[Platt] MSNBC a credible source? Ha, ha, ha, ha. As for rest, the questions remain. I learned them from you. Your citing the study as if that were the holy writ speaks volumes about the positions you hold when convenient. When not convenient, you ignore your own "scientific" criteria.
[Case] I did not cite the article Arlo did. But your disparagement of MSNBC does bring to mind some serious issues. When newspaper reports of the Watergate break-in brought to light the criminal activities of the Nixon administration, politicians saw the real consequences of a free press. An all out assault was launched on the free press from two directions. One was the cynical proclamation of bias in the media. Issuing forth from the right this was just one of a series of hypocritical attacks on institutions that had helped make America great. I have mentioned at length the attacks on government and public service. But this one is even more cynical. The press was a free institution. Walter Cronkite was almost universally regarded as the most trustworthy man in the country. Journalists subscribed to and were held accountable to a code of professional ethics. This was not something they did in secret. Ethics were on the front burner at staff meeting of every daily paper in the country every single day. The goal of the local paper was "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable" But the attack went beyond simply slander and lies. The cornerstone of a free press is local ownership, local investment in the local press. At the time of Watergate, most cities had at least two newspapers and the competition between them was fierce. Since Watergate there has been a loosening of restrictions on who can own the media both print and electronic. Today there are not more than a handful of communities with two newspapers. It is true that most people get their news from the TV but there the story is even bleaker. While small town presses were being gobbled up by large conglomerates, big business was in a lobbying frenzy. They pushed through changes in frequency licensing laws so that media owners could acquire more and more media. As a result local ownership of news media in any form is all but dead. This concentration of media ownership, which has been as enthusiastically supported by democrats as well as republican, is at least in my mind one of the single biggest threats to liberty that we face as a nation. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
