Edward R. Murrow & The London Blitz

He reported live by CBS from England to America. His opening became famous. "This is London," he said in the bleak months of 1940 as wave after wave of luftwaffe bombers set fires with their incendiaries to the buildings below. Search lights lit gaggles of bombs falling through the sky as tracer bullets lit German motors and wings for RAF Spitfire pilots diving on the bombers.

The London Blitz began about four in the afternoon the 7th of September 1940, and as air raid sirens sounded, the first German bombers arrived to drop their bombs on London. Over 340 German bombers escorted by around 600 fighters dropped hundreds of incendiary bombs on the London docks. The raid lasted until 6:00 pm. A couple of hours later, the flames served as beacons for the second wave headed across the channel from France. This attack lasted until 4:30 in the morning. More than 430 people were killed, with 16,000 serious casualties. The Blitz rained death on Londoners for 57 nights in a row, sirens awakening them in the middle of the night, urging them to take shelter.

For Americans, Edward R. Murrow chronicled this horror, and he stood on London roof tops, describing the planes and bombs in the sky, the flames leaping up over London. In Ohio and Iowa, New York and California, families clustered around living room radios to hear him. He brought the war home and prepared Americans for their entry into it. He shaped public opinion and encouraged aid to Britain.

He began a sign-off that became a recent movie title. As the war from the skies raged, Londoners did not know if they would see one another in the morning. They said “So long and good luck.” Ending a live radio broadcast, Princess Elizabeth said to the Free World, “Good night and good luck to you all.” At the end of a 1940 broadcast, Murrow signed-off with Good night and good luck.” George Clooney’s movie adopted the phrase as its title, David Strathairn playing Edward R. Murrow.

In 1941, back in the USA after three years abroad, he was guest of honor at a dinner hosted by CBS at the Waldorf-Astoria, eleven hundred guests in attendance, millions more listening on the radio. Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent him a telegram. Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, gave a speech in praise of him.

“ You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames. . . You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead. . . were mankind's dead without rhetoric, without dramatics, without more emotion than needed be. . . you have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond 3,000 miles of water is not really done at all.

Murrow climbed down from the roof tops of London and into the bellies of RAF and American bombers, flying with crews over Germany. In one night bombing raid, on December 2, 1943, he flew in an Avro Lancaster with D for Dog, as its nose art. In his radio report, even today we feel his and the crew’s fear, see the German search light cones probing the sky, feel the bomber twisting and turning out of reach. You can listen his radio to report here.

In his post war years, he became well-known for his character, integrity, and stance against ill-used power or influence. In a legendary 1954 broadcast he helped end the Red Scare and Red-baiting of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Once close friends with CBS boss William Paley, he fell out with the man, and took issue over Paley’s desire to improve profits at the expense of journalistic integrity. Paley’s successors, of course, have had their way with the media, so that today the public is entertained but rarely informed.

Contrasting what London was like then (audio), to what it is today (video), this link very poignantly provides a Murrow broadcast during the Blitz, and reminds us that all those 21st Century visitors don’t have a clue as to what 1940 Londoners had to endure.

Everybody's Magazine and Its Times

Everybody's Magazine and Its Times.

In a world where the next eye-candy bauble is only a mouse-click away, this magazine gives us pause to think about a time when people in their busy lives actually set aside leisure time to read.

I found an October 1912 copy of Everybody's Magazine in an antique shop and was struck by both similarities and huge differences between that time and this. The differences are reminiscent of the contrasts Peter Laslett made to far earlier times in The World We Have Lost. We are sleepwalkers unaware and indifferent to vast social changes that have gradually, almost imperceptibly, happened to generations. For now, though, an essay at comparison demands more space than I want to allow. For the moment I am content to present some pages and comment on them.

After the cover, I have provided pages of advertisements. The ads are introduced at the opening pages and at the end. None interrupt articles or stories; the idea must have been that an advertiser feared annoying the reader with an intrusion of his product into reading material, and possibly alienating the reader from the product.

Here is the cover. No pictures. Only words. The idea then was that the buyer need not be "grabbed" by an alluring babe or flashy celeb. People expected to find descriptive words not catchy graphics. Apparently Thomas W. Lawson wrote a sensational series a few years before--called "Frenzied Finance." In this issue's "The Remedy" Lawson argues that the stock market is merely a legalized casino and should be abolished. He writes it with a tone of high dudgeon. As people would say today, it is a kind of "I am fed up and am not going to take it anymore." His view of financial markets was widely shared by his readers. As I read it I was reminded of current popular disgust with Wall Street and high finance.

The first series, "Frenzied Finance," appeared intermittently and lasted from July 1904 to February 1908. To promote it, Lawson spent $250,000 of his own money, a hunk of change back then. The money helped. Sales reached 750,000 by 1908.

This ad for a Savage automatic pistol appears rather strange today. No weapons are now advertised in popular magazines. The population then was to a greater extent rural, and elsewhere shotguns and rifles are advertised. Clearly, fear of crime is not new. This ad is pitched to the lady of the house. Notice that she neither wounds nor kills the burglar, which would not be ladylike. She "tips" him.

Notice the nicely dressed women getting out of the Baker Electric car below. Then as now: You too can buy social status if you just purchase our vehicle. So they want you to believe. The illustration shows that ladies can stand up in it before exiting, so they won't harm their lovely hats. No man is shown. The point is that a woman can drive herself and her friends to a place where a dog can romp. In an era before women had the right to vote, this is a tactical point for Baker Electrics. It speaks to feminine freedom.













Some things don't change. One is Campbell Soup. The artwork for the children is different, but the design is basically the same, and kids are still used to promote the product.
















He didn't buy the suit off the rack. His tailor made it. The Oswego product is not the suit, but the serge material that he chose. The tailor would make the man's suit from the serge manufactured by American Woolen Company.









Des Moines, Iowa, was an up-and-coming town back then. Go West, young man, until you reach Des Moines. That didn't stop others from reaching the Pacific. In the classifieds, Los Angeles is advertised as the "fastest growing city in the West." You could buy a farm in L.A. with "rich loam soil, ideal for vegetables [and] fruit." Or you could plant peach and walnut trees. The reader is reminded that the property will "increase in value" as the "Panama Canal opens next year." By the 1960s Burt Bacarach would describe the area differently with his lyrics, "L.A. is a great big freeway."









This fellow below looks rather dapper in his cap, suit coat, and tie. No biker jeans and leather jacket for him. The Harley was a young gentleman's way to get around. The manufacturer pushed comfort, not power, not speed, not macho. Harley-Davidson then competed with other American manufacturers, among them Indian and Excelsior-Henderson. 1912 was the year Harley introduced chain drives. Before, they had used belts. A 1912 Harley was recently auctioned at $100,000.





Everybody's Magazine was founded in 1899. This was the era of muckraking, of deep investigative journalism that came about because of great social evils and atrocious robber barons. The editor, John O'Hara Cosgrave, intended the magazine to have popular appeal, but to include hard-hitting journalism while entertaining readers with many short stories. (With no TV or radio, people read.) Upton Sinclair was featured in it as well as Frank Norris--both muckrakers determined to reveal the evil side of an America that many feared was being taken over by Fat Cats.

Before 1917, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton, wrote in Everybody's Magazine for a series titled "America's Neutrality as England Sees It." In 1917 neutrality was over, and the public was roused by a popular song, "Over There," with its patriotic "We won't be back till it's over over there." Young men were encouraged to enlist with another song, "Johnny Get Your Gun." The United States was in the war a little more than a year. Since 1914, Europe had lost an entire generation of young men to trench warfare and machine guns.

After The War to End All Wars was over, so was Everybody's Magazine. Not suddenly, but gradually. The Jazz Age had begun, prosperity had come, and Americans wanted to enjoy themselves in speakeasies or make a wad in the stock market that Thomas Lawson had denounced in his articles on "Frenzied Finance" and "The Remedy." In December 1926, the magazine owners ended its charged political articles, and focused on entertaining short stories. It didn't work. Everybody's Magazine sold its last copy in March 1929.

Citizens & Frogs, Media & Government

If you put a frog in a pan of hot water, it will jump out. If you put it in a pan of lukewarm water, then slowly turn up the heat it will boil to death.

We are no different. In Shakespeare's Richard II, the tragic king observes that man's capacity for adjustment seems infinite. Infinite, yes. We are frogs, all of us. The only response is, Do we want to be?, and in that question lies our difference. We can jump out before the water boils.

Not that we will. Only that we can.

Where am I going with this? Here—In the last post, I noted that most media are ignoring the military build-up in the Middle East. The reason is obvious. It's called big business. The media are big business. For news anchors, the build-up story does not scream. People might flick the remote to the next channel. Besides, if war erupts, why that would be a real screamer, attracting many viewers. Never mind all that B.S. about the public interest, say the media. A buddy of media executives, former FCC Chairman Michael Powell said he did not know what the public interest is. He was not kidding.

You and I are the public, and we know what it is. Our vital interest lies with knowing that massive military build-ups have occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. We are already like frogs, our troops in the scalding water of Iraq. Without public knowledge, without public debate, we may be plunged into a caldron. Mainstream news got us into Iraq because corporate profit margins rule out investigative journalism. Instead, the news anchors just parroted the White House buzz words. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Saddam Hussein linked to terrorists. Lies, all of them, we now know, but no thanks to the media's sense of public interest.

There went more frogs into Iraq. In the Nineteenth Century soldiers were openly called cannon fodder by the power elite. Those in power did not understand what we now call Spin, or Propaganda. This explains why recent polls reveal that public trust in government is far lower than in 1981.

The only way to stop being frogs is to understand what is happening to media in this country. Not only to understand it, but to make our voices heard before the water boils.

Think about this.

Could a few media conglomerates overwhelm smaller competing voices? Voices that have news and information vital to the public interest? Quite obviously, they have. A 2004 report identified 6 media conglomerates that owned 94 percent of the media market; (1) Viacom-CBS-MTV; (2) Rupert Murdoch's Newscorpt (FoxTV, etc.) (3) GE-NBC-Universal-Vivendi; (4) Time-Warner-CNN-AOL; (5) Disney-ABC-ESPN; (6) Comcast. In 1981 there was great worry because ownership had shriveled to 15 conglomerates.

Be clear on this. The news media is not in bed with big business. The news media is big business. The State of the News Media 2004 report produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in March found that most sectors of the news media have seen clear cutbacks in newsgathering resources. The number of newspaper newsroom staffers shrunk by 2,000 between 2000 and 2004, a drop of 4% overall. Some major online news sites saw much deeper cuts, such as MSNBC, which cut around a quarter of its staff between 2001 and 2003. Radio newsroom staffing declined by 57% from 1994 to 2001. After an up-tick in 1999, network staffing began to drop again in 2000. Since 1985 the number of network news correspondents has declined by 35 percent while the number of stories per reporter increased by 30 percent.

The 1996 Telecommunications Act further deregulated the Federal Communications Commission, paving the way for more take-overs. During the senate debate Senator John McCain said, "You will not see this story on any television or hear it on any radio broadcast." All together the 3 major network news shows aired a sum total of only 19 minutes of coverage of the Telecommunications Act, over the course of NINE MONTHS.

Now, tell me that the media makes sure the public is well-informed.

These conglomerates are not answerable to the people although they use public air waves free of charge, tax free, thanks to the coziness between their lobbyists and Capitol Hill legislators, who need their campaign contributions. Soon only one voice will remain. Only one truth. Theirs.

Oh, we will still have freedom of choice. We can select many different programs to watch. We have great variety in entertainment. Like a frog, we can sit contentedly while the water heats.

But our understanding of our world, the way we see it, that is a different matter. It will be shaped by how big businesses want us to see it. There is a pattern to the way certain stories are covered, then dropped. The level of secrecy, of news distortion, or non-coverage has reached a historic low.

Charles Lewis of the Center for Pubic Integrity was a producer for CBS Sixty Minutes until he concluded that the public simply never learned much of important news. Lewis has this to say of his own organization, Center for Public Integrity:

They don't investigate and report on the media because none of their findings would ever be reported by the media. They found that the most powerful special interest in Washington is the media. The National Association of Broadcasters has lobbyists. The public is entitled to seats in committee hearing rooms, but lobbyists hire place holders, poor people who stand in line holding their position, then slipping out when the lobbyist shows up as doors open for the hearing. The National Association of Broadcasters has nearly 300 paid lobbyists who give away tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions. And they control whether a politician gets on the air all over America. Not only that but the Fairness Doctrine has been abolished. No more free time for politicians. They must pay, which accounts for one third of media news budget, and the huge rise in campaign expenses.

That's power.

How much power do we have? One thing is certain. Our power will be limited to that of a frog in heating water unless we make ourselves heard.
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Source: Orwell Rolls in His Grave at Information Clearing House

The Winds of War: A Military Build-Up Most Media Ignore

I take this threat quite seriously and so have chosen to alert my readers, although it is off-topic for this blog. I hope that others take it as seriously as I do.

It may or may not happen, and if it does, it will probably be months or even a year or two, but solid evidence is abundant that contingency war plans are being implemented with a military build-up, probably against Iran, perhaps Syria. Consider what follows, from Global Research. Notice what Sam Gardiner says below. I have watched and listened to Gardiner, an analyst on the Lehrer news hour as well as on the commercial main stream networks. He is very credible. These are only snips from a very long document.
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The March to War: Naval build-up in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

October 1, 2006. Editor's note. We bring to the attention of our readers, this carefully documented review of the ongoing naval build-up and deployment of coalition forces in the Middle East.

The article examines the geopolitics behind this military deployment and its relationship to "the Battle for Oil."

The structure of military alliances is crucial to an understanding of these war preparations.

The naval deployment is taking place in two distinct theaters: the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean is broadly under the jurisdiction of NATO in liaison with Israel. Directed against Syria, it is conducted under the façade of a UN peace-keeping mission pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1701. In this context, the war on Lebanon must be viewed as a stage of a the broader US sponsored military road-map.

The naval armada in the Persian Gulf is largely under US command, with the participation of Canada.

The naval buildup is coordinated with the planned air attacks. The planning of the aerial bombings of Iran started in mid-2004, pursuant to the formulation of CONPLAN 8022 in early 2004. In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued. While its contents remains classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.

These war plans must be taken very seriously.

The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war," which threatens the future of humanity.

In the weeks ahead, it is essential that citizens' movements around the world act consistently to confront their respective governments and reverse and dismantle this military agenda.

What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.

It is essential to bring the US war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America and Western Europe. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.
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Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 1 October 2006. The probability of another war in the Middle East is high. Only time will tell if the horrors of further warfare is to fully materialize. Even then, the shape of a war is still undecided in terms of its outcome.

If war is to be waged or not against Iran and Syria, there is still the undeniable build-up and development of measures that confirm a process of military deployment and preparation for war.

The diplomatic forum also seems to be pointing to the possibility of war. The decisions being made, the preparations being taken, and the military maneuvers that are unfolding on the geo-strategic chessboard are projecting a prognosis and forecast towards the direction of mobilization for some form of conflict in the Middle East.

In this context, people do not always realize that a war is never planned, executed or even anticipated in a matter of weeks. Military operations take months and even years to prepare. A classical example is Operation Overlord (popularly identified as “D-Day”) . . . but the preparations for the military operation took eighteen months, “officially,” to set the stage for the invasion of the French coast.

With regard to Iraq, the “Downing Street memo” confirms that the decision to go to war in 2003 was decided in 2002 by the United States and Britain, and thus the preparations for war with Iraq were in reality started in 2002, a year before the invasion. The preparations for the invasion of Iraq took place at least a entire year to arrange.

Time Magazine and the “Prepare to Deploy Order” of the Eisenhower Strike Group

The latest U.S. reports provide details of preparations to go to war with Iran and Syria. Time magazine confirms that orders have been given for deployment of a submarine, a battleship, two minesweepers, and two mine-hunters in the Persian Gulf by October 2006. There are very few places in the world where minesweepers would be needed or used besides the Persian Gulf. There also very few places where anti-submarine drills are required , besides the Persian Gulf.

Award-winning investigative reporter and journalist Dave Lindorff has written;

[Retired]Colonel Gardiner, who has taught military strategy at the National War College [of the United States], says that the [U.S. Navy] carrier deployment and a scheduled Persian Gulf arrival date of October 21 [2006] is “very important evidence” of war planning. He says, “I know that some naval forces have already received 'prepare to deploy orders’ [PTDOs], which have set the date for being ready to go as October 1 [2006]. Given that it would take about from October 2 to October 21 to get those forces to the [Persian]Gulf region, that looks about like the date” of any possible military action against Iran. (A PTDO means that all crews should be at their stations, and ships and planes should be ready to go, by a certain date—in this case, reportedly, October 1.) Gardiner notes, “You cannot issue a PTDO and then stay ready for very long. It's a very significant order, and it’s not done as a training exercise.” This point was also made in the Time article.

"I think the plan’s been picked: bomb the nuclear sites in Iran," says [Colonel] Gardiner. "It's a terrible idea, it's against U.S. law and it's against international law, but I think they've decided to do it He says that while the United States has the capability to hit those sites with its cruise missiles, "the Iranians have many more options than we [the United States] do.

Of course, Gardiner agrees, recent ship movements and other signs of military preparedness could be simply a bluff designed to show toughness in the bargaining with Iran over its nuclear program. But with the Iranian coast reportedly armed to the teeth with Chinese Silkworm anti-ship missiles, and possibly even more sophisticated Russian anti-ship weapons, against which the [U.S.] Navy has little reliable defenses, it seems unlikely the Navy would risk high-value assets like aircraft carriers or cruisers with such a tactic. Nor has bluffing been a Bush [Administration] MO [tactic] to date.

Click for the full article at Global Research

Manufacturing Consent IX: The O'Reilly Fracture

Home_____Manufacturing Consent IX: The O'Reilly Fracture

The immensely profitable O'Reilly industry depends on the credibility of its guru, Bill O'Reilly. When Bill speaks, the public listens. A key money earner, for Fox News, he is a force to be reckoned with. What follows is the legal complaint for a lawsuit against him by a former Fox employee.


















The entire document can be found at The Smoking Gun.

Manufacturing Consent VIII: European Public & Media

Home_____Manufacturing Consent VIII: European Public & Media

Over the years this blog has followed the decline of good information and news analysis on which people can make critical judgments as citizens. It has noted that the major news outlets simply feed to the public what they receive. Various reasons exist for this sorry state of affairs. One is that corporate news organizations are more concerned with the bottom line than with any sense of responsibility to the public for investigative reporting or in-depth news analysis. They are driven by the competition for dollars, which has become increasingly fierce as international behemoths swallow newsrooms to make them part of a cash flow. (One of the biggest jokes is ABC News' "In-Depth" segment, which offers a few minutes to some cheesy topic, giving nothing but a tease and no depth at all.) The sense of corporate civic responsibility is being strangled by the need for survival.

Certain types of blogs have become a feeble but--hopefully--rising voice for the public to learn about the skullduggery that goes on within the corridors of power. Unfortunately, they are so many of these blogs that one must become a news, politics, and policy junkie to keep up with all they provide. I go back decades and miss the era when a few major dailies could give much, if not all, of what an informed citizen should know. True, one can whittle down his reading to the most frequently visited sites, but even their number requires more time than my day offers.

All of that is by way of preface to a growing global phenomenon. The death knell of news analysis and investigation isn't being sounded here only. We are faced with a frightening prospect--whole populations whose consent is being manufactured--as only one example--to unwittingly endorse wrong-headed policies that fatten the rich while diminishing the people's own income. Recently while traveling I found this news clipping from the St Louis Post-Dispatch. It is dated 11 October 2005:

Associated Press. Europeans have nearly 4,000 television channels to choose from, but less and less quality programming to watch, according to a report by a European watchdog group.

The report by the Open Society Institute said television remained the primary source of information for most Europeans even as programming is becoming less informative and more sensational.

The institute analyzed television ownership content and regulations in 20 European countries, including 12 European Union member states, four EU candidate countries and four potential candidate countries.

It found a drop in quality of news reporting in countries where a few companies often control a country's entire television market and those which have opened up quickly to a flood of commercial broadcasts.

TFI, one of France's three commercial networks, commands almost one-third of the national audience and half of total TV ad revenue.

"Investigative journalism and minority programming are hard to find," the institute said. "Viewers often do not receive the information necessary to make informed democratic choices."

Miklos Haraszti, a media freedom expert, said a deluge of commercial channels in some countries has led to ratings wars with public service broadcasters. Haraszti is with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a regional security organization.

"The inevitable result has been the dumbing down of public service content in many countries," he said.

The Open Society Institute, based in Hungary, said governments and international institutions should not let the market determine broadcasting policy. It recommended that the EU set up an independent agency to monitor media.

Manufacturing Consent, VII: The Media As Seen By Journalists

Home_____While their worries are changing, the problems that journalists see with their profession in many ways seem more intractable than they did a few years ago.

News people feel better about some elements of their work. But they fear more than ever that the economic behavior of their companies is eroding the quality of journalism.

In particular, they think business pressures are making the news they produce thinner and shallower. And they report more cases of advertisers and owners breaching the independence of the newsroom.

These worries, in turn, seem to have widened the divide between the people who cover the news and the business executives they work for.

The changes in attitude have come after a period in which news companies, faced with declining audiences and pressure on revenues, have in many cases made further cuts in newsgathering resources.

There are also alarming signs that the news industry is continuing the short-term mentality that some critics contend has undermined journalism in the past. Online news is one of the few areas seeing general audience growth today, yet online journalists more often than any others report their newsrooms have suffered staff cuts.

Only five years earlier, news people were much more likely to see failures of their own making as more of an issue. Since then, they have come to feel more in touch with audiences, less cynical and more embracing of new technology. In other words, journalists feel they have made progress on the areas that they can control in the newsroom.

While feeling closer to audiences, however, news people also have less confidence in the American public to make wise electoral decisions, a finding that raises questions about the kind of journalism they may produce in the future.

There are also signs that the people who staff newsrooms, at least at the national level, tend to describe themselves as more liberal than in the past. . . .

What Journalists Are Worried About

Sizable majorities of journalists (66% nationally and 57% locally) think "increased bottom line pressure is seriously hurting the quality of news coverage." That is a dramatic increase from five years ago, when fewer than half in the news business felt this way.

And their concerns may be justified. The State of the News Media 2004 report produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism in March found that most sectors of the news media have seen clear cutbacks in newsgathering resources. The number of newspaper newsroom staffers shrunk by 2,000 between 2000 and 2004, a drop of 4% overall. Some major online news sites saw much deeper cuts, such as MSNBC, which cut around a quarter of its staff between 2001 and 2003. Radio newsroom staffing declined by 57% from 1994 to 2001. After an uptick in 1999, network staffing began to drop again in 2000. Since 1985 the number of network news correspondents has declined by 35 percent while the number of stories per reporter increased by 30 percent. . . .

There are also signs that the economic influences on the news business have become more pernicious. Five years ago we found that financial pressure in the newsroom was "not a matter of executives or advertisers pressuring journalists about what to write or broadcast." It was more subtle than that.

Unfortunately, that is less true today. Now a third of local journalists say they have felt such pressure, most notably from either advertisers or from corporate owners. In other words, one of the most dearly held principles of journalism--the independence of the newsroom about editorial decision-making--increasingly is being breached. Nationally, journalists are more than twice as likely as executives to say bottom line pressure is eroding journalistic quality. The divide exists at the local level as well but not as drastically.

Whatever the reasons for this, unless staffers and bosses can agree on first describing what is going on in the company and then agree on its impact, it seems doubtful they could agree on how to deal with it.

Specific Areas of Concern

Beyond cutbacks and pressure to help advertisers or corporate siblings, journalists have other worries as well. Five years ago, people in the news business shared two overriding concerns. As we said back then, "They believe that the news media have blurred the lines between news and entertainment and that the culture of argument is overwhelming the culture of reportingConcerns about punditry overwhelming reporting, for instance, have swelled dramatically in only four years."

Today, the concerns are more varied and less easy to categorize. The worries about punditry are still there but they have diminished both nationally and especially locally.

A bigger issue now is a sense of shallowness. Roughly eight-in-ten in the news business feel the news media pay "too little attention to complex issues," up from five years ago to levels seen in the mid-1990s, at the peak of the fascination with tabloid crime stories like O.J. and JonBenet Ramsey. . . .

On the issue of accuracy, journalists seem divided. Nationally, the number of journalists who feel that news reports are increasingly sloppy and inaccurate is rising. Locally, it is dropping. . . .

Confidence in the Public

. . . It is also possible that journalists are leaping to another conclusion: They see the content of the news becoming shallower and conclude that this must be what the public wants or why else would their organizations be providing it? More (From The Pew Research Center For The People And The Press, Survey Report titled "Commentary: A Crisis of Confidence," no date, by Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel and Amy Mitchell.)

Manufacturing Consent, VI: A Brief History of The FCC & Related Legislation

First, this by George Orwell--"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for official ban." I will add that the silence and the darkness are all the easier if a media elite owns most information outlets, which is where we are today.

Senator John McCain, at a congressional hearing--"When is the endpoint to all of this? Why not have Rupert Murdoch buy another company, then Comcast another, and on it goes. At some point, you'll have many voices--and one ventriloquist."

We don't know when it will all end. Here is a breakdown of shrinking media ownership--

In 1983, 50 owners

In 1987, 29

In 1990, 23

in 1992, 14

In 1997, 10

In 2004, 6 owners for 94 percent of the entire media

Understand that this is a sketch of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and omits important information in some instances. Its chief advantage is that it is presented in chronological order.

Manufacturing Consent, V: What About Terrorists or Arsenal Security Elsewhere?

Of the news that occurs, we can always trust the media to surface important events into the public consciousness. Right? For example, the public can rest assured that they will learn of breaches of security, especially concerning weapon stockpiles in former Soviet states, with implications for increased nuclear or terrorist threat. We would like to think so. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

The gate keepers of media conglomerates determine what we see and hear, and once again the public is unaware of an important story, which I will provide shortly. First, though, think about this. In 1983, media ownership had shrunk to 50 conglomerates. This raised great concern, but nothing was done. In 1989, it had reduced to 29; in 1990, 23; in 1992, 14; in 1997, 10. Today, 6 conglomerates own 94 percent of the media. Soon, one will own them all. *

The important story I mentioned--it occurred just a few days ago. It is scary, and should have received extensive and high profile coverage by the major media outlets. If the gate keepers chose to give it less than that, one would think they would still gave it some attention. It fell through the cracks, remaining only a wire release, and that fact provides a harbinger of things to come.

Think about this in terms of various issues, not only weapons stockpiles. Watergate, for example. The hotel break-in would have remained a curiosity and allowed to die a quiet death without Deep Throat,** a public official, and Woodward and Bernstein, two investigative journalists. Without intense and difficult investigation, even Deep Throat's tips would have been forgotten, and President Nixon's involvement would not have been uncovered. But investigative journalism had its death knell, and today the conglomerates only like news feeds, as they are cheaper. ** (Woodward promises to reveal his identify after Deep Throat dies.)

Anyhow, here is the story, and its omission from public consciousness is an example of what the media has come to. If a former Soviet state is capable of this kind of neglect, what else should we be concerned about?

Ukraine Says Hundreds of Missiles Missing by Anna Melnichuk

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) 03/26/04--Several hundred decommissioned Soviet-built surface-to-air missiles are unaccounted for in Ukraine's military arsenal, the defense minister told a newspaper.

Defense Minister Yevhen Marchuk, in an interview published in the newspaper Den, appeared to suggest the missiles may have been dismantled without proper accounting, rather than stolen or sold.

``We are looking for several hundred missiles,'' Marchuk was quoted as saying in Thursday's edition. ``They have already been decommissioned, but we cannot find them.''

Manufacturing Consent, IV: The Bewildered Herd

This article provides background to the earlier articles on manufacturing consent in the United States, a phenomenon with a scale unprecedented among wealthy nations. Somehow, consent toward corporate values has become assimilated into Mother Culture of America. Few people even think to question how they get the memes that form their opinions, view points, and beliefs about matters social and political. This, Part Four, touches upon early views of social engineering, as well as upon recognition that it has become a major instrument of government. (For articles on memes, see Memes, Genes, & God, 31 December 2003; Memes, Type X, Irrationalists, & Religion, 26 February 2004; Beyond Memes, 6 March 2004.)

Two hundred years ago, the idea of democracy was ripening, and would blossom into the French and American Revolutions, although not everybody thought it a good thing. The masses were regarded with suspicion, and aristrocracy with favor. Some, though, simply looked at the situation objectively. Eighteenth Century philosopher David Hume found "nothing more surprising" than

" to see the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and to observe the implicit submission with which men resign their sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find, that as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governers have nothing to support them but opinion. 'Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular." (Essays Moral, Political, and Literary)

Walter Lippmann, early Twentieth Century political and social pundit, wrote that "the public must be put in its place" so that we may "live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd," which serves to be "interested spectators of action," and not participants. As a "responsible" pubic intellectual, he saw his duty as guiding the voice of the herd in case government does not have sufficient sway over the public. (The Phantom Public)

Gore Vidal, a prominent, current, novelist and intellectual, has a different take on the situation: "To deny inconvenient opinions a hearing is one way the few have of controlling the many. But as Richard Nixon used to say, ' That would be the easy way.' The slyer way is to bombard the public with misinformation. During more than half a century of corruption by the printed word in the form ' news' --propaganda disguised as fact--I have yet to read a story favorable to another society's social and political arrangements. Swedes have free health care, better schools than ours, child day-care center for working mothers. . . but the Swedes are all drunks who commit suicide (even blonde blue-eyed people must pay for such decadent amenities). Lesson [for the bewildered herd]? No national health care, no education [with high national budget priority] , etc. . . . ."

"Of the billions now spent each election cycle, most is donated in checks of $1,000 or more. But less than one-tenth of one percent of the general population make individual contributions at this rate. These happy few are prepared to pay a high and rising price for the privilege of controlling our government. In the 1998 election cycle, the average winning House candidate cost the owners about $600,000. The average winning Senate candidate a bit over $5 million. Multiply both figures by two if you want the cost of dislodging an incumbent from office (in a system where, last time around, over 97 percent were re-elected). To finance a race in big media markets like New York, or California, it's a bit more expensive: as of election day 1998, something like $36 and $21 million respectively."

"The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity--much less dissent."

"Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions. . . ." (The Decline and Fall of The American Empire)

Nothing manufactures consent like fear. It guarantees that the bewildered herd will be tamed to conform to the expectations of the governing elite. A common threat marginalizes dissidents, activates supporters, and sways the undecided. It silences all opposing voices. If terrorists strike again in America, the November elections will be decided on only one issue, the war against terrorism. The economy, joblessness, health insurance, worker pensions, social security, environment, the budget deficit--these and other issues will be rendered null and void for practical purposes.

"Bewildered herd" refers, of course, to you and me, who have a voice only once very four years. Do you feel bewildered? I don't.