Tuesday, July 22, 2008

The Closed Media

In order to have anything printed anywhere – papers, magazines, websites, blogs etc. – you have to get your piece through the media filter – This comment is pending approval and won't be displayed until it is approved. The institutions that are doing this are using it to shape public opinion by shutting out contradictory opinions.
For example, I submitted a comment to the Cafferty File on CNN (or should I say Fox News Jr.). The question was “Who would you most like to meet”. I wrote “Ralph Nader because he is the only one who is not bought and sold by big corporations”. My submission was deleted. There was no profanity or threat of violence in my submission. So, why was it deleted? I submitted an opinion to the Huffington Post’s off-the-bus about Obama’s capitulation on telecom immunity and how I would support Ralph Nader and it was never displayed. There was nothing scurrilous in the piece, but it was rejected. The same story happens with letters to the editor and comments on the web. The media filter has an agenda and they will use their power to promote it.
Everyone thinks of the right wing media as being biased. Now the left wing media has followed suit. We want to shut out Nader because he might take away votes from our candidate. We want to hide his candidacy from the reader’s consciousness. They seem to think their cause is just and demands censorship.
What they do not see is that they are feeding into a society of censorship and corporate media control. They are becoming the very thing they oppose. A free society needs an open media to all points of view, no matter how different from the views of the people assigned to filter out abusive submissions.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sad, but true. There is no free press anymore.

Quality Journalism is essential to providing Americans with the information they need to understand what's happening in their communities, to hold elected leaders accountable, and to serve as a check on government and corporate power abuse.

However, as the current situation stands, propaganda runs high, and the public and the truth suffer under media conglomerates.