listen to me: I'll tell you!"
How could anyone be be so arrogant?
How could any listener not be offended by such condescension?
Well, you know what? I'm sure it was accidental, but he was only telling the truth.
We are often outraged by the likes of Limbaugh, Beck, O'Reilly and other similarly blatant examples of conservative propaganda merchants. But, they are merely the intentionally visible extremes who draw all of the attention and criticism. The pervasive corporate ethic which controls 99% of what we call the "mainstream media" and almost everything we are allowed to see and hear is, indeed, designed to "tell us what to think".
While the right-wing bloviators on talk radio and conservative TV---including everyone on FOX---have been known to create their facts out of whole cloth, that's not the most corrosive aspect of what passes for our "free press" nowadays.
Understand that the huge corporations which actually own our media---and the business aristocracy which they serve---are the gatekeepers who decide what information we will be permitted to receive. If they choose not to report an event which occurred or a speech that was delivered then, in a very real sense, the event never occurred and the speech was never spoken.
If a song contains lyrics which the corporatocracy finds offensive or embarrassing, that song simply will not get air time.
If a play or a sitcom script dares to side with the working class and portrays the greed, corruption, illegality and amorality of corporate America, it will never be broadcast.
In the case of broadcasts which still call themselves "new" progams, even events which must be covered despite being "inconvenient" for the "powers that be", those events can be framed so as to influence how they are received by the public. A recent example would be the 19 or so verified incidentss of violence by rightwing extremists(
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/terror-arizona-just-another-isolated) against liberals or the government since 2008.
Many of these events occurred AFTER the DHS warned of impending violence to be perpetrated by rightwing extremists.(
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/rightwing.pdf) Yet, each was treated by the MSM as an isolated event. I am not aware of any coverage which treated them as possibly related or a part of a pattern or trend.
Our formerly free press has been a prisoner of war for several decades. Its mission as evolved from informing and educating the US public to what could be called the homogenization of American thought. It treats us as consumers, not citizens and profit, not truth, is its touchstone.
It is the entire media apparatus that is the Great Whore. Rush is just a chancre.
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