I've been interested in tracking our national conversation over the past few weeks and in understanding why Americans have been subjected to so much really stupid stuff in the papers and TV.
The track followed to make this right-wing noise into a 'news' story that everyone is forced to cover or else is WAY more interesting than anything in the story itself.
1) Republican party operatives 'find the story' on 10/29/08. (GatewayPundit, FreeRepublic, BlogsForJohnMcCain etc).
2) On 10/30/08, Rupert Murdoch's London Times posts to the WWW and physically prints it. We've made a legitimate 'newsprint'. Sometimes Rupert runs stuff thru his Australia outlet if it needs a few more hours to percolate.
3) The Unification Church outlets (Korean 'Moonies') put it on the UPI wire. This feeds their newspapers in the Mideast, Orient, & Washington DC. Sun Myung Moon & Murdoch rarely disagree on anything, and their media outlets mirror each other's reporting.
4) Drudge Report links to story 2 or 3 if tipped off, as he was in this case and the one with the backwards B in the cheek; otherwise, he links to 5
5) Next it hits My Way News-AP and Breitbart.com, followed by Reuters, AP-Google, AP-Yahoo!, McClatchy, etc. What's really, really sad is to find the Wall Street Journal in this loop now...
6) Once on all of these wire services, Fox News hands out talking points and covers it. For 'breaking news', they'll give it to Hannity or O'Reilly; otherwise, it's a screen scrawl for a while and then a featured story.
SO...when I googled "Obama aunt Boston" this morning, I found 1765 news stories, 3480 blog entries, and 213,000 total general web hits. That poor girl!
Once Murdoch decides to have an opinion on something, he monopolizes our national conversation. Why do you think he became an American citizen? (Hint: It certainly wasn't love of the American free press, and it rhymes with 'holler'!!!) We have manufactured a story that everyone must now cover, even if there's no 'news' in the 'news story', & those who want to talk about it can complain if others refuse to discuss the noise. I believe the term used is 'liberal bias' if the propaganda isn't treated as a news-worthy current event, which is rather silly since liberals and progressives have gotten most of their news on-line for a decade or more. What conservatives call the MSM reflect the interests of their corporate owners and most closely resemble any other closely-held monopolies; the only TV news left is on PBS and CSpan.
The propaganda problem isn't as bad on the left since most gave up on MSM, which is controlled by only 7 corporations, a long time ago. The on-line rumor-mongerers have mostly been drummed out as advertising revenue grows with a good reputation. Most progressives and young people, as I already said, have gotten their news on line for a decade.
The reason that Bill O'Reilly & friends are losing to MS-NBC, people like CNN's Blitzer, Brown, and AC360 is that they've finally stopped letting idiots set the agenda & have started running news again. Welcome back, news guys: literate people missed you! We're finally rid of Glen Beck, so maybe we can finally rid ourselves of Nancy Grace, Lou Dobbs, and the rest of those who are merely polluting the airwaves.
For anyone interested in tracking stories like these around the world, there's a computer program monitoring the news run by the European common market commission at:
http://press.jrc.it/NewsBrief/clusteredition/en/latest.html
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