Merry Christmas and Media Consolidation!

I wish all of you a Merry, joyful, peaceful, warm and loving Christmas. Forget the presents and remember the loving. Don't forget to hug as many people as you can. Give them the cheapest and most exclusive present YOUR SMILE AND YOUR WARMTH. Be kind, try not to lose your temper, meditate and just be grateful, grateful, grateful!!!

Okay now why media consolidation? Cause the FCC is at it again. They want to let the only 5 big corporations gobble up more airwaves. Please do something about it if you care for our nation and our democracy. Do you like what news media consolidation has done to us? Think about Iraq, Katrina and all the lies you have been told by people who appear to be journalists but are ADVOCATES of something! Here is an article I wrote a while back for an international newspaper but before you read it, Please go to

www.stopmediaconsolidation. com


By Patricia Gras

The freedom of the press gives journalists the right to be honest, fair and courageous in gathering and interpreting information. However, many people are criticising the American press for no longer doing their job.

According to a survey of 300 journalists by the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review, about a quarter surveyed said they avoided newsworthy stories or softened the tone of their stories to benefit the interests of their news organisations. Forty-one per cent said they practiced either one or both of these practices routinely.

Six companies now control almost all of the radio and television stations and newspapers, allowing them to be able to dictate what Americans hear as news. Those six companies have become huge conglomerates by combining different media types under their roof. A good example to this is CBS which is owned by Viacom. Viacom owns television stations in 36 American cities, along with MTV, BET, UPN, Nickelodeon, VH1, Showtime and TNN. Viacom also owns well over 100 radio stations in 40 cities. They own Simon and Schuster, which publishes books.

Those large companies reach different types of viewers and have the chance to spread their editorial budgets across several different media, so that the same journalist can report for a media firm's newspaper, website, broadcast TV station, cable TV channel and radio station.

As a result when covering a news story the perspectives are limited and the diversity of expression is gone. Viewers do not see different points of views from different journalists as they should from a media that is free and versatile. The internet only accelerates the combination process. It provides much of the incentive for firms to become large conglomerates because it offers tremendous cost savings compared to firms with a smaller arsenal of media properties.

Former assistant district attorney for New York City, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently interviewed on Houston PBS TV, says, "The news departments have become corporate profit centres". Television news has now become an avenue for entertainment and not information. Kennedy says the stations no longer have an obligation to the public, it is to their shareholders and that obligation is met by increasing viewership -- "appealing to the lowest common denominator".

Robert McChensney author of The problem of the Media says that corporate cutbacks have allowed commercialism to penetrate journalism and the pressure to shape stories to suit advertisers is obvious. "Commercialism also pushes journalists to make content directed at demographics considered desirable by media owner and big ticket advertisers. The notion of journalism as a public service institution aimed at the entire population has vanished".

The enormity of the problem of our media today can be best viewed by looking at the decrease in the number of the big media companies in US. Ben H Bagdikian, author of The Media Monopoly, gives an insight into the numbers: "In 1983, fifty corporations dominated most of every mass medium and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. In 1987, the fifty companies had shrunk to twenty nine...In 1990, the twenty nine had shrunk to twenty three...In 1997, the biggest firms numbered ten and involved the $19 billion Disney-ABC deal, at the time the biggest media merger ever... In 2000 AOL Time Warner's $350 billion merged corporation was more than 1,000 times larger (than the biggest deal of 1983)".

Congressman Bernard Sanders said in a 2005 floor statement to the House leader, "I am increasingly alarmed by the culture of censorship that seems to be developing in this country. This censorship is being conducted by the corporate owners of our increasingly consolidated, less diverse, media. And it is being done by the government. This result is an insidious chill of free expression on our airwaves".

The goal of a journalist is to tell the story of the diversity of the human experience boldly, even when it is unpopular to do so. Many unpopular stories are never broadcast. Whether it is the news director, the head of the company or in the case of wartime, the United States military, journalists are being censored. During the Iraqi War in 2003, journalists were allowed to be embedded with the United States military units so the real story of war could be told.

However, according to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, the military had strict rules for these journalists. The media in Iraq were to be briefed as to what information may not be broadcast because of its sensitivity to military operations. For security reasons, commanders were allowed to impose news embargos and temporarily block communication transmissions.

There is much criticism of the way the media has portrayed the war in Iraq. Robert Scheer of Los Angeles Times says: "The media has been sucker-punched completely by this administration". John Burns of the New York Times says, "We failed the American public by being insufficiently critical about elements of the administration's plan to go to war".

Whether it is the giant conglomerates or the United States military, or themselves, many journalists face censorship in some form.