Students will then reflect on the message conveyed by these various forms of media, including the portrayal of Senator McCarthy and other key figures. During his speech, McCarthy claimed to have a list of all the known Communists in the state department. Compare your notes from from this article to a telegram sent to President Harry S. Truman the following day:.
Source: National Archive. What sources does he refer to as evidence for his claim? Remember, he is addressing the President of the United States. What is he asking the President to do for him? Is this an appropriate way to speak to the President? Why or why not?
What are his main accusations? We stand firmly by the phrase, "you can't be what you can't see" and as media makers, we wanted to take on that responsibility of creating something beautiful and inspirational Cook: By living in this beautiful female world for 30 days on the road, we learned how much we can grow and learn from each other if we share our stories, and how powerful and amazing we can be when we come together as women.
We came to the understanding that our stories are universal in many ways, and that oftentimes, as women we tend to undervalue our experiences and stand in our own way. But if we can recognize all of the passion and the power is already inside of us, embrace our vulnerability, and show up as ourselves, we can accomplish anything we set our minds to. How did you do it, what do you think women and the world want to see from this film project?
Moshman: Kickstarter was an incredibly difficult mountain to climb for us. Our project has always been bigger than us, it has always been about empowering the next generation of female leaders to pursue their dreams despite the media messaging, and I think people were drawn to that concept.
Moshman: We want to give young men and women across the country and across the world the feeling they can do and be and achieve anything they want. We also want to change the way the media portrays women. We have the tremendous privilege to see the empowerment firsthand when we visit schools, groups, offices and organizations all around the U. Gary Fereday London. There is nothing stunningly original in the assertion that communism and socialism have much in common with religion.
In this country certainly, religion and leftwing views often flowered on the same vine and major figures from John Ball, Gerrard Winstanley and William Morris were arguably driven at least as much by theology as politics.
Also, religion essentially arises out of our inability to cope with our own mortality and what communism did was to transfer this longing for some form of transcendental permanence from an imaginary next world to an imaginary future.
As with religion, communism offered future salvation but, as history shows, both got lost along the way, in a maze of greed, sectarianism and violence. Where I part company with Kettle however is in his evident faith that we now have something better, by which I suppose he means capitalism, neoliberalism and the market economy. What he and Aaronovitch converts both choose to ignore is that these dogmas of the right are equally faith-driven and delusional.
Likewise capitalism has a history every bit as violent as the communism of the Soviet Union and China, when its wars of conquest, colonialism and present-day interventionism are taken into account. Kettle also seems to assume that when the Soviet version of communism perished so did socialism in general. I am absolutely certain that, if allowed to continue, this fundamentally unjust and divisive addiction will at the very least destroy civilisation as we know it.
This is not an article of faith but straightforward mathematics on a finite planet. Furthermore, I can see no solution other than a paradigm shift in economic and political thought towards some sort of steady-state society.
Such a transformation would require a massive redistribution of wealth and resources. Not a matter of faith but survival. This has been going on for decades.
There is no formal censorship in the USA, but there is what some call Market Censorship — that is, mainstream media do not want to run stories that will offend their advertisers and owners. In this way, the media end up censoring themselves and not reporting on many important issues, including corporate practices. For some examples of this, check out the Project Censored web site.
Another effect of these so-called market forces at work is that mainstream media will go for what will sell and news coverage becomes all about attracting viewers.
Yet the fear of losing viewers from competition seems so high that many report the exact same story at the very same time! Objective coverage gets a back seat. A friend of mine [of journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski] was working in Mexico for various US television channels.
I met him in the street as he was filming clashes between students and police. I just get the shots. I send them to the channel, and they do what they want with them. Even honest journalists from the major networks can find that their stories and investigations may not get aired for political reasons , rather than reasons that would question journalistic integrity.
Some journalists unwittingly go with the corporate influences while others who challenge such pressures often face difficulties. John Prestage is also worth quoting on this aspect too:.
Even some mainstream journalists are sounding the alarm…. Henry Holcomb, who is president of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia and a journalist for 40 years, said that newspapers had a clearer mission back when he began reporting. That mission was to report the truth and raise hell. But corporate pressures have blurred this vision, he said.
Some advertisers kill some stories and promote others, she said, asserting that there is an overwhelming influence of corporations and advertisers on broadcast and print news reporting. The trends are all bad, worse and worse, Nichols said. Newspapers and broadcast journalists are under enormous pressures to replace civic values with commercial values.
He labeled local television news a cesspool. Local broadcasters are under pressure from big corporations to entertain rather than to inform, and people are more ignorant after viewing television news because of the misinformation they broadcast, he said.
It is not just corporate pressures that can impact the media, but political and cultural pressures, too. For example, Dan Rather was mentioned above noting that journalists were pressured by patriotic fever following the September 11, terrorist attacks to resist asking tough questions that might criticize America too much. At a media conference in March , Dan Rather reiterated his concerns regarding the state of journalism in the US.
So many journalists—there are notable exceptions—have adopted the go-along-to-get-along attitude , he said. So, because of this access game, journalism has degenerated into a very perilous state,.
As Amy Goodman noted many years ago linked to further below , the press corps that accompanies the White House is often too cozy with the officials, and it is hard to ask tough questions. Dan Rather notes that it is a general problem:. Rather reiterated his feeling that many journalists today—and he repeated that he has fallen for this trap—are willing to get too cozy with people in positions of power, be it in government or corporate life.
The nexus between powerful journalists and people in government and corporate power, he said, has become far too close. You can get so close to a source that you become part of the problem, he added.
Some people say that these powerful people use journalists, and they do. Rather also said that the consolidation of power in a small number of media companies has hurt the search for the truth in newsrooms across the country. As media conglomerates get bigger, the gap between newsrooms and boardrooms grows, and the goal becomes satisfying shareholders, not citizens, he said. Therefore, Rather supports increased competition between media companies and between journalists.
Political bias can also creep in too. While of course this is not a complete study of the mainstream media, it does show that there can be heavy political biases on even the most popular mainstream media outlets.
In addition, female critics were significantly underrepresented, ethnic minority voices were almost non-existent and progressive voices were far outnumbered by their conservative counterparts. The discussion also noted that PBS is not like a public service as it is understood in most countries; it requires the program request funding from wealthy individuals and companies that give it backing. Indeed, PBS requires major corporate funding to keep going, and so, the media experts in that discussion implied, did not offer the counter-balance to commercial stations, as they are often believed to provide.
At the same time, it was also revealed that the FCC never released another damaging report that the Telecommunications Act of had similarly reduced the diversity of radio stations throughout the United States. This concentration results from commercial ownership through buyouts and dominance by the most powerful entities and when those media interests reflect the interests of those in power, as they clearly do, has serious implications for diversity of views, and for a healthy democracy.
Concentrated ownership of media results in less diversity. This means that the political discourse that shapes the nation is also affected. And, given the prominence of the United States in the world, this is obviously an important issue.
However, politicians can often be hesitant about criticizing the media too much, as the following from Ben H. Bagdikian summarizes:. Politicians hesitate to offend the handful of media operators who control how those politicians will be presented — or not presented — to the voters. Media political power has always been a fixture in American history.
But today the combination of the media industry and traditional corporate power has reached dimensions former generations could not match. As the country enters the twenty-first century, the news and analyses of progressive ideas and groups are close to absent in the major media. Similarly absent is commentary on dangers of this political one-sidedness to American democracy. Bagdikian continues in that paragraph to then note how the American media are good at recognizing similar problems with other countries, by pointing to certain New York Times stories as examples.
In that book, they point out that there are many occasions, where the U. However, when it comes to reporting on the actions of their own nations in geopolitical issues, reporting often fits a propaganda model that they also defined in their book. Sometimes it is very subtle, but comes about through natural interactions of the various pulls and pushes of different political, economic and social aspects that affect decisions on what to report and how.
In some countries of course, especially authoritarian regimes, propaganda models may be very explicit. Using their propaganda model, Chomsky and Herman, attempt to demonstrate how money and power are able to filter out the news, … marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message across to the public.
The issues of concentration in media and its often negative impact on discourse and democracy is discussed in more detail on this sites section on corporate influence in the media.
The blog, FrugalDad, also has this info graphic on the the state of media consolidation in the U. On the advertising ingredient, Chomsky and Herman also point out that the pressures to show a continual series of programs that will encourage audience flow watching from program to program so that advertising rates and revenues are sustained results from advertisers wanting, in general, to avoid programs with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the buying mood.
Documentaries, cultural and critical materials then get a back seat. Others also recognize this as well:. They prefer us tranquilized, pacified, entertained. I have heard him describe in several speeches the mantra of dominant media to ordinary viewers, readers and listeners as simple: Shut up and shop.
It is these often unspoken values at the heart of the business culture that undercut the creation of and support for more democratic public interest media.
In the familiar dynamics, this in itself favors the big operator over the small, a contributing factor to the emergence of giantism in the American economy. On the reliance upon official sources ingredient, Chomsky and Herman point out that because sources such as the government and businesses are often well known, they are deemed reputable and therefore not questioned much.
However, when another government offers news items, we are often able to recognize it as possible propaganda, or at least treat it with some scrutiny that requires further verification. In terms of flak, Chomsky and Herman point out how various right-wing media watch groups and think tanks were set up in the 80s to heavily criticize anything in the media that appeared to have a liberal or left wing bias and was overly anti-business. It has a profound impact, especially when combined with the corporate ownership, as the following quote highlights:.
Corporations have multimillion-dollar budgets to dissect and attack news reports they dislike. But with each passing year they have yet another power: They are not only hostile to independent journalists. They are their employers.
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