Do you trust what the media tells you?


"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."
- C.S. Lewis


At the link you will find a great Video as a public service from me to you....

http://wimp.com/thelies/

NOT ON YOUR LIFE.

BUT...

If you watch carefully what they are putting on television you can know what the shadow government is up to and what they are planning next. You can even predict what countries we will be invading next, where they are getting money for their secret black operations, and how.

If something big happens that attracts all the attention of the news media you can be sure that is just a distraction. They are doing something even bigger behind your back.

How much can you trust the media? How much should you trust them? Many news broadcasts contain what is termed as “Fake News”, these are Public Relations videos (or Video News Releases) created either by corporations or governments featuring a specific subject. The idea of these videos is to promote a certain product or a specific idea (political or otherwise).

News networks are sponsored to show these videos as news. More VNR’s located here.
http://www.thethoughts.co.uk/thoughts/do-you-trust-the-media/

Not 100%, some more than others.

It's easier for me to say who I don't trust. I wouldn't believe anything Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and their ilk spew. Their agendas are for spreading hatred, fear, and the Republican party. I'd rather listen to more open-minded souls.

I prefer MSNBC or CNN to Fox, most definitely.

Who was it that said, "It's news if I say it's news"? There's a whole lot of that going on in the media, they can make something news by cramming it down our throats while failing to mention more important items.

So, the media tells us what they want us to know. Trust or not, possibly buy into their philosophies, that is the question.

On Fake News and Other Societal Woes
Noam Chomsky interviewed by Irene
NoOne's Listening, December 7, 2005

Interviewer: Hi Professor Chomsky.
Chomsky: Speaking.

Interviewer: This is Irene from No One's Listening, but in honor of your appearance on the show today we're entitling it Noam's listening.

Chomsky: Oh, well, that's nice.

Interviewer: So our show today is about video news releases.

Chomsky: Video news releases?

Interviewer: Video news releases and fake news. I imagine you don't have time to watch much tv since you've written 90 books but I think the reason you'd be so good for this show is because you could give a historical analysis of the print media.

Chomsky: Well there was a period, in the mid-19th century, that's the period of the freest press, both in England and in the US. And it's quite interesting to look back at it. Over the years, that's declined. It declined for two basic reasons. One reason is the increased capital that was required to run a competitive press. And as capital requirements increased, that of course lead to a more corporatized media. The other effect is advertisement. In the 19th century, the United States had something kind of approximating a market system. Now we have nothing like a market--they may teach you [that] in economics courses, but that's not the way it works. And one of the signs of the decline of the market is advertisement. So if you have a real market you don't advertise: you just give information. For example, there are corners of the economy that do run like markets--for example stock markets. If you have ten shares of General Motors that you want to sell, you don't put up an ad on television with a sexy model holding up the ten shares saying "ask your broker if this is good for you; it's good for me," or something like that. What you do is you sell it at the market price. If you had a market for cars, toothpaste, or whatever, lifestyle drugs, you would do the same thing. GM would put up a brief notice saying here's the information about our models. Well, you've seen television ads, so I don't have to tell you how it works. The idea is to delude and deceive people with imagery. And the same has happened to the print media. Take the New York Times for example. They have something called the news hole. When the editors lay out tomorrow's newspapers, the first thing they do is the important things - they put the ads around. Then they have a little bit left that's called the news hole, and they stick little things there. Quite apart from that the media are just big corporations and of course represent the interests of their owners, their markets, which are advertisers, and for the elite newspapers, more or less the managerial class, the educated population they deal with. The end result is that you get a very narrow perspective of what the world is like.

Interviewer: Well then what would be the alternative. That's where I'm searching.

Chomsky: The alternative would be a free press. It's not hard to imagine, there actually was one in the mid-nineteenth century. So that would mean a press that isn't reliant on massive capital concentration, corporate ownership, that is not reliant on advertising for its revenue, and would involve engaged people who are interested in understanding the world and participating in a reasoned discussion about what it should be like. I mean that's not inconceivable.

read the rest at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20051207.htm

I trust them as much as I trust The Onion.

They are run by the same guys who sell toothpaste

Bush secretly flew to Iraq a few weeks back to spend 2.5 hours pretending to serve a fake, inedible plastic turkey to that handful of carefully selected, prescreened soldiers for that Thanksgiving PR stunt that will forever embarrass anyone with any sense of decency and pride -- which is, according to Bush's instant surge in the polls after the photo op, fewer and fewer of us.Naomi Klein, The Nation, January 8, 2004

Joe the Plumber gets called out by a fed up news reporter.

http://www.wimp.com/calledout/

King's October 11, 2003 news story --Many soldiers, same letter.Newspapers around U.S. get identical missives from Iraq -- and numerous articles about the letters home have been carried by news services and bloggers on the internet.

WASHINGTON -- Letters from hometown soldiers describing their successes rebuilding Iraq have been appearing in newspapers across the country as U.S. public opinion on the mission sours.
And all the letters are the same.
A Gannett News Service search found identical letters from different soldiers with the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment, also known as "The Rock," in 11 newspapers, including Snohomish, Wash.
The Olympian received two identical letters signed by different hometown soldiers: Spc. Joshua Ackler and Spc. Alex Marois, who is now a sergeant. The paper declined to run either because of a policy not to publish form letters.
The five-paragraph letter talks about the soldiers' efforts to re-establish police and fire departments, and build water and sewer plants in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, where the unit is based.
"The quality of life and security for the citizens has been largely restored, and we are a large part of why that has happened," the letter reads. ... It describes people waving at passing troops and children running up to shake their hands and say thank you.
It's not clear who wrote the letter or organized sending it to soldiers' hometown papers.
Six soldiers reached by GNS directly or through their families said they agreed with the letter's thrust. But none of the soldiers said he wrote it, and one said he didn't even sign it.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Letters_home

I trust them about as much as I trust OBAMA & the DEMS he chose to surround himslef with. I hope he sleeps with one eye opened.

How absolutely Christian of you, not surprisingly.