mainstream media

The so-called liberal media is never ending in its pushing of right wing propaganda. Take the case of off-shore drilling for oil. In Eric Alterman’s article, Think Again: Shallow Reporting on Deep Drilling, the evidence showing the downsides of drilling is given:

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Agency projects that drilling would only yield merely 200,000 barrels of oil over a period of 20 years. This comes to roughly 0.2 percent of world oil production, which the EIA says is too small to have any significant effect on prices. These figures contradict the entire “drill here, drill now, pay less” mantra.

Here’s how our so-called liberal mainstream media reports this information:

Yet the Center for Economic and Policy Research has conducted a stunning survey of just how infrequently this information appears in the mainstream media’s narrative on drilling. From June 16 to August 9, there were 267 broadcasts that mentioned proposed drilling, including “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “Meet the Press,” CNN, and “Fox News.” Of these 267 broadcasts, only one saw fit to include the EIA data.

As Eric Alterman says, “Is it any surprise, therefore, that 74 percent of the public now favors drilling offshore—a demonstrably useless policy?” And this is just one of the things that really make me wonder whether America is going to survive as a democracy much longer into this 21rst century!

For more on how the so-called liberal media continues to pass on right-wing propaganda without critical analysis of any kind see here.

The NYT has a great editorial today, Mississippi’s Ballot Trick, and this is one of the 150 comments so far, an editor’s pick:Wow, what a shock! Republicans trying to rig an election! Since the 2000 election, which saw the Supreme Court violate the law to stop the vote counting and appoint our President, we’ve discovered voter rolls purged of legitimate (democratic) voters, voter challenges, voter caging lists, voter registrations thrown in the trash, letters sent to the homes of voters to mis-inform them of the election date, phone banks jammed to prevent voters from contacting campaign offices for rides to the polls, students told they can’t vote in the districts where they attend school, and of course the continued use of notoriously flawed touch screen, paperless, voting machines which flip votes, lose votes, crash, and were invented to throw elections to the republicans. Has there been any serious investigation of these tactics by the mainstream media? Only now you’re offended? Eight long and tragic years late, but better late than never, though not by much.

— Kenneth D. Brown, Redondo Beach, CA

I discovered this interesting chart for the US Primaries 2008 while perusing Notes from underground. It was created by The Political Compass. Sadly, according to the criteria of the Political Compass website, the only two candidates who show up as non-authoritarian and left of center are the two that hadn’t a ghost of a chance, Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel. Clearly, the perspective here is not that of the American Mainstream Media, but may it not in fact be realistic from some perspectives, perhaps that in parts of Europe?

The website also provides a test for a person to compute where she/he stands on the Left to Right, Authoritarian to Libertarian scale. I took the test and found that I fell in the lower left quadrant, that of the leftist libertarian. The questions are general enough so that if you feel like putting in a little bias you can maybe move yourself around a little on the chart, or even perhaps a lot, depending on how much you might cheat.
hmmmmmmm