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Faulking Opinions - Oct 30, 2005 - Printable Version
- Robert Kennedy Jr. Speaks About the Media
by Katie Hickox
On this foggy Saturday morning in San Francisco, with the Republicans firmly in control of seemingly everything including the media, I am gravely concerned about the deteriorating state of our media that resembles more and more rightwing propaganda. Please take a minute to consider my brief introduction and read Robert F. Kennedy Jr's recent speech. Thanks for taking a few minutes to read and contemplate and maybe someone can do something more about all this aside from restoring honest elections. Thanks in advance if you read all the way to the bottom and bonus points if you click on the link below to Kennedy's speech! I wish more could be done to stop juggernault of media consolidation into the hands of a few very powerful conservatives who control/influence these corporations. These powerful wealthy conservatives are running (or ruining) this country by choking off balanced, unbiased news reporting. More and more the only way to get a shocking expose' about the abuses of the US government introduced, is to launch this story in the UK or Europe, and then the US domestic mainstream news channels are pressured to finally pick up the story, as with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. We almost lost NPR and PBS earlier this year when major funding cuts were proposed and finally defeated, but not without a battle. We're on the border for completely losing freedom of the press and having our news "locked down".
Because of the historic corporate consolidation of the media over the past few decades, six multi-national corporations control something like 85% of what the American public reads, hears on the radio, and watches on Cable/TV news programs. Having a liberal media is a complete myth.
Here is an excerpt from RFK Jr's recent speech delivered at the Sierra Summit 2005 in San Francisco about the problems with an unfair and unbalanced news as a result of corporate media consolidation. Six corporations are influencing elections since it's in their best interest to have had George Bush re-elected, who will give them the best tax breaks and enable them to further purchase the remaining 15% of media outlets not currently under their control. Hence in a few years there will be no longer radio stations such as NPR, KPFA or the fledgling Air America liberal talk show, or magazines such as Mother Jones, since they'll be bought our or put out of business, or PBS.
Robert Kennedy Jr says "80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on."
We Must Take America Back
By Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The problem is most Americans don’t know about it, they don’t see the connection and the reason for that is because we have a negligent and indolent media and press in this country which has absolutely let down American democracy [applause]. All this right wing propaganda which is planned and organized and dominated this country, the political debate for so many years talking about a liberal media. Well, you know and I know there is no such thing as a liberal media in the United States of America.
There is a right wing media and if you look where most Americans are now getting their news, that’s where they’re getting it. According to Pew 30 percent of Americans now sway that their primary news source is talk radio which is 90 percent dominated by the right.
22 percent sat their primary news source is Fox News, MSNBC or CNBC, all dominated by the right and another 10 percent, Sinclair Network which is the most right wing of all. That’s the largest television network in our country. It’s run by a former pornographer who requires all 75 of his affiliate television stations and this is where Mid-Westerners get their news, red state people get their news, all of them have to take a pledge to not report critically about this president or about the war in Iraq.
Then the rest of us are - the majority of Americans are still getting their news from electronic media and it’s the corporate owned media and they have no ideology except for filling their pocket books and many of them are run by big polluters. All of them are run by giant corporations that have all kinds of deals with the government and are not going to offend public officials.
This all started in 1988 when Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine said that the airwaves belong to the public. They were public trust assets just like our air and water and that the broadcasters could be licensed to use them but only with the proviso that they use them to promote the public interest and to advance American democracy. They had to inform the public of issues of public import. They had to have the news hours. None of those networks wanted to show the news because it’s expensive, they loose money on it. They had to avoid corporate consolidation. They had to have local control and diversity of control. That was the requirement of the law since 1928.
Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.
The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip [applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we’re today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.
If you look at the Pippa Report and I’ve known this for many, many years because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way Republicans react and the democrats react except the republicans come up afterwards and say, "Why haven’t we ever heard of this before? I say to them, "It’s because you’re watching Fox News and listening to Rush."
And 80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on [applause].
I don’t know if any of you saw the Pippa Report which came out after the last election but it confirmed everything and this is kind of a digression but this whole talk has turned into a digression. The Pippa Report was done by the University of Maryland and it showed that there is no - you know all these Saturday morning gas bags, the political pundits you see on TV talking about the moral difference and the ideological difference between red states and blue states.
There is no difference.
The only difference is there is a huge informational deficit in the red states and I’ve known this for a long time reaction I get people and the Pippa Report confirmed that by going and asking people who voted for Bush and who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. What they found that of the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic values, they were just misinformed. 70 percent said that they believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, 70 percent believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, 64 percent believed that President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our foreign treaties and on and on.
When Pippa went back and asked them what they believed, there was almost no difference between what the Republicans and Democrats believed where America should be headed. The problem was a huge information deficit because the news media in this country is letting down American democracy and democracy cannot survive long without a vigorous news media.
To read Robert F. Kennedy's speech in it's entirety, go to:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091705Z.shtml
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