CNN: Corrupt News Network

[leftist_not_liberal]

Tim Rutten:
Regarding Media
CNN: Corrupt News Network
A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates.
December 1, 2007

...Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country...

So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform... Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corruption, and it's why the Republican candidates had to spend more than half an hour "debating" an issue on which their differences are essentially marginal -- and, more important, why GOP voters had to sit and wait, mostly in vain, for the issues that really concern them to be discussed. That's particularly true because that same Pew poll reported findings of particular relevance to Republican voters, the vast majority of whom continue to support the war in Iraq.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/newsletter/la-et-rutten1dec01,0,4804052.column?track=mostemailedlink
__________________

Lou Dobbs = Father Coughlin

CNN is not journalism, it is the fucking Addams Family minus the humor. TV, the also evil twin of the Nazi-infested National Security State, makes it clear that the USA is most certainly NOT anything close to a real democracy.

That "authoritarian" Hugo Chavez lets reich wing media play on in a way that left wing media has NEVER been played in the U$A.

[BleedingHeartPatriot]

1. lnl, could you please include the link to Mr. Rutten's post?

I'd like to read more or see where it is he posts.

This is nice synopsis, I've not heard of him before.

TIA. :-) MKJ

[leftist_not_liberal]

2. Oh, my bad. Thanks for the heads-up.

[David Diderot]

3. Not surprising

Not surprising. CNN is corporate owned and a significant
factor in America's creeping fascism. Out of the thousands of
questions submitted CNN could easily select which ever bland
or agenda enhancing questions they desired.  The fix was in
from the beginning.

[David Diderot]

4. Not surprising

Not surprising. CNN is corporate owned and a significant
factor in America's creeping fascism. Out of the thousands of
questions submitted CNN could easily select which ever bland
or agenda enhancing questions they desired.  The fix was in
from the beginning.