Our Media is Controlled

On December 16, 2010 Daniel Ellsberg along with 131 others protested the war in Afghanistan in front of the White House and were arrested and carried away. Has anyone seen this on the corporate 'mainstream media'?

U.S. District Judge Henry Hudson, a George W. Bush appointee, was the judge that ruled the individual mandate provision in Obama health care reform that requires everyone have health care insurance “exceeds the constitutional boundaries of congressional power” and ordered that it be removed from the health care reform law. This was widely reported. What was not reported was that he is a major shareholder in a political messaging firm that gets paid to argue that health care reform's individual mandate is unconstitutional. Since 2003 Hudson has earned between $32,000 and $108,000 in dividends from his shares in the firm (federal rules only require judges to report ranges of income).

Our mainstream media is controlled. Whereas we rarely get outright lies we frequently do not get the entire truth. What is particularly concerning is that the decisions regarding what gets reported does not appear to be made at a local level. It's not the decisions of individual editorial boards. So who is controlling our information and is their overall agenda as conservative as it seems?

To answer that I think we need only follow the money. 20 years ago media outlets were owned by over 40 different parties. Today it's 6 corporations each controlled by only one or two individuals. For the most part these individuals are overwhelmingly ultra-conservative corporatists.

Of course it is impossible to control all the news. And it would be unwise to even try. But select events do in fact get blacked out - universally as regards the mainstream media - and THAT is pretty darn scary.