Mass Media 101

Barry Krusch is interested in how the media works as distinct from the political and Cultural agendas behind them. He knows that they are powerful because they control what goes into our minds. If the people running the media are honest, that is as good as it gets. If they crooked and they have different agendas you can still work out more or less what is going on but when they all have similar agendas things are bad. That is why the Internet is so valuable. It has many agendas. Finding the honest ones is possible because they are out there. Before it was not.

The html version is not properly formatted so it is a case of using  http://www.krusch.com/articles/MassMedia101.pdf, which is a nuisance but much better than nothing.

 

Media Bias Sources
Two books mentioned by Mr Krusch are available from Amazon. Here are reviews.

 

 

Media Bias Sources
These books are mentioned by Barry Krusch who is very sound on how the media are used to manipulate us. The blurb from Amazon confirms his point.

Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War
Product Description
The New Republic airbrushed a Hitler mustache on Saddam Hussein. CNN reporters described the bombing of Baghdad as "fireworks on the Fourth of July." The Pentagon fed prepackaged programs to the TV networks. Veiled Arab women became icons of an exotic culture. These are some of the ways the media brought home the war in the Persian Gulf as a national spectacle. Looking to old and new technologies for mass communication--from CNN to comic books, from international new agencies to tabloids, from bomb sights to the Super Bowl--the essays in this collection show the ways in which public information is shaped, packaged, and disseminated. The contributors include Venise T. Berry, Victor J. Caldarola, Dana L. Cloud, Tom Engelhardt, Cynthia Enloe, H. Bruce Franklin, Daniel C. Hallin, Kim E. Karloff, Michelle Kendrick, Margot Norris, Lauren Rabinovitz, Leonard Rifas, Therese Saliba, Ella Shohat, Holly Cowan Shulman, Mimi White, and Robyn Wiegmen. Susan Jeffords is the director of Women's Studies and a professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era. Lauren Rabinovitz is an associate professor of American Studies and Film Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema.

 

The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left
Product Description
"The whole world is watching!" chanted the demonstrators in the Chicago streets in 1968, as the TV cameras beamed images of police cracking heads into homes everywhere. In this classic book, originally published in 1980, acclaimed media critic Todd Gitlin first scrutinizes major news coverage in the early days of the antiwar movement. Drawing on his own experiences (he was president of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1963-64) and on interviews with key activists and news reporters, he shows in detail how the media first ignore new political developments, then select and emphasize aspects of the story that treat movements as oddities. He then demonstrates how the media glare made leaders into celebrities and estranged them from their movement base; how it inflated the importance of revolutionary rhetoric, destabilizing the movement, then promoted "moderate" alternatives--all the while spreading the antiwar message. Finally, Gitlin draws together a theory of news coverage as a form of anti-democratic social management--which he sees at work also in media treatment of the anti-nuclear and other later movements.

Updated for 2003 with a new preface, The Whole World Is Watching is a subtle and sensitive book, true to the passions and ironic reversals of its subject, and filled with provocative insights that apply to the media's relationship with all activist movements.

 

The Best Congress Money Can Buy
Philip Stern tells all.

 

Farm Fiasco
James Bovard goes for it.

 

Open secrets: The price of politics in Alaska
Larry Makinson

 

AMERICA , INC.
by Mintz and Cohen.

 

Question Time
The BBC has a formal obligation to report honestly and well. It destroyed any claim it had with a grossly blatant attack on Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party. The hate was open. The fear of honest patriots finding a voice in Parliament was clear too.

 

The Israel Report
Is from Jews in Israel who want to defraud us by making us believe they are victims not perpetrators. Manipulating minds is thought control. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself.

 

Think Tanks
Think tanks are out there to........... do what, exactly? A BBC man tells us that they are more about Propaganda than anything else. Perhaps that is why he mentions the Institute of Economic Affairs so much; it is not a Marxist outfit, unlike the http://www.ippr.org/, which bills itself as:-
IPPR, the Institute for Public Policy Research, is the UK's leading progressive think tank

Progressivism is a code word used by the Left Wing to mask their agenda.

 

Errors & omissions, broken links, cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if you find any I am open to comment.
 
Email me at Mike Emery. All financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep it private, use my PGP KeyHome Page

Updated on 04/12/2017 20:39