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I will be giving a speech to a small local group later this month. I decided on a topic: Media Bias. Over the past few days, I've done research and have written the following speech. I know it is a long thing to read, but if you could read it (maybe even out loud, if you want) and let me know what you think is weak, what should be changed, what you like, and what you think should be added, I'd be very appreciative. Thanks!
Hi. Good morning. Thank you.
I want to thank you guys for inviting me to come out and speak to you today. I especially want to thank you all for bravely coming despite the heightened terror alerts -- we're at Terror Alert Code {pause as if to check notes} "Plaid", I believe. Very dangerous.
You know, on April 18, 1975, we didn't have a Tom Ridge or a Department of Homeland Security or a Crayola Box of Alert Levels. We didn't have a CNN or an MSNBC or a Fox News or a New York Times, either. But what we DID have was a guy named Paul Revere. And he shouted an alarm that saved many lives in towns like Concord and Lexington. But let me tell you this: If Paul Revere had shouted "The Redcoats are coming!" countless times prior to that because HIS George W. wanted to distract the American public... by the time the actual Redcoats came, the colonists would have gotten slaughtered in their sleep.
That's one of the biggest dangers of the Bush administration's record on terrorism. The American people, by and large, are cynical. There are only so many times that George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, or Tom Ridge can look into a CNN camera and scream "WOLF! WOLF!" before the public becomes so skeptical that the warnings become meaningless. The problem with that is that there are REAL wolves out there, and these alerts condition us to ignore real threats because we can't distinguish them from all the fake ones.
Politically motivated threat alerts are a fraud on the American public. And THEY MAKE US LESS SECURE.
The cheerful and willing accomplices in all of this are the media outlets. Thomas Jefferson once wrote in a letter that advertisements "contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper". Oh, how times have changed since Jefferson's day! Now, you can't rely on the truth of advertisements, either.
Part of the problem is that the journalistic practice of verifying stories and getting multiple sources have fallen to the wayside. A number of years ago, Connie Chung was a guest on Johnny Carson's show. He asked her how much of the evening news "consists of information {they've} actually gone out and dug up on {their} own." Her reply was very simple: "In all honesty, Johnny, we are often at the mercy of the White House for the news we report. Frequently, we simply repeat verbatim what the White House tells us."
If that was true then, it is even more so now. The Bush administration exerts more pressure and control over the media than any other president in history. Reporters who offend the administration by asking tough questions are exiled or ignored. They lose their access to the administration -- and once they have lost their access, they have lost their effectiveness as journalists. When Irish reporter Carole Coleman dared to suggest during an interview that the world was not a safer place after the invasion of Iraq, Bush got testy with the reporter, cancelled an interview between the first lady and Coleman, and filed a complaint with the Irish embassy. Here in the United States though, it's easier for the White House to keep reporters in line. When White House Helen Thomas was asking hard-hitting questions, the White House simply stopped calling on her at press conferences. There! No more hard questions!
To make matters worse, the Bush administration requires reporters who will be interviewing Bush or asking questions at press conferences submit their questions ahead of time. During the run-up to the war in Iraq, Bush held a press conference -- only his second since he took office, during which he took questions from a predetermined list of reporters, in a predetermined order, so that they could ask predetermined questions. When one reporter tried to deviate from the screenplay, Bush stopped him by saying, "We'll be there in a minute, King. John King. This is a scripted --" During that press conference, Bush called only on journalists on his list. That list ignored not only Helen Thomas, but also Time, Newsweek, USA Today, and the Washington Post. John Rosensteil from the Project for Excellence in Journalism described it this way: "This was a speech disguised as a presidential press conference. What you saw was political media control at a high level."
There are a small handful of American journalists with ethics and integrity like Helen Thomas, but for the most part, journalists are controlled by their editors and producers, and the editors and producers are controlled by large corporations. Viacom owns CBS, Disney owns ABC, General Electric owns NBC, GE and Microsoft own MSNBC and Newsweek, AOL/Time/Warner own CNN and Time magazine, and Satan owns Fox News Network, the New York Post and the Washington Times.
And any one of them would sell you their grandmother for a dollar.
Money is what it's really all about, and it's a sad reality -- peace doesn't sell papers. Safety and security and a complete lack of conflict don't bring in the viewers or the listeners. Wars, unrest, violence, danger -- these are the bread and butter of what passes for journalism in this country. War and uncertainty bring in the big audiences. Big audiences translate into more and bigger advertisers. More and bigger advertisers mean more money and profits for corporate stakeholders. This isn't a new concept -- Hearst knew it a hundred years ago when his newspaper dragged the United States toward the Spanish-American war. His statement to his newspaper's illustrator -- "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war" -- could just as easily have been spoken by a CNN producer or a New York Times editor today.
But aside from being dishonest, the media at large is also quite biased. And contrary to claims that it has a liberal bias, the media in reality has a sharp right-wing bias. There's a guy from Oklahoma who writes a semi-daily website called bartcop.com. He explains the media like this. If a television show criticized George W. Bush, there would be an immediate outcry from other media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, the Beltway Boys, Brit Hume, Tony Snow, Juan Williams, G. Gordon Libby, "Doctor" Laura, Oliver North, Bob Novak, Bill Schneider, Candy Crowley, Judy Woodruff, John Stossel, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Peggy Noonan, Tucker Carlson and Mary Matilin. But when a Democrat is attacked -- usually by one of the above-mentioned media figures -- the only left-wing media rebuttal you hear is the sound of crickets chirping.
And once again, if we want to figure out the reason for all of this, we just have to follow the money. Early in his administration, Bush pushed through tax cuts that gave a median tax cut of $470 to American families. But that number doesn't tell the full story. If you make less than $10,000 a year -- like 23.7 percent of households in the US -- you saw an average tax cut of around $8... enough to buy a medium pizza. If you make between $500,000 and $1 million -- like 1/3 of 1 percent of households in the US -- you saw an average tax cut of $22,485... enough to buy a mid-sized car. And if you make more than $1 million annually -- like 1/10 of 1 percent of households in the US -- you saw an average cut of $112,925... enough to buy a semi-decent house around here. The rich get richer, folks.
And the richest got the richest with Bush in office. NBC is owned by General Electric. GE's former CEO, Jack Welsh, received $97 million in pay in 1998, and now draws a pension of $3.9 million annually. The current CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, receives a salary exceeding $7 million. In fact, all of GE's officers personally fall into that lucrative 1/10th of 1 percent. But the real story is how much money the company itself is receiving from the Bush windfall. By statute, corporate tax rates are around 35%. But General Electric pays only about 20%, thanks in large part to massive tax breaks -- in GE's case, about $7 billion over the course of three years. Seven billion dollars is a lot of money, especially for someone who would sell their grandmother for a dollar.
You'd think that would be enough, but it isn't. General Electric is also making large piles of cash from the war in Iraq. General Electric subsidiaries make airplane engines and set up electrical transformers, generators, and things like that. They've received multi-million dollar contracts in Iraq to perform these tasks. How can anyone expect that a media outlet will be unbiased and fair in its reporting of political matters and war when outcomes of elections and decisions to attack another country can mean literally BILLIONS of dollars in their pockets?
And I don't mean to simply pick on NBC and General Electric. The truth is that they all have a sharp bias. The truth is that they are all motivated by unadulterated greed. The truth is that it will be difficult to change this as long as I can list the massive corporations that own all of the American media on one hand.
But luckily, we do not have to be slaves to mainstream media. There are countless independent, honest, ethical media sources on the Internet. Sources like PBS, NPR, and C-Span are much less beholden to corporate influence than are their mainstream counterparts. The key is to actively seek the truth -- and hopefully the truth will save us. Because, as Lois McMaster Bujold said, "If the truth does not save us... what does that say about us?"
Thank you again.
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