Ads-oriented media breeds biased journalism – author
Modern America’s media is a cartel system that is owned and dominated by a handful of huge corporations saddled with heavy debts, said author Mark Crispin Miller, who shared his views on American media and propaganda.
“What they tend to do is cut costs wherever possible and at the same time go for the kind of material that they think will sell the most and the quickest,” said the author, “You basically get a new system that resembles the worst aspects of the Internet and that is simply because it is profit-driven, advertising-based and controlled – that is probably the most important – by a handful of enormous commercial entities that are very close to our government and that is not good for democracy.”
Americans stay uninformed not because they do not want to be informed, claimed Miller, who also confessed that good entertainment is absolutely essential.
Still, he admitted that “There is a very close relationship between the low-quality of a lot of entertainment, that is derived and sensationalistic, and the low quality of our journalism.”
People cannot control the information they were not told simply because “people don’t know what they don’t know”, explained Mark Crispin Miller.
“We are a consumer culture. So people are raised here basically to do one thing and that is a shock if they cannot afford it,” author said, “If people are used to a kind of paper-thin, lightweight, completely distorted news coverage – that is all they see everywhere they look, no matter how many cable channels they have.”
According to Miller, the most scandalous story hidden from the American society over the last decade was the subversion of the US voting system.
“We have an absolutely preposterous voting system that is based on computerized voting machines that are very easily hacked and highly insecure,” Miller shared his accusations.
He claimed that this system concealed the overwhelming, landslide win of Barack Obama “by about 7 million more votes than we think” at the last presidential elections in the US, because the press and the Democrats “are blind to the evidence of all those vote that he would have gotten if the system was honest.”
Speaking about propaganda in the American media Miller said that “When you have a media system that has been captured by private interests, the media system becomes nothing but a conduit for propaganda.”
“Advertising and propaganda on one hand are antithetical to real journalism on the other,” author stressed.
Mark Crispin Miller came to a conclusion that “In a true democracy people must have access to unbiased information in order to make reasonable decisions. That kind of thing is an anathema to the advertisers.”
There is a close relationship between the media and the political elite, which in turn is in a very close relationship with the corporate elite, and that makes it possible to hunt certain politicians in the media and skip over the others.
As for the events of 9/11, Miller evaluates that what “the 9/11 truth movement really wants is a new investigation and a new commission – and that is all that I call for. Because the fact is that the official report is preposterous in countless ways.”
“The Challenger disaster, when a spacecraft blew up – the commission to establish that disaster was funded at US$15 million. The budget for the 9/11 commission was US$3 million – that is insane,” Miller exclaimed.
But a new investigation on 9/11 would not be established under the current president because Barack Obama is “an extraordinarily cautious person and not progressive by any stretch of imagination and never was.”
Mark Crispin Miller agreed that in some ways Barack Obama has “out-Bushed Bush, primarily because our expectations from him have been extremely low.”
“Bush is Obama’s low standard. I think we should hold our presidents to much higher standards.”
