TV News LIES

On Monday, September 12, at 5 o’clock, Fox News’s rating was increased by one. My first reaction: where the hell is Glenn Beck? I was actually looking forward to seeing this journalist who I had been hearing was out there where the buses don’t run. But he was gone.

It was widely reported that Beck was fired by Roger Ailes for being too extreme, or what we progressives commonly call “all that right-wing crap.” All that right-wing crap has been replaced by a news show called The Five, which consists of five people sitting around a table talking simultaneously. What the Fab Five was talking about, I was to discover as the week wore on, were the highlights of the right-wing crap:

A day after presiding over the publication of his new, damn-the-critics Sun on Sunday tabloid, Rupert Murdoch was confronted with fresh allegations from a top police investigator that the daily Sun had systematically paid large sums of money to “a network of corrupted officials” in the British police, military and government.

Considering that this was going on in the 1950s, it is highly likely that this is happening now and at a much larger extent. The CIA and other government agencies literally control the corporate controlled media.

Anytime you hear a story on the major networks that has any implication in US foreign or domestic policy rest assured that it was, at the very least, vetted by the CIA before being released.

Google has secretly been bypassing your privacy settings in Internet Explorer, Microsoft claimed Monday afternoon.

The startling accusation came in a blog post Monday by Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Internet Explorer. On Friday, a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that the search and advertising giant was bypassing the privacy settings of millions of people using Apple Safari browsers on iPhones and desktop computers.

When it comes to natural gas extraction via “fracking,” TV journalism has some serious competition: energy industry commercials.

Like ads for political candidates that run concurrently with broadcast news coverage of the presidential race, ads promoting natural gas (and other fossil fuels) have long been running in concert with news segments about the topic, most recently touting the prospect of a “boom” made possible by the controversial extraction method known as hydraulic fracturing of the shale sprawling beneath more than 30 U.S. states.

“Between the public sector and the private sector, we have wreaked untold havoc on the media environment.”

These aren’t the words of a progressive media advocate such as University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney or The Nation’s John Nichols, but of ex-FCC commissioner Michael Copps in January. In an interview on Democracy Now!, Copps attributes his claim to “the abdication of public interest responsibility by the FCC” over the last 30 years and their failure to enforce public interest guidelines and a stronger focus on news.