Fox News is in the news again, as it tightens the noose even further on its local outlets and broadcasters. Its goal is a monolithic right-wing spin machine. It owns stations all across the country, in some cases even two stations in the same city. Its stations are more and more being forced to slant the news towards the right. For specific information about Fox News and its line up of conservative hosts who have predominantly right-wing guests, see the FreePress website here. To sign a petition against Fox News' effort to centralize all programming so that it reflects a monolithic voice that leaves out local views, see here.
Of course, Fox isn't the only corporate media giant controlled by right-wing interests. MSNBC host Keith Olberman revealed recently the pressure his show is under to present an almost uniformly right-wing face to the American public. As quoted in an article on FAIR's website here, Olbermann said the following on October 25 when speaking with comedian Al Franken:
"You were good enough to come on this newscast with me late in the summer of 2003. It was August or September. And by coincidence, either the next day or the day before, Janeane Garofalo had been a guest on the newscast. And I got called into a vice president‘s office here and told, "Hey, we don't mind you interviewing these guys, but should you really have put liberals on, on consecutive nights?"
Olbermann's show had a total of 9 guests over 3 days, 2 of whom were liberals. That means that 7 out of 9 were conservatives. So MSNBC is portraying a skewed picture of American thought to all of its viewers, who may be deceived into thinking that these right-wing perspectives are the norm of American life. If you want to do something about the way corporate ownership of the media is distorting the information you receive, petition the FCC to demand public hearings throughout the country on media consolidation.
And if that weren't enough, it seems that the covert government propaganda that we thought had been exposed and gone to a rapid demise is still alive and well. Kerry and Lautenberg in the Senate proposed a strong bill that would have required continuous notification throughout a government-prepared video news release (VNR) that the "news report" was in fact government propaganda. That bill was strongly opposed by the media, who claimed it would interfere with their local rights to broadcast. Apparently, they think they have a right to broadcast deceptive reports to the public that fail to identify their source. A news report on a government function that is prepared by the government carries very different credibility than one prepared by an independent journalist. The result of industry lobbying is a spineless bill that the industry now loves. According to the AlterNet article (see link below):
According to to TV Week, Cochran summarized the effect of these changes as: "The bill clears the way for TV news operations to continue using snippets of government-produced VNRs for [video footage] in their own stories, as they do currently, leaving the issue of how to identify the material up to station news personnel."
In other words, it appears that the result of the bill is business as usual--covert propaganda without any required disclosure. For more on this story, see this posting on AlterNet of "The Fake End of Fake News."
If you want the news you watch to be independently produced and not a piece of covert government propaganda intended to manipulate your views, join the Center for Media and Government's petition drive to ask Congress to stand up to corporate media and government propagandists on this issue. We can pressure Congress to make the weak bill a real bill. Let's do it! Here's the link for speaking out on this issue.