When your product is ideology, those people engineering the ‘wrong’ product for your owners, shareholders, and relatedly involved businesses are quietly or openly gotten rid of, in large part.

An excellent point, well expressed.

I would like to discuss this subject with you further, maybe even to collaborate on an article. If you are interested, please contact me: ralph@newsfare.com

Alternatively, you could send a message via my weblog, http://newsfare.com

Thank you.

Download this flyer and drop it in mailboxes in your neighbourhood.

NOTE from a Postal worker.

Do NOT drop un-postmarked items in a mailbox.

EVER.

Mailboxes are a private link between the US Postal Service and the customer. Nobody else is supposed to touch them or put things in them.

EVER.

Put handbills on a doorstep. Tuck them in the door somehow. Do NOT leave one in the mailbox. If it can be traced to you, you can be charged with mail fraud. Usually, you will get a warning to knock it off. The first time. Repeating it will land you in court, and you WILL NOT WIN.

I have been there when customrs complain about people dropping things off non-postal items in their mailbox. ONE complaint is all it takes for the USPS to notify you to knock it off–OR ELSE.

Don’t like that? Too bad. And don’t bring up the I’m-a-taxpayer-so-I-can-do-what-I-want bullshit. Your taxes don’t pay for USPS operations (In fact, y’all owe us several BILLION dollars–long story). The only thing any of you pay for is having one particular mail piece delivered to a particular address. It’s called postage. You can complain about the service you’re getting. But you can’t complain about this.

Take it to a judge if you think you can drop off whatever you want in a mailbox. See if you win. You won’t.

El Cid at 16:

The major news media simply are… structurally organized to oppose liberal and progressive policies and philosophies. This is not some conspiracy theory… It is a business model — and their business is to propagate an idea of reality to Americans.

El Cid, I believe you are very much on the right track here. Could you elaborate a bit on the “business model” to which you are referring?

I’m guessing you are pointing to ad revenue as the driving force behind all decisions made by the corporate media. I’m guessing that by “propagating an idea of reality” you refer to a viewpoint from which money and consumerism appear to be the most significant goals to which humans can aspire. I’m guessing that you observe Republicans enthusiastically cheering that same world view, and cooperating with the media apparatus in an unprecedented way, in order to increase profits for the people who write the checks for both their media enterprises and their political enterprises.

Comment?

There are a lot of people who have studied this in-depth, many of whom not even out of a critique of the content by the major news media.

Here is the simple way of asking about the functions of the major news media within a business model that necessarily presses them toward a ‘conservative’ world view.

First, let’s assume for just a moment’s simplicity that a ‘liberal’ reality portrayal would be one which makes it *more* likely that government authority is used in favor of ordinary members of society instead of for the most powerful and wealthiest members of society (including individuals, families, and corporations).

Let’s assume a ‘conservative’ portrayal of reality would therefore tend toward the reverse — making it *less* likely that government authority is used for ordinary members of society versus the wealthiest and most powerful.

The “business” model of major news media consists of convincing both individual and institutional investors (i.e., ‘partner’ corporations) that (a) they can attract and deliver the ‘eyeballs’ necessary to prove that a certain population is watching, or listening, or reading; and that (b) the view of reality portrayed will somehow influence the ‘eyeballs’ behavior in general ways which *help* rather than *hinder* the material and power interests of those individual and institutional investors.

Note that (a) and (b) can conflict. So, while some people happily watch Fox News which could sing for decades about How Great Everything Is in Iraq, there are a lot of people who aren’t going to tune into or pay attention to a news product if they *feel* like it’s 100% not reality.

It’s a business model which promises not only investors, but an entire subset of the wealthiest and most powerful members of a society, ‘We won’t challenge you, not if we can avoid it.’

Now, let’s take the opposite view.

Let’s say that a major news corporation took the opposite view — that they would side with the ordinary members of a society and portray reality in such a way as to favor their interests over the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful.

And let’s further assume that the company directors simply don’t give in at all to any begging, pleading, or threatening by any advertiser, investor, regulator, or partner corporation.

What might happen? Well, for a while they might have some viewers.

But advertising would be pretty hard to come by: after all, even with lots of viewers, I know that I as a corporate CEO wouldn’t want to give a lot of money which might make it more likely that billions of dollars worth of taxes or regulations were going to fall onto my head.

Investors too would face risks. They not only invest in the rebel media corporation; they invest in other corporations which also might face tax and regulatory and wage pressures from the news coming out of this news corporation.

And so on, and so forth. No conspiracy, no magic, no irrationality — just the simple pressures of concentrated power, wealth, and interest.

Really — do you think that people who continually create, manage, and employ the awesome power of advertising and public relations have failed to sit down and think about the impact of the major News Media on their business and financial environment?

What, are we children? Are we to imagine that somehow by perfect accident we have teleported into a society in which the wealthiest and greediest groups are incompetent bunglers who are less clever about influencing their nation’s citizens and voters than are unpaid bloggers?

A good antidote for liberals, lefties, and progressives to improve the quality and reality of news portrayals without invoking the inevitable ‘conspiracy theorist’ slur is to take the ‘News Business’ model seriously.

These cynical journalists and editors and publishers and anchors always talk down to us liberals etc. as though we just don’t understand the ‘Business’ of news.

Fine. They want to talk ‘Business’? Then let’s now talk about the News Product they produce.

And how do people protect themselves from other faulty Consumer Products? Do they accept the excuses of the manufacturers that their products are shoddy because, well, you just don’t understand how complicated our business is?

Any possible review of the News Products produced with regard to the leadup to the invasion & occupation and Iraq will find that those News Products were shoddy, incomplete, inferior, and contrary to their product claims.

No excuses from reporters, journalists, editors, publishers, etc. are needed — we don’t need to know their mystical process and environment for creating shoddy & inferior news products in order to know that the products are shoddy and inferior.

A DVD player which won’t play DVD’s is a failed product, no matter the fascinating process and tough circumstances the manufacturers found themselves in.

Without the magical intervention of an individual or few with nearly limitless resources to not only launch a major news media corporation which favors the interests of ordinary citizens over concentrated power & wealth, but with enough resources and spending willpower to buy off all the other opposition — publishers, distributors, TV networks, satellite & cable distributors, partner corporations…

…without such magical interventions, we find ourselves much as we did in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when liberals, progressives, trade unionists, ethnic groups, farmers, etc. all knew clearly that the ‘company newspapers’ were against them, so they published their own.

And they sold more papers, too. But then production prices went up and it turned out that advertising paid a lot more than subscribers.

And it was not just religious broadcasters but labor unions which took radio from being an odd experiment to being a serious commercial medium, at which point it was regulated in favor of private investors.

Either we on the liberal (i.e., ordinary citizen) side of things take responsibly the charge not just of reviewing other corporations’ news products (i.e., the Consumer Reports of news) but of collectively producing an alternative news product, we will ever be reacting, complaining, wondering why ‘they’ just refuse to see reality.

Again, it can be very hard to convince people to see reality when their job, and their company, depends in the long run on their *not* seeing it.

No matter whether it’s (R’s) or (D’s) in office, the liberal view favoring ordinary citizens will be under continual attack by those who would lose from it. Any other circumstance would be surprising, unlikely, and magical.

From the elite of the quill profession to the sometimes cartoonish talking heads of T.V., as in from Dowd to Hannity, the media of America do scant little to educate the public.

Collectively they behave as if they were youth taking alternating peeps through a hole in the wall of the boys and/or girls gym locker room. Espying a calf or a buttock they clamor and jostle to press their eye to the peephole and set off en masse to repeat gossipy chatter as news. This game, which is passed off as a profession, is today so ingrained that there is little reasoned analysis and the public neither wants nor expects any.

(excerpt: “I Had a Dream” cognitorex blogspot)

We need to take back the media one step at a time. I used to not watch or read local media and then I decided what I was doing is giving it to the Rethugs, letting them win. So I watch one news channel for a week, note when the screw up and call, send emails and letters…

Start small, just your local TV channel, hold their feet to the fire and let them know that they are biased and that you are listening and paying attention.

katymine,

That sounds like an excellent idea to me. Our side might organize such media monitoring the way MoveOn and other web-based groups organized political canvassing for the recent election.

For example, a group of local FDL’ers (or Kossacks, or Atriots) could commit to monitor a specified group of media outlets in their area. Those commitments could be recorded in a (suitably anonymized) database including every radio and television station in the U.S. New volunteers could then be actively recruited in areas where our coverage is sparse.

Then some kind of closed-loop process could evaluate the results for each area, and work toward improving the techniques — such as writing letters to editors, calling stations, faxing, contacting advertisers and so forth.

All this would depend on mobilizing our forces, not just at election time, but all the time, so that volunteers could be assigned whenever uncorrected bias was reported.

The major news media simply are… structurally organized to oppose liberal and progressive policies and philosophies. This is not some conspiracy theory… It is a business model — and their business is to propagate an idea of reality to Americans.

El Cid, I believe you are very much on the right track here. Could you elaborate a bit on the “business model” to which you are referring?

I’m guessing you are pointing to ad revenue as the driving force behind all decisions made by the corporate media. I’m guessing that by “propagating an idea of reality” you refer to a viewpoint from which money and consumerism appear to be the most significant goals to which humans can aspire. I’m guessing that you observe Republicans enthusiastically cheering that same world view, and cooperating with the media apparatus in an unprecedented way, in order to increase profits for the people who write the checks for both their media enterprises and their political enterprises.

Comment?