When and Why Did Journalists Sell Out?

Nice shirt! (I would loose the tie). Uhm sorry, have I lost track of pursuit of the topic at hand?

Jeremy Scahill, I think I'm in love.

What can we do to change this? The fairness Doctrine would not end Rush Limbaugh or LW talk, but would force the media to have equal time of each.
There is nothing wrong with this. We would get both sides and I think it would help.

Thanks, Laura. I watched this video at Greenwald's blog earlier. Keep up the good work.

More words of wisdom from the man WhiteNoise. If you want to be educated check his posts out, he has more knowledge in his little pinky than a basketful of Glenn Becks!

"To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful" - Edward R. Murrow

Must see then ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Night,_and_Good_Luck.
"Fear is not in the habit of speaking truth" - Publius Cornelius Tacitus

“Conspiracy stuff' is now shorthand for unspeakable truth.” – Gore Vidal

I wanna be a truthful journalist!

I loved it when Scahill called Chuck Todd for falling in line. Chuck Todd is in it for the money and got punked by a true journalist.

In an alternate reality Obama would come out and say that everything up to now has been a... ROPE A DOPE !

Could he still pull it ? ;)

They did & do but the spotlight or golden microphone just ain't on them folks who buck with facts ;)

Robert Kennedy Jr. nailed it when he said that during a Repug administration Big Media goes AWOL but comes back with a vengeance as soon as Dems get to power...

QUESTION : On a scale of 1 to 10...how much damage has the previous executive branch has bestowed on america compared to Obama ?

They stole 2 elections… the first by perverting the supreme court…nothing happened…Then 9-11 and a war based on a 1000 lies + the treacherous hoisting of a CIA agent… nothing happened… ENRON....zzzzzz....they proceeded to shred the constitution, kidnapped imprisoned & tortured the world over…nothing…spied on one & all, fired top US attorneys, destroyed evidence… nada… conducted Katrina’s thinly veiled ethic cleansing …zilch…then they took us to the cleaners…

A little perspective & relative assessment of guilt seems appropriate but is waaay to much to ask for the obscurantist crowd so proud of what they ignore ;)

Now where does this mind gangrene comes from ?

LET'S INVESTIGATE JUST FOR SIZE ;)

To what party or political wing would you say these people belong too ;)

18% of Americans Think Sun Revovles Around Earth !!!!
http://www.gallup.com/poll/3742/New-Poll-Gauges-Americans-General-Knowledge-Leve....

1 in 5 US citizens think the Sun revolves around the Earth
http://www.rustylime.com/show_article.php?id=562

For the record, the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun was discarded in the 17th century.

"Kid's heads are filled with so many nonfacts that when they get out of school they're totally unprepared to do anything. They can't read, they can't write, they can't think. Talk about child abuse. The school system as a whole qualifies. Go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts... " - Frank Zappa

The system as a whole is broken & Obama's incapacity is but a symptom !

Washington has become Versailles. We are ruled, entertained and informed by courtiers. The popular media are courtiers. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are courtiers. Our pundits and experts are courtiers. We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power. It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games. We are being had. - Chris Hedges

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity - Martin Luther King, Jr.

they sold out because we chumped out......who gives a shit about half the junk thats on the news....every time some floozy coke whore goes to rehab we hear about it...who gives a giant rats ass ? i know what you dont see on the news....positive stories about cannabis....chumps

At the end of 2008, little before.

The monopolization of the media into just a few giant companies owned by souless corporations who need to make a profit on news are the problem.
In the days of Huntly-Brinkley and Cronkrite, news was considered a public service and not a for profit part.

The big souless corporations now controlling the news have a vested interest in what is reported now. It was Michael Moore who had to inform ABC about companies having insurance contracts on employees.
ABC should have done that investigative reporting.

No investigative reporting. No quality news.

There's different kinds but the investigative reporter remains the gold standard,,,

Here's a few :)

Greg Palast
http://www.gregpalast.com

Jeremy Scahill
http://rebelreports.com/

These two a different, Their analysis is their forte...

Naomi Klein
http://www.naomiklein.org/main

Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/category/hedges/

Seymour Hersh also comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh

Check here for more : http://centerforinvestigativereporting.org/

Documentaries are great...

Check this site...
http://freedocumentaries.org/index.php

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Are there any 'real' journalists left? Or, are they all merely commentators?

Internet sure is a magnificent tool, but it seems that it is mostly used to drown the fish ;)

TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES FOR 2009
http://current.com/items/89327026_top-25-censored-stories-for-2009.htm

As for Big Media : we are, indeed, back to where we never left ;)

THE MIGHTY WURLITZER SPEWS JUNK UPON.A NATION OF VILLAGE IDIOTS...

At least 22 American news organizations had employed American journalists who were also working for the CIA, and nearly a dozen American publishing houses printed some of the more than 1,000 books that had been produced or subsidized by the CIA. When asked in a 1976 interview whether the CIA had ever told its media agents what to write, William Colby replied, Oh, sure, all the time !

PS : Check out Carl Bernstein's 1970s Rolling Stone article on the CIA's stranglehold on the US media, which has gotten far worse since then:
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html

CIA Instructions to Media Assets
http://192.220.64.45/collections/assassinations/jfk/cia-inst.htm

"The media is not influenced by the CIA - the media is the CIA." -Robert Lederman http://www.konformist.com/2000/bush-dictator.htm

Look who the corporate media is today. The beneficiaries of 9/11; the biggest beneficiaries have been Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, the Carlyle Group, Boeing, Halliburton, the military industrial contractors, each of those have had 300 to 400 percent increase in their stock value in the last five years, and when we look at those groups and the memberships of their boards, Carlyle has someone sitting on the New York Times board, Bechtel sits on NBC, Boeing sits on ABC, Halliburton sits on ABC, Lockheed Martin sits on Gannett. They're interconnected; - Peter Phillips / Project Censored

"A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself": Joseph Pulitzer

it is a consequence of a corporate media. certainly. But I really don't think there ever was a time when the media was unbiased and willing to speak truth to power. In fact I think in the past in this country it has mostly been worse than it is now.

EXCELLENT !

This goes into the essence of what is happening !

Tried to raise a flag 3 years ago ;)

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDodWOCFxeI&feature=channel_page

"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary.": George Orwell in the book 1984

"Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter" - Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social philosopher, 1900-1980

"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media" - William Colby: Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from September, 1973, to January, 1976.

"In examining the CIA's past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public." - Frank Church - Church was a key figure in American foreign policy during the 1970s, and served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1979 to 1981.