Listen to the conventional media megaphone so you can learn what is important to GE, Goldman Sacks and Nike. We as citizens are expected to hold personally important what is important to large power interests.
Something the last 10 years at least has demonstrated, the more you listen to conventional media outlets, the worse your financial situation will be. Conventional news outlets were instrumental in building up the stock bubble and the real estate bubble. They were also critical in selling the bailout, and they sold it as hard and with as little questioning as they sold WMDs. As soon as it is found that they get a story wrong, they don’t apologize, they simply move on. When asked about their track record, they tend to point to a very small minority of journalists who get the story right. This method works for them in deflecting criticism. What they never bring up is their funding (its from advertising), their ownership (its a large corporation) and their access (journalists who side with consumers in giving real news, quickly lose access to institutional power). Conventional media is intent upon repeating what large corporate and government interests want the population to believe. However, access is not as important as most in the media believe. If a corporation or government body releases information about an action, it is more often useful to simply look at historically what the institution has done, rather than rely upon anything that their PR department releases. However, many journalists do little more than report what concentrated power “says.” This is called reporting the news.
We can learn something about the media by what it reports on and considers as important.
Notice many of the things the media focuses on
- How the stock market is doing (is it going up?)
- How the housing market is doing (is it going up?)
Notice what they do not focus on
- Ordinary wage growth
- The decreasing percentage of productivity which workers receive from their efforts
- The reduction in taxes paid by both corporations and the ultra-wealthy
- The use of offshore tax havens to hide money
- Standards for the workplace or in regulation or in the environment
Television is problematic because is it an expensive media which means that it can be centralized and highly subject to concentrated power. Accurate information about the bailout is not coming from television, but from the web, which is more difficult to control.
In between the commercials for the ultra wealthy (called news) there are commercial commercials, that is the information that is actually identified as advertisement. These are more impositions of things that people with money would like you to buy. In order to safeguard your financial security as well as your mental acuity, its important to minimize the most controlled of all media….television. As for PBS, most of their programing can be viewed on the internet now. Bill Moyers and Frontline, two of PBS’s best programs are available at the links below.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/index-flash.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/
Below, Noam Chomsky, Justin Lewis and Edward Herman explain how the media works. It applies as strongly for the financial media as other areas of the conventional media.
