Are your views represented in the news media?

Are your views represented in the news media?

  • Yes, I’m satisfied that they are

    Votes: 6 9.7%
  • No, they are not at all

    Votes: 29 46.8%
  • More or less, but there’s still room for improvement

    Votes: 17 27.4%
  • More or less, but we need not get bothered about it too much

    Votes: 7 11.3%
  • I don’t think the news is this important

    Votes: 3 4.8%

  • Total voters
    62
  • Poll closed .
I'm about to leave the office but I want to leave these two thoughts with the thread in the hope folks will pick up on the significance of its subject matter:

1) We live in "The Information Age". It's called that for a reason. As Civ fans, we need not be reminded that in the previous ages, be they Iron or Steam or Gunpowder, there was always a fierce contest for that defining substance of the age. Expect the same to happen with Information - ie. the news. It's happening already.

Again, those links I gave to Sparta are highly revealing on what's going on behind our backs about the Information that is so essential to our society.

2) We complain about dumbed down news and poor journalistic integrity. Well there a clear financial incentive to churn out crap news that tows a party line. It is, quite frankly, cheaper to make. So expect the crap news outlets to proliferate while they outmatch the more disciplined proper journalists. Result? More cheap propaganda, less informed citizens.

Have a nice day :)
 
Rambuchan said:
2) We complain about dumbed down news and poor journalistic integrity. Well there a clear financial incentive to churn out crap news that tows a party line. It is, quite frankly, cheaper to make. So expect the crap news outlets to proliferate while they outmatch the more disciplined proper journalists. Result? More cheap propaganda, less informed citizens.
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that the market for "proper journalism" has shrunk as compared to less educated ages. I've yet to hear a reason why that should be the case.
 
The Last Conformist said:
The problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that the market for "proper journalism" has shrunk as compared to less educated ages. I've yet to hear a reason why that should be the case.
That broadsheet, high brow market has shrunk! That's what I am saying. The net, a rash of new TV news stations and other news feeds into phones etc are changing the news landscape. And its the shoddy 'journalists', fat cats and propaganda merchants who are stepping in.

I don't have figures to hand but the declining sales figures of broad sheet newspapers is startling. I hope someone finds them for the thread. Maybe go ask Rupert Murdoch, I'm sure he's got them.

This is why it's so important for us to dig in and make sure that the next boat isn't hijacked. This information is crucial. Again, these two links explain the threat we are facing very well:

http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=1234951

http://www.democraticmedia.org/issues/JCnetneutrality.html

EDIT: And the Director-General of the BBC has been talking about this 'new boat':
"I see no reason why BBC broadband reach shouldn't approach the historic levels achieved by the BBC's television and radio services.

Nonetheless, and despite the rapid strides we've made to date, we believe that on-demand changes the terms of the debate, indeed that it will change what we mean by the word 'broadcasting'.

It's not, of course, the only feature of this phase of digital, but we believe it's by far the most important as far as the BBC is concerned.

This decade will be the decade of on-demand. And we will arrive at a digital Britain not when we switch analogue terrestrial TV to digital – though that's important as well of course – but when every household has access to rich and interactive on demand services.

That's when the real gains in public value – in educational potential, in civic connectivity, in user-based creativity, in the opening up of resources like the BBC's amazing archive – that's when the real gains kick in."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/speeches/stories/thompson_edinburgh05.shtml
 
It's a very very broad area you're looking at, oh frucially crunky one. I wouldn't expect all broadcasting outlets to be aligned with my particular views (poor old Mega Tsunami, for a start, wouldn't be able to survive how outraged he'd become ;)) - it's a broad market because many people have very different needs (between pure factual reporting, commentary, detailed background, short summaries, even handed versus aligned with a particular set of beliefs in what is important, etc) and the broadcasters to a large extent simply respond to that.

Does the existence of Fox News prove that the state of news broadcasting is unhealthy ? Hmm, it certainly gives me apoplexy whenever I see it. And it does seem to me to have foregone certain basic journalistic essentials. So I'd probably say, reluctantly, that it does give reason for worry. In general, however, there is more information available than ever before, and it's nigh on impossible for a government or other agency to cover something up in the way which would have been simple 100 years ago. We have no excuse for allowing the wool to be pulled over our eyes.

For the most part then (simplifying your question set down to a single issue), I'd say yes, I often see things on TV & in the papers which appear unbalanced or unfair to me - and generally, at a conceptual level at least, I welcome this. It can be very, very difficult to maintain absolute balance and impartiality, and often comment / analysis is necessary (you need to shout "wake up!" sometimes) - it's important for us to realise that our needed analysis/commentary is probably someone else's unbalanced polemic.
 
I'd be concerned of myself if i ever see or hear a viewpoint that is entirely my own.So to answer the question,rarely that i do see my views in the media due to the fact that i am not in the media[electronic,print,radio] but an outside spectator.

Another thought:

If we in the Civ OT managed to recieve a contract from a major television channel(about an half-hour or one hour time slot) that allows us to make news and response to news stories of today,i wouldn't be surprise to see us being satirized by shows such as "The Daily Show",or just people in other website complaining that we are not doing enough to represent their views.:lol:
 
Lambert: I agree that we now have a plethora of new information. Problem is - it's a plethora of the same distractionary nonsense, dished out by the same few sources. Their reach is amazing for such a small minority.

Hence all this new media (think of the excess in new cable channels) is very limited in its scope and views. This means it is also quite impotent to change anything significant that people would feel aggrieved about (a big reason for voter apathy in mature democracies).

Here's what I'm talking about in more detail:
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?

The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. "We" take care of that.

What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system.

What about their institutional setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other major power centers—the government, other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities. Say you are a reporter writing a story on Southeast Asia or Africa, or something like that. You’re supposed to go over to the big university and find an expert who will tell you what to write, or else go to one of the foundations, like Brookings Institute or American Enterprise Institute and they will give you the words to say. These outside institutions are very similar to the media.

The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. There may be independent people scattered around in them but that is true of the media as well. And it’s generally true of corporations. It’s true of Fascist states, for that matter. But the institution itself is parasitic. It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society. The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.

If you’ve read George Orwell’s Animal Farm which he wrote in the mid-1940s, it was a satire on the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state. It was a big hit. Everybody loved it. Turns out he wrote an introduction to Animal Farm which was suppressed. It only appeared 30 years later. Someone had found it in his papers. The introduction to Animal Farm was about "Literary Censorship in England" and what it says is that obviously this book is ridiculing the Soviet Union and its totalitarian structure. But he said England is not all that different. We don’t have the KGB on our neck, but the end result comes out pretty much the same. People who have independent ideas or who think the wrong kind of thoughts are cut out.

Source
I quoted a lot because it's well worth it imho.
the Crucially Classical Commuter said:
...it's important for us to realise that our needed analysis/commentary is probably someone else's unbalanced polemic.
It's important for us to realise who that "someone else" is and why democracy's functioning is so closely tied up to the media's operation...
How did all this [global media in the hands of a few] evolve? It has an interesting history.

A lot of it comes out of the first World War, which is a big turning point. It changed the position of the United States in the world considerably. In the 18th century the U.S. was already the richest place in the world. The quality of life, health, and longevity was not achieved by the upper classes in Britain until the early 20th century, let alone anybody else in the world. The U.S. was extraordinarily wealthy, with huge advantages, and, by the end of the 19th century, it had by far the biggest economy in the world. But it was not a big player on the world scene. U.S. power extended to the Caribbean Islands, parts of the Pacific, but not much farther.

During the first World War, the relations changed. And they changed more dramatically during the second World War. After the second World War the U.S. more or less took over the world. But after first World War there was already a change and the U.S. shifted from being a debtor to a creditor nation. It wasn’t huge, like Britain, but it became a substantial actor in the world for the first time. That was one change, but there were other changes.

The first World War was the first time there was highly organized state propaganda. The British had a Ministry of Information, and they really needed it because they had to get the U.S. into the war or else they were in bad trouble. The Ministry of Information was mainly geared to sending propaganda, including huge fabrications about "Hun" atrocities, and so on. They were targeting American intellectuals on the reasonable assumption that these are the people who are most gullible and most likely to believe propaganda. They are also the ones that disseminate it through their own system. So it was mostly geared to American intellectuals and it worked very well. The British Ministry of Information documents (a lot have been released) show their goal was, as they put it, to control the thought of the entire world, a minor goal, but mainly the U.S. They didn’t care much what people thought in India. This Ministry of Information was extremely successful in deluding hot shot American intellectuals into accepting British propaganda fabrications. They were very proud of that. Properly so, it saved their lives. They would have lost the first World War otherwise.

In the U.S., there was a counterpart. Woodrow Wilson was elected in 1916 on an anti-war platform. The U.S. was a very pacifist country. It has always been. People don’t want to go fight foreign wars. The country was very much opposed to the first World War and Wilson was, in fact, elected on an anti-war position. "Peace without victory" was the slogan. But he was intending to go to war. So the question was, how do you get the pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda agency in U.S. history. The Committee on Public Information it was called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel. The task of this commission was to propagandize the population into a jingoist hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months there was a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war.

A lot of people were impressed by these achievements. One person impressed, and this had some implications for the future, was Hitler. If you read Mein Kampf, he concludes, with some justification, that Germany lost the first World War because it lost the propaganda battle. They could not begin to compete with British and American propaganda which absolutely overwhelmed them. He pledges that next time around they’ll have their own propaganda system, which they did during the second World War. More important for us, the American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.

So what do you do? It’s going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.

Same source
Here you can see how intimately related propaganda, advertising, PR and 'the news' really are.....
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn’t smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.


Another member of the Creel Commission was Walter Lippmann, the most respected figure in American journalism for about half a century (I mean serious American journalism, serious think pieces). He also wrote what are called progressive essays on democracy, regarded as progressive back in the 1920s. He was, again, applying the lessons of the work on propaganda very explicitly. He says there is a new art in democracy called manufacture of consent. That is his phrase. Edward Herman and I borrowed it for our book, but it comes from Lippmann. So, he says, there is this new art in the method of democracy, "manufacture of consent." By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. So we’ll have a real democracy. It will work properly. That’s applying the lessons of the propaganda agency.

Academic social science and political science comes out of the same thing. The founder of what’s called communications and academic political science is Harold Glasswell. His main achievement was a book, a study of propaganda. He says, very frankly, the things I was quoting before—those things about not succumbing to democratic dogmatism, that comes from academic political science (Lasswell and others). Again, drawing the lessons from the war time experience, political parties drew the same lessons, especially the conservative party in England. Their early documents, just being released, show they also recognized the achievements of the British Ministry of Information. They recognized that the country was getting more democratized and it wouldn’t be a private men’s club. So the conclusion was, as they put it, politics has to become political warfare, applying the mechanisms of propaganda that worked so brilliantly during the first World War towards controlling people’s thoughts.

That’s the doctrinal side and it coincides with the institutional structure. It strengthens the predictions about the way the thing should work. And the predictions are well confirmed. But these conclusions, also, are not allowed to be discussed. This is all now part of mainstream literature but it is only for people on the inside. When you go to college, you don’t read the classics about how to control peoples minds.

Just like you don’t read what James Madison said during the constitutional convention about how the main goal of the new system has to be "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," and has to be designed so that it achieves that end. This is the founding of the constitutional system, so nobody studies it. You can’t even find it in the academic scholarship unless you really look hard.

Same source
Do you still feel so comfortable about the current news diet you're feeding on?
 
I watch news for news, and not because "my view is represented" and I need to feel good.

I want my news without any partisanry or hackery-therefore,the BBC is my service of choice.
I read The Independent, because the Independent highlights very important popints that other papers do not, while being critical of everything, especially the administration.
I also enjoy some of their editiorials, such as those of Johann Hari, who
can argue fluently on topics that I agree with, as well as those I don't.

I prefer to make my mind up, rather thamn being told what to think.

I read the Private Eye to get an in sight into al of politics-all of the parties and people are lampooned, so hackery is minimal, while being entertaining, and very interesting. Ian Hislop is a genius, in my opinion, and I love his contribution to Have I Got News For You and to the occasional Question Time-critical, funny, fluent, he can savahge a person, and has doneeveryone from Blair to Thatcher to Kennedy.

I also enjoy watching The Daily Show-not ofr news however. I like Jon Stewart, he's funny, and he's the only American on TV who I cna sayis a genuinely in touch with "liberal" sentiment.
Everyday he talks of Iraq, which other services do't-we nee dmore news of Iraq.

I also love his ripping apart of those he dislikes-not news, but schadenfreude.

Happy Ram?
 
No I'm not. Sorry, but you missed the point.

This is not about whether your views are easily grabbed from the news, as you suggest here: "I prefer to make my mind up, rather thamn being told what to think."

The point, which is spelt out in the quotes above, is that the significant political debate in public takes place far away from what many of the issues that most of us are concerned about. Or we are simply distracted away from those that truly matter. I take it you didn't read the article extracts above then.

In other words, this is one arena is which the public are largely cut off from the debate altogether - the democratic decision making itself.
 
Rambuchan said:
No I'm not. Sorry, but you missed the point.

This is not about whether your views are easily grabbed from the news, as you suggest here: "I prefer to make my mind up, rather thamn being told what to think."

The point, which is spelt out in the quotes above, is that the significant political debate in public takes place far away from what many of the issues that most of us are concerned about. Or we are simply distracted away from those that truly matter. I take it you didn't read the article extracts above then.

In other words, this is one arena is which the public are largely cut off from the debate altogether - the democratic decision making itself.
Of course I read the article, but when your thread is called "Are your views represented", strangely enought I try to answer that question :crazyeye:

In any case I touched my opinion in my previous post-I feel that the Independent is the only real British paper that higlights important points, rather thanget carried away in the popularist sentiment other papers do (never mind the Sun's "throw the bloody immigrant scroungers out" line).
I also feel Jon Stewart touches upon the Iraq issue agaion, and agaion, and again, hwich no one does anymore.
Short of a large number of soldiers dying, or of someone being beheaded, noone else does.

In fact it's very telling that Norman Kember and his relatively good treatment got days of airtime, while the Iraqis that are being kidnapped daily for ransoms aren't even reported in the news.
 
nonconformist said:
Of course I read the article, but when your thread is called "Are your views represented", strangely enought I try to answer that question :crazyeye:
Whoa! You are one crazy, whacked out kind of guy! :crazyeye: :lol: The Independent are pretty good for those articles you mention, but imho, they're very middle of the road and middle of the spectrum on almost everything else. Oh, unless they've changed their style and stance in the last 10 years. :mischief:
 
Rambuchan said:
The Independent....changed their style and stance in the last 10 years. :mischief:

Yeah, well, they ran out of money, had all of their quality journalists and commentators nicked by other papers, and ended up with a well meaning bunch of juniors who can't tell the difference between an obsession and investigative reporting.

I'll have to read your big post later Ram, as I have other things to do at the moment (I know, the shame...) but just saying so you don't think I'm intentionally ignoring it :)
 
Rambuchan said:
Whoa! You are one crazy, whacked out kind of guy! :crazyeye: :lol: The Independent are pretty good for those articles you mention, but imho, they're very middle of the road and middle of the spectrum on almost everything else. Oh, unless they've changed their style and stance in the last 10 years. :mischief:
Forgive me if I don't choose to get my nice unbiased neswsx from the Star or the Socialist Worker :)
 
Ram, interesting long excerpts. Trouble is, to try to deal with several hundred words from someone like Chomsky, either requires you to be a brilliantly succinct writer (which I'm not) or to take the same or greater length of piece. And no-one's going to read several hundred words of my prose....

Some major points though.

a) Not all news agencies & broadcasters are controlled in the way Chomsky implies - the BBC and Reuters for starters don't fit into his model.

b) Independent thought isn't valued in universities or colleges ? Eh ? This isn't my experience, and sounds like some sort of hobby horse, because I don't think this point is particularly crucial to his case.

c) Propaganda is a key tool used by governments in wartime - I'm happy to agree with that (though I did admire his description of the US as "a very pacifist country. It has always been." Yeah, right. Let's wheel anarres in with his list of the top 50 US military interventions of the 20th century, shall we ? He does it so much better than I could.) And there's little surprise that some of the same techniques (and people) were subsequently used in PR and advertising. I don't, however, see where he makes a link (never mind a convincing one) from these areas to the news media. Given that he's waffled on for several hundred words, we're inclined to assume it must be useful stuff supporting his principle case, but I just don't see that he makes the link. (It's late - maybe I've missed it ? It would, however, be typical of Chomsky though, IMHO...)

I've gone on a bit long. Still, your final point is whether I "still feel so comfortable about the current news diet (I'm) feeding on". Well, yes, frankly, I do, because I get my news principally (as I think you know) from Reuters, The Guardian, the BBC, and the North Essex and Colchester Evening Gazette. I don't see anything up there which makes me more suspicious of any of these sources than I was previously.
 
If you're interested in bias, perception and trust in relation to the news media, you may be interested in an event BBC and Reuters are running today and yesterday. We Media

Amongst some interesting comments and ideas, there is a poll and an e-survey on the theme of "Trust in the Media" which seems quite closely related to this thread.
 
PrinceOfLeigh said:
Fox News is 'liberal'? In comparison to whom?
In comparison to Inqvisitor, who seems to be a 16th-century conservative (Remember the time he citied bulls from 1215, 1330 and 1446) and by our standards is doubleplusconservative.
 
Phlegmak said:
Since news media is mostly objective, rather than subjective, I'm satisfied with it. It doesn't have to "represent my views", since I want news to be objective.
I'm talking about the debates, when a number of views are put in the same studio or article, so that voters are given a broad spread of the options. Objectivity is called for in the chairing of these debates. But your views could and should be a part of that balanced debate. If it isn't then that would be a cause for concern, no?
Lambert Simnel said:
Ram, interesting long excerpts. Trouble is, to try to deal with several hundred words from someone like Chomsky, either requires you to be a brilliantly succinct writer (which I'm not) or to take the same or greater length of piece. And no-one's going to read several hundred words of my prose....
I'll glad you found those interesting for your own sake and not just mine. Those are bald facts which rarely make the light of day. Whether you come up with a lengthy response or not, thanks for your worthy input, always good to read.
Lambert Simnel said:
Some major points though.

a) Not all news agencies & broadcasters are controlled in the way Chomsky implies - the BBC and Reuters for starters don't fit into his model.
I would disagree. Although the corporate governance and commercial imperative of the BBC and Reuters is quite different to say Sky, there are pressures negative to democratic media nevertheless. Pressures which Chomsky identifies and which I agree with (and have seen) and which you're not in agreement with. Fair enough. Here's why I take this view...

Close contact with the BBC has led me to agree with Greg Dykes conclusion of a few years ago, namely that the BBC is a "south of England, middle-class institution". I also agree with him when he said "there's a great number of people out there who say we don't reflect their lives in any way at all". Here's the detail of what he said.

Now, consider the observation about Harvard in the article posted, particularly:

"The elite institutions like, say, Harvard and Princeton and the small upscale colleges, for example, are very much geared to socialization. If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on."

Now, who is at the top of the BBC? Who are the top producers and executives? Oxbridge folk. These two universities are riddled with the socialisation mentioned. The rituals and ceremonies are all a part of it, the it being the socialisation of a ruling elite. These are also the breeding grounds of the political, diplomatic, corporate and legal elite. They all come from the same place. That's the point Chomksy makes when he says that the media is subject to the same pressures as the other 'estates'.

If I were to compare working with the BBC and other media companies the difference is stark. It's monolithic institutional nature comes across in much of what they do. They are slow to move and sluggish to embrace change like others on the media scene owing in part to their size (but when the momentum gets going...), suspicious of radical innovation where other companies would relish the alternative avenue (think of the sluggish suspicious that TV received by the BBC in its early days), typically formed around an ideological clique (the Oxbridge profile) and they are indeed very white, and very middle class in the spread of their programming.

To be fair, they've made huge ammends but it's a sluggish process. I would say that a proliferation of other media outlets (not only on the net) alongside the BBC would be a much healthier state of affairs.
b) Independent thought isn't valued in universities or colleges ? Eh ? This isn't my experience, and sounds like some sort of hobby horse, because I don't think this point is particularly crucial to his case.
Sure it's crucial and it's a worthy hobby horse imo. If the university to media links a) news, documentary producers etc ring up university experts for content b) they are largely bred from the same Oxbridge stable, then this point becomes more than just a hobby horse.
c) Propaganda is a key tool used by governments in wartime - I'm happy to agree with that (though I did admire his description of the US as "a very pacifist country. It has always been." Yeah, right. Let's wheel anarres in with his list of the top 50 US military interventions of the 20th century, shall we ? He does it so much better than I could.) And there's little surprise that some of the same techniques (and people) were subsequently used in PR and advertising. I don't, however, see where he makes a link (never mind a convincing one) from these areas to the news media. Given that he's waffled on for several hundred words, we're inclined to assume it must be useful stuff supporting his principle case, but I just don't see that he makes the link. (It's late - maybe I've missed it ? It would, however, be typical of Chomsky though, IMHO...)
Easy on the character assasination of the guy ;) . The link between the old school government propaganda and today's news is perhaps best seen in the continuing (and very measurable) use of the "Press Release", whether from government, industry or whoever. Tracking this document evolution is very interesting. This is closely intertwined with the legacy that Creel left behind, and that of Bernays as the guru of 20th century PR.

Let's note the experience which the guru of 20th century PR, marketing and news wrote about in their 'handbooks'. This is what the socialisation of those media elite came from. Here's the specific snippet I'm refering to.

"So the question was, how do you get the pacifist population to become raving anti-German lunatics so they want to go kill all the Germans? That requires propaganda. So they set up the first and really only major state propaganda agency in U.S. history. The Committee on Public Information it was called (nice Orwellian title), called also the Creel Commission. The guy who ran it was named Creel. The task of this commission was to propagandize the population into a jingoist hysteria. It worked incredibly well. Within a few months there was a raving war hysteria and the U.S. was able to go to war."

Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller’s image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda.......The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.

This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala".


I take a wide definition of "the public relations industry".
The Crucially Classical Commuter said:
I've gone on a bit long. Still, your final point is whether I "still feel so comfortable about the current news diet (I'm) feeding on". Well, yes, frankly, I do, because I get my news principally (as I think you know) from Reuters, The Guardian, the BBC, and the North Essex and Colchester Evening Gazette. I don't see anything up there which makes me more suspicious of any of these sources than I was previously.
That's entirely up to you what you read and how you feel about it. :)
 
Lambert Simnel said:
If you're interested in bias, perception and trust in relation to the news media, you may be interested in an event BBC and Reuters are running today and yesterday. We Media

Amongst some interesting comments and ideas, there is a poll and an e-survey on the theme of "Trust in the Media" which seems quite closely related to this thread.
I'll be checking it out, thanks. :thumbsup:
 
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