Modern Freedom of Choice: Death by a 1000 cuts

(Survival manual/2. Social issues/Modern freedom of choice)

Modern Freedom of Choice topics:
1. ‘The Matrix’ (as a metaphor)
2. How Industry Manipulates Public opinion
3. How Propaganda Works in the West
4. Who Really Determines What You Will Or Will Not See On TV, Or Read In The Newspaper?
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1.  ‘The Matrix’
Live Real: Where Science and religion meet common sense
<http://www.livereal.com/movies/matrix_for_real.htm>

_A. “Wake up, Neo.  The Matrix has you.”
So, what is “The Matrix”?
A seriously cool action flick. Stellar visuals. Next-generation special effects. Gnarly fight scenes. Carrie Anne-Moss. Really twisted story. Leather.
But that’s just the surface, the appearance of the movie. That’s all it seems to be.
But there’s something more going on here.
After all, The Matrix movies seem to have a deeper effect on people than that of just another sci-fi flick. What is it about this movie that seems to be speaking to people on such a deeper level? Maybe there is something there to explore…like The Inner Meaning of “The Matrix”

Some quotes from the movie:
“You’re here because you know something.
What you know you can’t explain.
But you feel it.
You’ve felt it your entire life.”
“That there is something wrong with the world.
You don’t know what it is, but it’s there,
like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.”

 What is the Matrix?
It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”
What truth?
That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”
“You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo.”

“The Matrix” – in one sense – is an entertaining adventure movie, with far-out psychological twist. Nothing more.
Keanu, the everyday guy, living the normal life as a computer software programmer, soon is faced with a harsh truth: he’s been living a double life; one by day, another by night. He’s forced to choose which one is really him.
From there, and once he makes a few more key choices, practically everything he believes about himself, his world, his place in the world, fundamental assumptions about him and his identity . . . unravel.
Pretty interesting movie, pretty interesting fantasy, but that’s all it is…or is it?

_B. Views from ‘The Real World’
Consider the following observations from some quite brilliant minds:

•  The first view is from Peter Ouspensky, the 20th-Century mathematician and author of In Search of the Miraculous, in which he quotes philosopher G. I. Gurdjieff:
 “If men could really see their true position and could understand all the horror of it, they would be unable to remain where they are even for one second. They would begin to seek a way out and they would quickly find it, because there is a way out; but men fail to see it simply because they are hypnotized.”

“You do not realize your own situation. You are in prison. All you can wish for, if you are a sensible man, is to escape. But how escape? It is necessary to tunnel under a wall. One man can do nothing. But let us suppose there are ten or twenty men – if they work in turn and if one covers another they can complete the tunnel and escape.”

“. . . Furthermore, no one can escape from prison without the help of those who have escaped before . . . if a man in prison was at any time to have a chance of escape, then he must first of all realize that he is in prison. So long as he fails to realize this, so long as he thinks he is free, he has no chance whatever. No one can help or liberate him by force, against his will, in opposition to his wishes. If liberation is possible, it is possible only as a result of great labor and great efforts, and, above all, of conscious efforts, towards a definite aim.”

      “If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him – to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: how to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious.”

•  Or the following from Indian spiritual teacher Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
 “Thus is created the world in which we live, our personal world. The real world is beyond the mind’s ken; we see it through the ‘net of our desires’, divided into pleasure and pain, right and wrong, inner  and outer.
To see the universe as it is, you must step beyond the net. It is not hard to do so, for the net is full of holes. Look at the net and its many contradictions.”

•  From Plato
“’And now,’ I said, ‘let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened: behold human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players put in front of them, over which they show the puppets.’
‘I see.’
‘And do you see,’ I said, ‘men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.’
‘You have shown me a strange thing, and they are strange prisoners.’
‘Like ourselves,’ I replied; ‘and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another .

•  Or the words of  philosopher J. J. van der Leeuw
“Our life is like that of the prisoners in the cave; we too see only the back of the cave, the wall of our own consciousness on which dance the shadows, the images cast there by the reality which we do not behold.

We have come to know the play of these shadows so well that we have been able to build up an entire science concerning them. This science is right in so far as the shadows have a vital relation to the reality that casts them, but it is ever doomed to find itself confronted by mysteries which in the world of shadows never be solved, unless some who have seen the real world introduce into these sciences a wider knowledge. But we are impatient and incredulous when anyone would tell us that the world upon which we gaze is not the world of the Real, but only our world-image.

Yet among us too evidence is not lacking of men, who, throughout the ages, have found freedom from their bondage, who have conquered illusion and discovered that world of Reality of which this world of ours is but a shadow or image, cast in the cave of our consciousness . . .” (quoted from The Conquest of Illusion, 1928)

•  Or the following from a description of Gnosticism
(Gnosticism was a philosophy that was influential around the time of the origin of Christianity. Many argue that Jesus was a member of a Gnostic sect called The Essenes.)
“. . . gnosticism taught that we are souls trapped in a prison like material world by an evil divinity, kept unaware of our plight by its carnal seductiveness. Only those with the occult knowledge (gnosis) of the true state of affairs can transcend this prison and enter a higher reality. The good divinity dwelling above this evil realm aids the lost souls by sending a messenger of truth to reveal the deception.
Replace archons with agents and magic with machine guns, and “The Matrix” is a virtual, point-for-point retelling of an gnostic concept.”

•   Or the following from two psychologists
“The average person is unaware that he or she is living out a negative destiny according to his or her past (childhood) programming, preserving his or her familiar identity…,”
– Robert W. Firestone and Joyce Catlett

 •  Or the thoughts from Albert Einstein
“A human being is a part of the whole called a universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” [Image at left is an attempt to display the meaning of Einstein’s  4-dimensional universe on a 2-dimensional surface.]

•   And from Scientific American
“Our innate perception that the world is three-dimensional could be an extraordinary illusion…results suggest that our universe, which we perceive to have 3 spatial dimensions, might instead be “written” on a 2-dimensional surface, like a hologram. Our everyday perceptions of the world as 3-dimensional would then be either a profound illusion or merely one of two alternative ways of viewing reality…”
– from “Information In the Holographic Universe” by Jacob D. Bekenstein, Scientific American, August 2003 [Image right]

These descriptions are very similar to the core message in the movies: The Truman Show, Jacob’s Ladder, The Thirteenth Floor, The Wizard of  Oz and Waking Life.
“It is not until you awaken that you will realize that you have been asleep, dreaming that you are awake.” – Leonard Jacobson

 And If You Want To Go Deeper… – down the rabbit-hole
•   It’s pretty safe to say that the vast majority of people who see The Matrix trilogy will more or less enjoy the movies, have a fun couple of hours with each…then move on with their lives, and that’s it. Good flicks.
•  Another, smaller group of people, will go see the movies, and afterwards, think about the underlying message and philosophy that pervades the movies. They’ll take it to a slightly deeper level, and get intellectual about it…In a way, they will be like dreamers in a dream who dream that someone told them they were dreaming, and they talked and thought about it in the dream.
•  And yet another, much smaller group, will go even further. They will see the movies, like them, and work to understand the deeper message that pervade the movies intellectually… then they’ll get to work.

After all, if the movies strike a chord with people because there’s some truth to them. If we actually are, in some way, living in some kind of illusion, and we’re more or less ‘cut off’ from reality or “IT” or whatever you want to call it, and this is why we suffer from all kinds of deception then there’s a lot of work to do.

And if there is some truth behind the ‘machines’ that we created becoming the enemy that enslaves us, then working to free ourselves from their grip and find ‘The Truth’ is what we need to do, which means, among other things, that we should probably be studying and practicing certain exercises, like a kind of ‘mental martial-arts, and work with others to help win the battle…and then, maybe one day we can all wake up.
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2.  How industry manipulates public opinion
http://www.healingdaily.com/beliefs.htm
Why you believe what you believe.
PR (public relations) was created to manipulate public opinion. More and more of what we hear, see and read as ‘news’ is actually PR content. On any given day much of what the media broadcasts or prints as news is provided by the PR industry.
There are two kinds of ‘experts’ we’re dealing with:
1)  the PR spin doctors behind the scenes and
2) the ‘independent’ experts paraded before the public, scientists who have been hand-picked, cultivated, and paid handsomely to promote the views of corporations which are involved in controversial actions.

“Third parties” set PR apart from advertising. Stauber and Rampton describe how the tobacco industry first hired movie stars to promote cigarettes and then spent millions of dollars to counter findings that cigarettes cause cancer, a strategy based on testimonials and the so-called third-party technique.

The book, Trust Us We’re Experts also considers the effect big money has on universities and scientific journals, describing instances in which tobacco companies paid 13 scientists $156,000 to write letters to influential medical journals.
People don’t realize how most issues of ‘conventional wisdom’ are scientifically implanted in the public consciousness by a thousand media clips a day.

If everybody believes something, it’s probably wrong. That’s what we call “Conventional Wisdom”. In the U.S., conventional wisdom which has mass acceptance is usually contrived: somebody paid for it. For example:
● “Hospitals are safe and clean”
● “The cure for cancer is just around the corner”
●   “Pharmaceuticals restore health”
●  “America has the best health care in the world”
●  “Vaccination brings immunity”
●  “When a child is sick, he/she needs immediate antibiotics”
●  “When a child has a fever he/she needs Tylenol”
●  And many more

Public relations shaping public opinion
In “Trust Us We’re Experts“, Stauber and Rampton point to some compelling data describing the science of creating public opinion in the U.S. They trace modern public influence back to the early part of the 1900’s, highlighting the work of people like Edward L. Bernays, the “Father of Spin”.

[Image at right: Trust Us We’re Experts a book co-authored by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton of the Center for Media and Democracy, shows how the world’s richest and most powerful corporations are involved in the shenanigans of the public relations industry, which pays, influences and even invents a surprising number of those ‘experts’.]

Edward Bernays layed the groundwork for the fledgling public relations industry in the 1920s to the power it wields over public policy today.

In his book “Propaganda”, Bernays argued that scientific manipulation of public opinion is key. “A relatively small number of persons,” he wrote, “pull the wires which control the public mind.” Bernays believed that “somebody interested in leading the crowd needs to appeal not to logic but to unconscious motivation.”

Bernays dominated the PR industry until the 1940s, and was a significant force for another 40 years following that. During that time, Bernays took on hundreds various assignments to create a public perception about some product or idea. For example, as a new member on the Committee on Public Information, one of Bernays’ first assignments was to help sell the First World War to the American public with the idea to “Make the World Safe for Democracy.”

A few years later, Bernays helped popularize the notion of women smoking cigarettes. Not being one to turn down a challenge, Bernays set up the advertising format, along with the AMA, which lasted for almost 50 years proving that cigarettes are beneficial to health. It’s interesting to look at ads in issues of “Life” or “Time” magazines from the 40s and 50s.

Bernays also popularized the idea of bacon for breakfast.

Bernay’s job was to reframe an issue, to create a certain image which would put a particular concept or product in a desirable light. Bernays described the public as a ‘herd that needed to be led.’ And this herd-like thinking makes people “susceptible to leadership.” Bernays never strayed from his fundamental axiom to “control the masses without their knowing it.” The best PR takes places when the people are unaware that they are being manipulated.

Stauber describes Bernays’ rationale like this: “the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in a democratic society.” (“Trust Us We’re Experts” p. 42)
Once the possibilities of applying Freudian psychology to mass media were uncovered, Bernays’s list of corporate clients grew rapidly. Global corporations were eager to court the new Image Makers. There were hundreds of goods and services and ideas to be sold to the susceptible public. Over the years, these players have had the money to make their images happen. Some of those players are:

Monsanto Philip Morris DuPont Pfizer Dow Chemical Union Carbide tobacco industry General Mills

Allstate Eli Lilly Ciba Geigy Goodyear lead industry Coors Chlorox

Shell Oil Standard Oil Procter & Gamble Boeing General Motors

The best PR is PR that goes unnoticed.

For decades these “players” have created the opinions most of us were raised with, on virtually any issue which has the remotest commercial value, including:

pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, medicine as a profession, tobacco, leaded gasoline, alternative medicine, dental amalgams, pollution of the oceans, forests and lumber, images of celebrities  inc. damage control

fluoridation of city water, aspartame, chlorine, household cleaning products, dioxin, global warming, cancer research and treatment, crisis and disaster management, genetically modified foods, food additives; processed foods

Bernays learned early on that the most effective way to create credibility for a product or idea is with “independent third-party” endorsement. For example, if General Motors were to come out and say that “global warming” is a hoax invented by some liberal tree-huggers, the public would suspect GM’s motives, since GM’s fortune is made by selling cars.

If however some independent research institute with a very credible sounding name like the Global Climate Coalition comes out with a scientific report which says that global warming is really a fiction, the public begins to get confused and to have doubts about the issue.

So that’s exactly what Bernays did. With a policy inspired by genius, he set up “more institutes and foundations than Rockefeller and Carnegie combined.” (“Trust Us We’re Experts” p 45)

Quietly financed by the industry giants whose products were being evaluated, these “independent” research agencies would churn out “scientific” studies and press releases which could create any public image their handlers wanted. Such front groups are given important-sounding names like:

Alliance for Better Foods, Temperature Research Foundation, Consumer Alert,Industrial Health Federation,Manhattan Institute, The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, International Food Information Council

Center for Produce Quality, Tobacco Institute Research Council, Cato Institute, Air Hygiene Foundation, American Council on Science and Health,Global Climate Coalition, International Food Information Council

As Stauber explains in “Trust Us We’re Experts“, these organizations and hundreds of others like them are front-groups whose sole mission is to advance the image of the corporations which fund them.

Public relations and the media
The news media regularly fails to investigate so-called “independent experts” associated with industry front-groups. These front-groups all have important-sounding names like “Consumer Alert” and “The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition,” but they fail to reveal their corporate funding and their propaganda agenda.

Industries’s front-groups promote their agenda in part by an endless stream of “press releases” announcing “breakthrough research” to every newspaper, radio and TV station in the country. Many of these press releases read like news, and indeed are purposely molded in the news format. This saves journalists the trouble of researching the subjects on their own, especially for topics about which they know very little. Entire sections of the press releases can be just lifted intact, without any editing, given the byline of the reporter or newspaper or TV station – and voila! Instant news. Written by corporate PR firms

Does this really happen? It happens every single day, since the 1920s when the idea of the Press Release was first invented by Ivy Lee. (“Trust Us We’re Experts”, p. 22) These types of stories are mixed right in with legitimately researched news stories. Unless you have done the research yourself, you won’t be able to tell the difference.

Words in press releases are very carefully chosen for their emotional impact. A front group called the International Food Information Council handles the public’s natural aversion to genetically modified foods. Who do you think funds the International Food Information Council? Take a wild guess. Right – Monsanto, DuPont, Frito-Lay, Coca Cola, Nutrasweet – corporations in a position to make fortunes from GM foods. (“Trust Us We’re Experts” p. 20)

Science For Hire
Stauber tells the amazing story of how leaded gas came to be. In 1922, General Motors discovered that adding lead to gasoline gave cars more horsepower.
When there was some concern about safety, GM paid the Bureau of Mines to do some fake “testing” and publish “research” that “proved” that inhalation of lead was harmless. This is where Charles Kettering comes in.

Founder of the world-famous Sloan-Kettering Memorial Institute for medical research, Charles Kettering also happened to be an executive with General Motors. By some strange coincidence, we soon have the Sloan Kettering Institute issuing scientific reports stating that lead occurs naturally in the body and that the body has a way of eliminating low-level exposure.

Through its association with PR giant Hill & Knowlton and The Industrial Hygiene Foundation, Sloane Kettering opposed all anti-lead research for years. (“Trust Us We’re Experts” p. 92). For the next 60 years more and more gasoline became leaded, until by the ’70s, 90% of our gasoline was leaded.

Finally, it became too obvious to hide that lead was a major carcinogen, and leaded gas was finally phased out in the late ’80s. But during those 60 years, it is estimated that some 30 million tons of lead were released in vapor form onto American streets and highways. 30 million tons.

I hope this page will help you to start reading newspaper and magazine articles a little differently, and perhaps start watching TV news with a slightly different attitude. Always ask yourself, what are they selling here, and who is selling it?

If the news is dealing with an issue where money is involved, objective data won’t be so easy to obtain. Remember, if everybody knows something, that image has been bought and paid for.

Real knowledge takes a little more effort, a little digging down at least one level below what “everybody knows.”

We are all “conditioned”. What we are exposed to through the media, especially television, does shape our beliefs. Britney Spears is paid millions of dollars to tell us to drink Pepsi because IT ABSOLUTELY WORKS.
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3. How Propaganda Works in the West
11 November 2008, Ed Strong blog.com
http://edstrong.blog-city.com/noam_chomsky_how_propaganda_works_in_the_west.htm
The American approach to social control  is so much more sophisticated and pervasive  that it deserves a new name  It not propaganda any more, it’s “prop-agenda”. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.
Remember, children. Propaganda works because we don’t know we’re being propagandized.
How could anyone suggest that in this beacon of ‘freedom and democracy’, the magnificent United States of Amnesia, that we are programmed to follow an ideology?

Propaganda for Dummies
In the West the calculated manipulation of public opinion to serve political and ideological interests is much more covert and therefore much more effective than a propaganda system imposed in a totalitarian regime.
Its greatest triumph is that we generally don’t notice the influence of propaganda — or laugh at the notion it even exists.
We watch the democratic process taking place – heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice – and think that, because we have “free” media, it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it.
The American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s “prop-agenda.” It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.
When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it’s the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone’s talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false “intelligence” and selected “leaks”.

With the ground thus prepared, governments are happy if you then “use the democratic process” to agree or disagree — for, after all, their intention is to mobilize enough headlines and conversation to make the whole thing seem real and urgent.
The more emotional the debate, the better. Emotion creates reality, reality demands action.

Keeping the People Passive & Obedient
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Since the voice of the people is allowed to speak out in democratic societies, those in power better control what that voice says — in other words, control what people think.

One of the ways to do this is to create political debate that appears to embrace many opinions, but actually stays within very narrow margins. You have to make sure that both sides in the debate accept certain assumptions — and that those assumptions are the basis of the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, the debate is permissible.

One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they have jobs in management, media, and academia and therefore work in some capacity as agents of the propaganda system — and they believe what the system expects them to believe. By and large, they’re part of the privileged elite, and share the interests and perceptions of those in power.

It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and government malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest.

What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality of the command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.

Propaganda & the Ruling Ideology
When a leading journalist or TV news presenter is asked whether they are subject to pressure or censorship, they say they are completely free to express their own opinions. So how does thought control work in a democratic society? We know how it works in dictatorships.

Journalists are an integral part of the ruling ideology. They are so well ‘integrated’ that they can’t see outside the ideological box they inhabit. Their journalism is balanced, fair and tolerant of other points of view. But that is part of the ‘value system’ they are promulgating. ‘Truth’ is their version of the world.

To return to the original question. If one suggests there is censorship in the Western media, journalists immediately reply: “No one has been exerting any pressure on me. I write what I want.” And it’s true.  But if they defended positions contrary to the dominant norm, someone else would soon be writing editorials in their place.

Obviously it is not a hard-and-fast rule: the US press sometimes publishes even my work, and the US is not a totalitarian country. But anyone who fails to fulfill certain minimum requirements does not stand a chance of becoming an established commentator. It is one of the big differences between the propaganda system of a totalitarian state and the way democratic societies go about things. Exaggerating slightly, in totalitarian countries the state decides the official line and everyone must then comply.

Democratic societies operate differently. The line is never presented as such, merely implied. This involves brainwashing people who are still at liberty. Even the passionate debates in the main media stay within the bounds of commonly accepted, implicit rules, which sideline a large number of contrary views.  The system of control in democratic societies is extremely effective. We do not notice the line any more than we notice the air we breathe.

We sometimes even imagine we are seeing a lively debate. The system of control is much more powerful than in totalitarian systems. Look at Germany in the early 1930s. We tend to forget that it was the most advanced country in Europe, taking the lead in art, science, technology, literature and philosophy. Then, in no time at all, it suffered a complete reversal of fortune and became the most barbaric, murderous state in human history. All that was achieved by using fear: Fear of the Bolsheviks, the Jews, the Americans, the Gypsies – everyone who, according to the Nazis, was threatening the core values of European culture and the direct descendants of Greek civilization (as the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in 1935).

However, most of the German media who inundated the population with these messages were using marketing techniques developed by US advertising agents. The same method is always used to impose an ideology. Violence is not enough to dominate people: some other justification is required.

When one person wields power over another – whether they are a dictator, a colonist, a bureaucrat, a spouse or a boss – they need an ideology justifying their action. And it is always the same: their domination is exerted for the good of the underdog. Those in power always present themselves as being altruistic, disinterested and generous.

In the 1930s the rules for Nazi propaganda involved using simple words and repeating them in association with emotions and phobia. When Hitler invaded the Sudetenland in 1938 he cited the noblest, most charitable motives: the need for a humanitarian intervention to prevent the ethnic cleansing of German speakers. Henceforward everyone would be living under Germany’s protective wing, with the support of the world’s most artistically and culturally advanced country.

When it comes to propaganda (though in a sense nothing has changed since the days of Athens) there have been some minor improvements. The instruments available now are much more refined, in particular – surprising as it may seem – in the countries with the greatest civil liberties, Britain and the US.

The contemporary public relations industry was born there in the 1920s, an activity we may also refer to as opinion forming or propaganda. Both countries had made such progress in democratic rights (women’s suffrage, freedom of speech) that state violence was no longer sufficient to contain the desire for liberty. So those in power sought other ways of manufacturing consent.

The PR industry produces, in the true sense of the term, concept, acceptance and submission.

It controls people’s minds and ideas. It is a major advance on totalitarian rule, as it is much more agreeable to be subjected to advertising than to torture.

4. Who Really Determines What You Will Or Will Not See On TV Or Read In The Newspaper?
http://www.whoownsthenews.com/
In the early years of our democracy the ‘free press’ was all that stood between greedy corporate interests, government corruption and you and I. While many newspapers were controlled by wealthy individuals such as William Randolph Hearst, who influenced the content of the news in his papers, a kind of journalistic ‘Hippocratic oath’ seemed to prevail across the country as reporters and publishers at small papers usually chose to pursue the truth in reporting.

Local papers, TV stations and radio outlets were owned mostly by local individuals with an interest in their community. That began to change as a powerful institution known as the Council On Foreign Relations gained power and the trend toward total corporate media control rapidly accelerated during the Bush-era with media consolidation.

Suddenly the old rule that one corporation could not own all of the town’s news outlets was gone. Companies like Clear Channel Communications suddenly began to buy up every radio station, TV outlet and newspaper in major markets, effectively controlling everything that people read, watched and heard. The pattern of media consolidation has increased during the last eight years to the point that now only a few corporations control the news that we watch.

He who owns the media, controls the media. With such powerful platforms they are able to drown out independent media and control public opinion and government policy. There can be no freedom without freedom of the press and there can be no freedom of the press if only a few powerful corporations own it.

What Liberal or Right Wing Media? It’s Just Corporate Media.
Who really controls the media? Is the so-called ‘liberal media’ that the’ right’ complains about controlled by Hollywood and liberal special interests? Is Fox News controlled by the Republican Party? If you believe any of these generalizations you are dead wrong and the truth will shock you.

Major multinational corporations, Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and Saudi Princes, all hell-bent on protecting their own interests, choose what you will see on the nightly news and trick you into believing it is unbiased reporting. As we see below all the major news outlets, regardless of what they make you believe, contributed heavily to George W. Bush in both 2000 and 2004, so any argument that they are controlled by liberals evaporates. In this case they all supported the candidate that promised to allow consolidation of multiple media companies.

The very news stories that you are fed by the mainstream media are manipulated to mirror the public relations campaigns of companies that operate nuclear plants, sprawling theme parks that gobble up wetlands, defense contractors, oil companies and even Saudi Princes.
Remember the old ‘Outer Limits’ TV shows where the announcer says “We control everything you see and hear, the vertical, the horizontal,” etc? The corporate controlled news media controls all you see and hear.

Below,  are the top twenty media corporations in the U.S. according to mediaowners.com All but two, #18 and #19, are not members of the Council On Foreign Relations.

1. Time Warner Inc. 2. Walt Disney Company 3. Viacom Inc. 4. News Corporation 5. CBS Corporation 6. Cox Enterprises 7. NBC Universal 8. Gannett Company, Inc. 9. Clear Channel Communications Inc. 10. Advance Publications, Inc.

11. Tribune Company 12. McGraw-Hill Companies 13. Hearst Corporation 14. Washington Post Company 15. The New York Times Company 16. E.W. Scripps Co. 17. McClatchy Company 18. Thomson Corporation 19. Freedom Communications, Inc. 20. A&E Television Networks

Question: Who Owns The Media?
Answer:  Industry Giants, Saudi Princes and Australian Robber Barons.
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Here is a breakdown of the “Liberal” media ownership By Corporations:
..
GENERAL ELECTRIC, –Not Just Light Bulbs Anymore
General Electric – NBC (In 2000  they donated 1.1 million to George W Bush for his election campaign)

_TV Holdings:
 •    NBC: Owns outright 13 stations and many affiliates, Market penetration: 28% of US households.
 •   NBC Network News: Owns The Today Show, Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, Meet the Press, Dateline.
 •   CNBC business network, MSNBC 24-hour cable and Internet news service (co-owned by both NBC and Microsoft); Court TV (co-owned with Time Warner), Bravo (50%), A&E (25%), History Channel (25%).
The MS in MSNBC stands for Microsoft, Bill Gate’s Microsoft donated 2.4 million in 2000 to get George W Bush elected.

_Other Holdings:
 •   GE Consumer Electronics and Household Products and components used in military electronics..
 •   GE Power Systems, which makes turbines for nuclear reactors, wind turbines, “clean” coal technology.
 •   GE Plastics: produces military hardware for fighter jets, ships and nuclear power equipment.
 •   GE Transportation Systems: manufactures engines and diesel and electric locomotives.

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WESTINGHOUSE / CBS INC. –  Not Just Fridges Anymore.
Westinghouse Electric Company, part of the large Nuclear Utilities Business Group of British Nuclear Fuels.
Which is Headed By Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group. A group with very strong ties to the Bush Administration.

_TV Holdings:
 •   CBS: Owns outright 14 stations and over 200 affiliates in the US.
 •   CBS Network News: 60 minutes, 48 hours, CBS Evening News, CBS Morning News.
•   Country Music Television, The Nashville Network.
•   Group W Satellite Communications.
Other Holdings:
 •   Westinghouse Electric Company: provides services to the nuclear power industry including owning 4 nuclear plants, waste disposal and transport.

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 DISNEY – ABC Not just cartoon characters, ‘Worlds’ or family movies anymore.
(Donated $640,000 to George W Bush’s 2000 political campaign)

_TV Holdings:
 •   ABC: includes 10 stations outright, many affiliates, Penetration in the market: 24% of US households.
•   ABC Network News: Prime Time Live, Nightline, 20/20, Good Morning America.
•   ESPN, Lifetime Television (50%), as well as smaller holdings in A&E, History Channel and E!
•   Disney Channel/Disney Television, Touchtone Television.

_Other Major Media Holdings.
 •   Miramax, Touchtone Pictures.
•   Major Magazines: Jane, Los Angeles Magazine, Discover.
•   Three recording labels, twelve major local newspapers.
•   Hyperion books.
•   Infoseek search engine.

Major shareholders include Sid R. Bass, oil and gas baron.
Disney’s environmental and social record: Source wikipedia.org

The company has been accused of human rights violations regarding the working conditions in factories that produce their merchandise. Numerous environmental groups in Florida and California have criticized development procedures used in building theme parks including damage to wetlands.

An environmental management plan for a zone of Great Guana Cay, in the Abaco Islands, criticized Disney for poor management of a 90-acre (36.4 ha) tract of the island. Disney partially developed, but then abandoned the place, which was to have been a cruise ship resort called Treasure Island. The report, by the University of Miami and the College of the Bahamas, blames Disney for leaving hazardous materials, electrical transformers, and fuel tanks, and for introducing invasive alien plants and insects that threaten the natural flora and fauna of the island.
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TIME-WARNER TBS – AOL (In 2000 they donated 1.6 million to George Bush’s political campaign)
“Time, Not Just On The Coffee Table Anymore”.
America Online (AOL) acquired Time Warner which was the largest merger in corporate history.

_TV Holdings:
 •   CNN, HBO, Cinemax, TBS Superstation, Turner Network Television, Turner Classic Movies, Warner Brothers Television, Cartoon Network, Sega Channel, TNT, Comedy Central.
•   Largest cable system owner with an estimated 13 million households.

_Media Holdings:
 •   HBO Productions, Warner Home Video, New Line Cinema, Castle Rock, Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera.
•   Music: Atlantic, Elektra, Rhino, Sire, Warner Bros. Records, EMI.
 •   Thirty three major magazines including Time, Sports Illustrated, People Magazine, In Style, Fortune, The Book of the Month Club, Entertainment Weekly, Life Magazne, DC Comics, MAD Magazine.

_Other major corporation Holdings:
•   Sports Teams and Wrestling: The Atlanta Braves, The Atlanta Hawks, World Championship Wrestling.
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NEWS CORPORATION LTD. / FOX NETWORKS (Rupert Murdoch, numerous donations. On Board of Directors of Phillip Morris, Phillip Morris Donated 2.9 million to Bush’s campaign.
Why did Australian Rupert Murdoch forsake his native country and become a U.S. citizen? Reportedly it was because he could save on taxes and start over in virgin territory after leaving behind so much scorched earth in the Australian economy as he laid waste to his business opponents and bought up media outlets. Or perhaps it was just so he could get around foreign media ownership laws. (Which no longer exist.)

Does a Saudi billionaire actually have the power to control the news on the Fox network, of which he is a part owner?

_Major Television Holdings:
 •    Fox Television: includes 22 major and many affiliate stations, Penetration into more than 60% of US households.
•    Fox International: extensive worldwide cable and satellite networks include British Sky Broadcasting (40%); VOX, Germany (49.9%); Canal Fox, Latin America; FOXTEL, Australia (50%); STAR TV, Asia, IskyB, India; Bahasa Programming Ltd., Indonesia (50%); and News Broadcasting, Japan (80%), major owner of DirecTV.
•   The Golf Channel (33%).

_Other Major Media Holdings:
 •   Twentieth Century Fox, Fox Searchlight.
•   132 major newspapers (113 in Australia alone) including the New York Post, the London Times and The Australian.
•   Owns 25 magazines including TV Guide and The Weekly Standard.
•   Owns Harper Collins books.
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_Other major corporation holdings around the world:
 •    Sports: LA Dodgers, LA Kings, LA Lakers, National Rugby League.
•   Ansett Australia airline, Ansett New Zealand airlines.
•    Rupert Murdoch is on the Board of Directors of Philip Morris, a major Bush donor.
It’s no surprise that corporate robber baron Rupert Murdoch is a major Bush supporter, but who else owns Fox News?
•   Prince al-Walid bin Talal owns 5.5% of Fox News.  Prince al- Walid bin Talal stated recently that he used his influence to change Fox’s headlines. During the recent riots in Muslim neighborhoods in France Fox was using the term “Muslim Riots” to describe rioting by Muslim youths and Prince bin Talal claims that called Fox News had them change the title of the story to “Youth Riots”.
Source. worldnetdaily.com [Image at left.]

 •   In another instance, where supposedly conservative Fox News should have been up in arms, was the deal by a United Arab Emirates holding company to buy U.S. ports. Suddenly Fox went from being against the deal to very supportive of a deal that would have put US container ports in foreign hands.
A U.A.E. sovereign wealth fund also owns major shares of Fox.

The “good ole boys” that hang on every word that Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly utters might not be so happy when they hear who is whispering in their idol’s ears.
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The Council On Foreign Relations and What It Has To Do With Corporate Control Of The News CFR Seal.
What do Dan Rather, Barbara Walters, Jim Lehrer, Rupert Murdoch, Tom Brokaw and the late William F. Buckley have in common? They are all members of the CFR, The Council On Foreign Relations. The stated goal of the CFR is to manipulate the News to bring about a new world order or corporate control of everything. This is not some weird conspiracy theory, it is stated in their original charter.
Who else belongs to the CFR, Disney’s Michael Eisner and ABC’s Thomas Murphy, Tom Johnson, CEO of CNN, Time Warner’s Gerald Levine, and many, many more media CEO’s who have merged their empires under the CFR’s guidance.

Freedom of the press is vital to our democracy. We need to prevent things like media consolidation, where one company is allowed to own all the news outlets in any given market. Speak up and stop the corporate robber barons and the CFR from taking that right away from us.

[Sorry to say, but the horse is already out of the barn, the time for prevention has passed. Modern freedom of choice really is part of the milieu we find ourselves in: a slow, social, economic, environmental and democratic death by 1000 cuts. Mr Larry]