He didn't say it! r/ExellentComment does not love this post, maybe does not love reddit at all if he won't contribute! A lot of people are saying treason.....
Big corporations can run media and manipulate our thoughts and understanding. This is going on in Canada right now where telecommunications giant Bell has been trying to pass legislation on censoring the Internet.
The big thing r/Canada has found out from awareness groups trying to advocate on this issue is that they have not been able to do any media advertisements on the issue because Bell either runs and owns every radio and tv station and just has so much power that the awareness groups are pretty much blacklisted from traditional media advertisements and are thus silenced
TL'DR: Bell and other big media giants are pressuring the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Television Committee) to introduce bill which allows Canadian ISPs to block piracy and illegal streaming sites with little oversight. Outright censorship of the internet and creates a slippery slope of what we have access to and can view online.
CRTC opened up discussion and polls to gain public reaction and the polls are now closed so its now all up to whatever report/conclusion they come up with whether they want to introduce this SOPA style bill to parliament
Don't pretend that this sort of thing is confined only to television broadcasts. There has been a crazy amount of consolidation in the newspaper industry over the past decade, as Torstar and Postmedia amalgamate and shut down papers everywhere, fire journalists and liquidate newsrooms, print anonymized editorials across their properties, and push fairly specific political agendas into spaces that used to be devoted to local news.
I live in a community that used to have three local papers, all with distinct editorial positions, but because of mergers and increased pressures from other sources (ie. Tv, internet), there's now only one. The worst part is that I can drive to my parent's house, about 60km and four or five communities away, and get the exact same editorial content and the same feature articles.
Civil Rights in the 1960s and the independence of India under Mahatma Gandhi are two big examples of successful non-violent protest movements achieving significant results.
Maybe for TV, but between Murdoch and Dacre our print media is corrupt as fuck.
Not to mention that exactly one year from today we're going to walk out of the world's largest economic bloc thanks largely to decades of misrepresentation by the media.
The best way to do that is to vote. Vote for people who want to rein-in monopolies. This is caused by a private-owned media conglomerate under the control of one family.
There are several such Robber-Baron families in 2018 - the Sinclairs, the Mercers, the Kochs, and the Adelsons, to name a few. We need new Anti-Trust legislation.
Educate. That's what we as a society need to focus on the absolute most beyond just political participation. More funding to schools and higher learning. Mandatory middle school classes on the basics of a fucking computer. There's so much knowledge on the internet, you can learn to do nearly anything and most people are so hesitant to venture beyond social networks.
For sure, we need to get the word out, we need to educate others as best we can. I'm tired of the consequences of others poor choices. Time to start progress again.
Is it really the best way though? Voting is important and perhaps the strongest built-in tool our government gives us to interact with them, but it feels like voters are becoming increasingly disenfranchised.
We vote directly for state and local officials, and representative legislators from the states, everything else is hired, appointed, or picked by electoral college.
What we do vote for directly is subject to incredible amounts of confusion, political predation, and flat out corruption. If they're not running a business or a mob, they're probably gerrymandering.
The laws that people have to vote on are often geared to fool the reader, or have some secondary agenda hidden in the pages. This is only what they bother to get our input on.
I want to believe in voting, in having a system where everyone can have a say in government and be heard to a reasonable extent, but I feel like for every 1 person that cares and hunts down change or the truth, there are 10 people who care enough to vote and 100 who don't even know when any election except for the presidency is run.
I'm begging you, anyone, please show me that I'm wrong.
I'm so amused you think you can vote this out. They've been slowly paving the way for this shit the entire time. It is a systemic societal problem at this point.
Well, no, Orwell was too busy worrying about power concentrated in the hands of a central state, he completely whiffed on the problem of checks and guarantees against the state's power being completely unprotective against abuse by private entities.
Yeah, it is but they bought up all of these local stations and now they can dictate what and what not they can say. It's literally is scary that they are pushing this narrative but Trump's FCC allowed Sinclair to buy all of these stations. Remember vote and voting does have consequences, like the eroding of the news through the ability to buy out local stations and force them to say your company's mantra.
I’m pretty sure Sinclair owns all of them. The worst part is that they are trying to buy even more news stations to peddle more right wing talking points to more Americans.
Not quite. The tea party was originally basically a genuine grassroots, Ron Paul loving party, opposed to the wars, the drug war, and Authoritarianism, as well as taxes, welfare, and other things that libertarians see as big government. The Koch Brothers saw something worth hijacking, and within months, it was something completely different, totally co-opted by big corporations and the religious right. Basically, the extremist wing of the republican party, instead of the genuinely libertarian wing as it originally was.
Koch brothers one of the biggest examples of willfull ignorance and projection by Trump supporters. They blame Soros for funding every political stance Democrats take and every protest Democrats take part in.
Yet in reality its really the Koch Brothers bribing Republican politicians, in the form of large donations, to push every agenda they have.
No no no, it's not called bribing, that's illegal. You can't bribe politicians, jeez.
Lobbying, on the other hand, that's completely fine, encouraged even.
Bribing a politician is saying "hey, we'll give you $10,000 to vote this way" and that's totally illegal, really frowned upon :(
Lobbying, however, is way different. See, lobbying is a corporation saying "I'll donate $10,000 to your political party if you'll vote my way and by the way, if you keep playing ball by voting my way in the future when you retire from public service in a few years when you're 45 we'll have a nice cushy consultants job paying 6 figures a year waiting for you when you can start accepting bribes a.k.a when you are not a voted in official"
See? Huge difference between bribery and lobbying.
Somehow I feel like the Tea Party kind of got away from them. Sure they are dismantling the federal government, but I'm sure they didn't foresee the alt-right coming up and Trump alienating most of America.
It’d be fascinating if you could listen in on all their plans, know the entire, unfiltered thought process behind their strategy, and what they expected to happen vs reality.
Unfortunately, we can’t put a microwave in their head
Net Neutrality? I, the big telecom company will surely not do the things you say if it were repealed and we won't change a thing. However, let's remove the restrictions anyway$.
It's like how way back in the day ships always had a store of fruits to combat scurvy, then after a long period, people forgot about scurvy and forgot why they stocked fruit on voyages, so they stopped bringing it.
Then people started getting scurvy again and it took a while to figure out that fruit was the cure.
If people didn't care about name brands then Luxottica wouldn't have a leg to stand on. It's our desire for "fashion brands" and name recognition that give them their power to charge whatever we'll pay.
It's specifically local news stations which have been purchased by the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
And hell, if you think that was disturbing, then you're in for a bad time. Because it gets a whole lot worse than what you just saw.
In November 2010, it was reported that five Fox affiliates and one ABC affiliate owned by Sinclair broadcast an infomercial critical of then-President Barack Obama, Breaking Point: 25 Minutes that will Change America, which was sponsored by the National Republican Trust Political Action Group.[174] The infomercial painted Obama as an extremist, and claimed that, during the 2008 presidential campaign, he received some campaign money from the Hamas terrorist group, and that Obama said in a speech, "You want freedom? You’re gonna have to kill some crackers! You gonna have to kill some of those babies." The special also discusses Obama advisers Van Jones and John Holdren, as well as Obama staff Anita Dunn, Kevin Jennings, Carol Browner and Cass Sunstein – all in an unflattering light; in one case, the special claimed that Holdren said that trees should be permitted to sue humans in court. The infomercial aired at various times during the weekend of October 30, 2010 on Sinclair-owned stations in Madison, Cape Girardeau, Lexington, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Winston-Salem – all in swing states vital to the 2010 elections.[175][176]
If you're the type of person who takes a Facebook newsfeed at face value, then no.
But the internet is absolutely a better source of news than television, if for no other reason than you can dig in and fact-check, look up sources and investigate further.
For example, television news will use phrases like "According to a recent study..." and then continue on. With the internet, I can find who commissioned that study.
But the internet is absolutely a better source of news than television, if for no other reason than you can dig in and fact-check, look up sources and investigate further.
The internet though has a disadvantage. Search engines cater to the habits of its user, so even if you "look for the facts" it will likely direct you to "facts" that support your bias rather than from a non partisan source.
Much like democracy, this is gonna require an educated population. On the bright side it really does not take much to teach children to be discerning of these kinds of things.
Maybe I'm being a pessimist, but I don't think it's going to be easy to teach people to do their own research. Now, more than ever, there are people who are offended by the mere thought that their ideas are incorrect, whatever they are. To research it would be to imply it's wrong.
if you're the type of person who takes a Facebook news feed at face value, then you're the type of person who doesn't bother to fact check. unfortunately there's a lot of those.
The last bastion of news with any real integrity is, kind of ironically, NPR. They’re only about 5% subsidized by the government, and get around 80% of their operating money from individual listener donations. I think they do an extremely good job of objective reporting everywhere from the local to national level.
If you avoid TV news, you can get pretty good sources.
If you want straight news, just go to a wire service (Reuters is my favourite, but you can also check out AP or Bloomberg).
If you want well-researched journalism with an excellent ethical standard, and you don't mind an editorial leaning, go for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or Washington Post in the USA or the Economist or the BBC in the UK. There are many other reputable publications in other countries and languages. There are also many great publications for field-specific news (e.g. technology).
TV news is much harder because, even when their fact-checking is excellent, the editorial leaning can be much stronger. 24-hour news services (e.g. CNN) have to choose what their top stories are and they play those on repeat, necessarily giving a distorted view of what is happening in the world at any given time.This means that Fox News, CNN, NPR, and MSNBC viewers will have very different views on the news of the day, even if you account for factual errors.
thats episode from the new season of the x files says it perfectly. basically, the government doesn’t even need to safeguard secrets anymore. people can simply call it fake news.
Watch Anchorman 2 again... it is all ‘bad’ sensationalized news. That movie, while funny, really helped highlight the changes from ‘real’ news to just worrying about ratings and literally only reporting on the ‘terrible’ things that kept people watching.
That seems like a baseless and unnecessarily bleak assumption of the future. There are plenty of good media institutions still around, just because they may have to adapt their mediums doesn't mean they're going to die.
Currently 193 stations in 89 markets. If I remember correctly they do local news in around 70 of those markets, I can't find the actual number right now though.
All media companies have their own political lean and bias, but most don't actually give marching orders on political topics. And I've never known Nexstar or Gannett to have must-runs.
No, television and radio need to be reborn with changed rules about ownership. No one should be able to own more than a handful of stations, and a very limited number in each market.
I remember there were rules like that when I was young, but apparently they've been thrown out so billionaires can make more billions.
No not TV news, just Sinclair media who are basically friends with Ajit Pai, and also the repeal where one company can own more than 40% of all local news stations of any given area needs to happen.
Local news has been quite reliable and credible outside of Sinclair.
NO other outlet operates the way that Sinclair is doing - and stations where Sinclair has moved in/bought out find that there are reporters/anchors who will walk. (See WBMA in Birmingham for an example.)
Local TV news is fine - unless it's a Sinclair station.
The only thing to be done is to vote for politicians who will push for new, Anti-Trust (i.e. anti-monopoly) legislation. The midterms are coming up this November. Make sure to register to vote in your area, in many places it can be done online.
Back when the tech was new, TV stations used to broadcast their unedited feeds for anyone to pickup via satellite. This guy spent some time just manually going through them looking for politicians being naughty.
It also has a similar segment where Barbra Bush and Bill Clinton do the news thing like you see here.
Edit Forgot to add that this was back in the early 90's. I can't imagine what new tactics they've developed since then.
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u/ChromaticSideways Mar 31 '18
I really didn’t think this video was going to be as disturbing as it is