Media Capture

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Media capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which govt, private and/or business interests significantly influence the media's publication decisions.

"So long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible"

Robert W. McChesneyWikipedia-W.svg

"The War You Don’t See", John Pilger (2011)
"We journalists... have to be brave enough to defy those who seek our collusion in selling their latest bloody adventure in someone else's country... That means always challenging the official story, however patriotic that story may appear, however seductive and insidious it is. For propaganda relies on us in the media to aim its deceptions not at a far away country but at you at home."

FixMeNote: this video is also available on Vimeo, but it won't play anywhere else: {{#ev:vimeo|67739294|350}}. Buy the DVD here: http://johnpilger.com/dvds/

Articles

  • What Elon Musk and George Soros can teach us about media credibility. After a few negative headlines about his electric car company, Tesla, Elon Musk took exception to an investigation by Reveal, website for the Center for Investigative Reporting, into the number of unreported injuries. Linking to a report disclaiming the negative headlines, the PayPal founder and space explorer tweeted: “Holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them.” How, for example, would these voters rank the credibility of last week’s Daily Mail front page which accused billionaire George Soros of funding a “plot to subvert Brexit”? No one can deny the existence of a 26-page report detailing a six-month PR plan ahead of a key parliamentary debate in Oct. Nor that Soros, a survivor of Nazi-occupied Hungary, has used more than $18bn (£13,5bn) of his fortune to fund many projects, including those he considers pro-democratic. But the issue is one of perception. The Mail accused Soros of being an “unaccountable nabob” who is “undermining democracy” by supporting a campaign “putting up billboards around the country calling for a second vote”. The Mail, of course, was exercising its democratic right by proclaiming its “belief that it is simply wrong for a foreign billionaire to exert his muscle” funding a campaign group in the UK. Leave to one side, for now, the non-domiciled status of its owner Lord Rothermere. Earlier this year, Soros told fellow plutocrats and politicians in Davos that it took a “real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called ‘the freedom of mind’”. He called Facebook and Google – the digital giants sucking advertising from all media including the Daily Mail and Reveal – a “menace to society”. The Guardian.
  • Mar.22.2018: The Washington Post: Watchdog or stenographer to power? Like the majority of the US press, the Washington Post supported the march to war in Iraq in 2003. The coverage was "strikingly one-sided at times". Shockingly, the Washington Post argued in 2016 that US whistle-blower Edward Snowden, whom the paper had used as a source for stories on the US govt's vast electronic surveillance programmes, should stand trial on espionage charges. Its reasoning was that his leaks likely endangered "national security" — the same justification given by editors at the New York Times for spiking journalist James Risen's reports on the US govt's vast domestic surveillance programme in 2004. It turns out the govt's crying wolf about "national security" and interfering in the so-called free press isn't just something that happened when journalists smoked in newsrooms and called sources from payphones. What all this shows is the Washington Post's coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate was, in reality, small islands of crusading, dissenting journalism in a sea of stenography to established power. Worryingly, the sole owner of the Washington Post today is Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO and main stakeholder. Beyond the obvious concerns about corporate influence, the Amazon link is troubling because the internet giant signed a $600m contract with the CIA in 2014 to provide it with a computing "cloud". Ian Sinclair, Ian Sinclair's Blog.
  • Jan.23.2018: UKIP's unwarranted fanfare is mass media manipulation before our eyes. Can somebody please tell me why UKIP should be literally all over the news, on every political TV and radio show, and splashed on every newspaper?!? Look at the shiny shiny. The supposed ‘trusted’ news-pedlars are the ones quite literally setting the agenda: telling British people what priorities and concerns should occupy their minds. Alex McNamara, The London Economic.
  • Jan.23.2018: Fake News Attack Is More Fake News. The UK, home to our free and fearless press, ranks a lowly 40th on the World Press Freedom Index. And there’s no spinning your way out of that one, press people. Tim Fenton, Zelo Street.