalist Bill Moyers who spoke on Friday before 3,500 at the opening of the National Conference on Media Reform in Memphis. He announced his return to the airwaves and outlined his vision of media reform.
"As ownership gets more and more concentrated, fewer and fewer independent sources of information have survived in the marketplace; and those few significant alternatives that do survive, such as PBS and NPR, are under growing financial and political pressure to reduce critical news content and to shift their focus in a mainstream direction, which means being more attentive to establishment views than to the bleak realities of powerlessness that shape the lives of ordinary people."
"It is absolutely stunning, frightening, how the major media organizations were willing, even solicitous hand-puppets of a state propaganda campaign cheered on by the partisan, ideological press to go to war."
3 comments:
Thanks for the compliment, Hope, and right backatcha. I rely on your voice. Btw, the piece you did on "Bush on the Couch" was excellent. I read the whole interview you linked to.
The concentration of media ownership encouraged by ideology or conscious policy, pushes a national soma agenda which is punctuated by fits of paranoid, violent hallucinations.
Blogs are probably so popular because they provide a means of fighting, through fact-checking and amplifying dissenting opinions, and journalism is passing to blogs. Some have dismissed blogging as unproductive venting, but organizational changes start with venting. If the venting resonates with other venting, it gets amplified. This knob goes to 'Eleven.'
Wow, Hopey, that Moyers speech is quite the tour de force, dense with wisdom. One thing among many that grabbed my attention:
The pioneering communications scholar, Mary Edelman, wrote that opinions about public policy do not spring immaculately or automatically into people's minds. They are always placed there by the interpretations of those who most consistently get their claims and manufactured cues publicized widely.
Welcome back, Bill Moyers - we really need you.
That really is an astute comment and pick-up Op. Thanks.
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