Going from our local

[CHIMO]

Concerns to the bigger picture:

Chris Hedges: Obama is a "Poster Child for the Death of the Liberal Class"

AMY GOODMAN: What happened? It hardly got any coverage in the corporate media.

CHRIS HEDGES: Yeah, well, that’s not much of a surprise, at this point. I think we’ve seen a kind of a withering of corporate media, including my own paper, the New York Times. As advertising rates decline and as circulation drops, they become even more craven in their service of the power elite and reportage that in no way offends the structures of power. So, you know, events like that one are nonentities for mainstream news organizations.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean by the "death of the liberal class"?

CHRIS HEDGES: The collapse of the pillar, the primary pillars of the liberal establishment, those liberal institutions—the press, labor, public education and, in particular universities, culture, liberal religious institutions and the Democratic Party—that have been under assault.

And I speak a lot about World War I and the rise of the Committee for Public Information, the Creel Commission, which was the first system of modern mass propaganda, very closely studied by the Nazis, used to sell an unpopular war to an American public, but also used to crush populist, radical, progressive anarchist, Socialist, Communist movements that had frightened the power elite on the eve of World War I. And they employed for the first time the techniques of mass crowd psychology studied by figures like Le Bon, Trotter and Sigmund Freud. They understood that people were moved or manipulated not by fact or reason, but by what Walter Lippmann calls the "manufacturing of consent" in his 1922 book Public Opinion. And we’ve never recovered ever since.

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/20/chris_hedges_obama_is_a_poster
http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2010/dec/video/dnB20101220a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=00:25:50


And further on this, last Sundays' program:
Chris Hedges and Bob McChesney Sunday at 1pm

Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Call and comment during this live program. http://www.truthdig.com

http://will.illinois.edu/mediamatters/
The program starts after the first 5 minutes.
Very interesting analysis.