Credibility: Corporate-owned Media versus the Internet

     Probably the most oft-repeated accusation against the corporate-owned news media is that they’re biased. Probably the most oft-repeated accusation against Internet reporting of the news is that there are many inaccuracies on the Internet.

     Both accusations are true. Perhaps not surprisingly, both accusations are true of both forms of reporting.

     Let’s first look at the matter of media bias. On my first day of journalism class at the University of South Carolina in 1977, my professor taught that bias is simply the framework by which we interpret the world around us. Bias is both inevitable and essential.

     Every minute of every day, every sentient being—that includes us—is bombarded with so much information that we can’t absorb it all. To avoid sensory overload, our minds create a model that, to us, represents the world as it is. We unconsciously filter out things that don’t fit the model. Things that do fit the model are assigned proper places and rankings in our mental map of that model.

     In one respect, these mental maps differ from the familiar diagrams known as mind maps. Mind maps often contain symbols signifying how we are to respond to certain information. Each item we fit into our mental map is a word or phrase, an item of information, and a symbol.

     This process, which is called semiotics, is necessary for survival and to simplify decision making. For example, when a cat sees a strange dog, the cat’s mental map detects the dog, the danger the dog represents, and possibly the cat’s manner of expressing the word dog. If cats somehow became unbiased and had to think everything through from scratch, cats would soon become extinct. With experience, a cat may adjust its mental model enough to accept a particular dog; but, in the general sense, dog still represents danger.

      I further explain the function of bias in part two of the three-part series “How News Reporting Really Works.”

     Semiotics doesn’t have the same results for all animals or for all humans. A dog may look at his master and think, “He feeds me, shelters me, loves me, and provides for all my other needs. He must be a god.” A cat is more likely to look at his master and think, “He feeds me, shelters me, loves me, and provides for all my other needs. I must be a god.”

     What we call media bias is usually one of two things: Either the reporter fails to account for differences in his perceptions and the perceptions of others; or the reporter has agenda that he allows to influence the way he reports the news. If his agenda get in the way of his reporting, it may be unconscious or deliberate.

     We all know that bloggers and other unpaid Internet reporters and commentators have agenda. But so do reporters and commentators working for the corporate-owned media.

There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t tell my students, “The truth is out there, but so are lies.”

     The corporate-owned media today is in the same situation as the university-trained doctors found themselves after the A.D. 1450 or so. For the first time in human history, university-trained doctors found themselves in direct competition with traditional healers. They responded by branding their competition witches and charlatans. After all, every educated person “knew” that leeches and bloodletting were more scientific and effective than herbs, foods, and other  unproven cures. They were the very people who, as recently as the 1850s, persecuted Ignaz Semmelweis for saying that doctors should wash their hands.

     In those days, doctors were also barbers. Some doctors are still barbarous.

     This competition went beyond the superficial matter of affecting opinions. With the help of government and the church, they actively influenced the model by which people perceived the issue. They would be perceived as the “medical community,” while natural healers would be seen—at best—as “alternative.”

     They got away with and continue to get away with it because of the relationships they enjoy with people in positions of power, including the corporate-owned information media. The Internet provides the most effective voice for competing information.

     It has often been said that the corporate-owned media can’t control what we think; but, by choosing which stories to cover, they can control what we think about. That’s not entirely true. By representing themselves as the only reliable source of news, and representing the Internet as an unreliable alternative, the corporate-owned media can affect the public’s model of reality.

For examples of unreliable and outright dishonest reporting, see the four-part series “How News Reporting Really Works,” and the companion piece “Sometimes They Lie.” (To begin reading this series, click here.)  (I make further references to problems in the corporate-owned news media in the five-part series “How Washington Really Works.” To begin reading this series, click here.)

     More blatant examples of media dishonesty have recently come to my attention. It would be too easy to dismiss Glenn Beck as a fool, but close inspection of him and his methods—and the fact that he keeps his job—show that he and his bosses are thoroughly dishonest.

     Picture for a moment someone like Glenn Beck reporting on the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. The earlier version of Beck tells us that some Roman Catholic Italians entered a garage and viciously murdered six Jews and a garage mechanic. Over and over he reminds us that the killers were Italian Catholics and that most of the victims were Jews.

     The way this 1920s Glenn Beck tells it, it would be easy to get the impression that the Italian Catholics were acting from religious conviction and ethnic type. That seems to be the general idea. Instead of blaming the criminals for criminal behavior, we’re expected to blame the religion or the ethnic group.

     Glenn Beck and other disinformation specialists are pimps for banks and corporations that profit from war, other conflicts, and other disasters.

     He and others like him make a regular practice of finding examples of criminality by poor immigrants, Palestinians, and other peoples whose voices can not be amplified by profits or the profit motive. It’s the Internet that gives voice to the voiceless.

     Bias, agenda, and inaccuracies can be found in both the corporate-owned media reports and the independent media of the Internet. For that reason, a more workable model of reality would be to suspect, examine, and judge the reliability of all sources in both the corporate-owned media and the independent media. For the sake of Truth and Justice, this should be our model.

The Healthcare Embezzlement

This page is still under construction. I'll have it completed as soon as I can. Here's a preview of what to expect:
Regarding the Obamacare scam formally known as HR 3590, and euphemistically known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act, there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is, it doesn’t protect patients; at an estimated $940 billion, it's not affordable; two thirds of the money, according to the bill's supporters, will go into the pockets of Big Pharma and the health insurance racketeers; and official projections of the costs of federal programs have always been several hundred percent on the low side. When I hear of any good news, I'll let you know. Did your congressman vote to embezzle $940 billion-plus to give to Big Pharma and health insurance racketeers, leaving you and your descendants to pay the bill? Click here to find out.

Is Medical School a Big Pharma Infomercial?

Some years ago, I mentioned chiropractic to a friend of mine, and she said, “I’m a nurse; I don’t believe in chiropractic.” The way she said it—semicolon and all—indicated, “I don’t believe in chiropractic because I’m a nurse.” That was my first inkling that nursing school and medical school was one long infomercial for the drug companies.
That’s not to say that doctors and nurses don’t learn anything useful. That’s the info part of the word infomercial. People watch infomercials because they expect to learn something useful. The –mercial part of infomercial—as in commercial is the part where they try to steer people toward certain products and away from the competition.
The competition includes chiropractors, aroma therapists, and such traditional healers as herbal doctors, shamans, and acupuncturists. Before the Renaissance, university-trained (allopathic) doctors had no competition from traditional (naturopathic) healers (naturopaths). The former made a living treating the rich; the latter, the poor. It was a fine arrangement until so many universities sprang up that, for the first time in history, there weren’t enough rich sick people for all the allopathic doctors.
Fortunately, the rise of the nation state (and the need to assert newfound political muscle) and the decline of the church’s temporal power (and the need to reassert theirs) occurred at about the same time. Accusing the naturopathic healers of being in league with the devil seemed a reasonable solution for all three groups—hence, the witchcraft hysteria of that began in 1639.
The allopathic monopolists can no longer burn traditional healers at the stake; but they—meaning Big Pharma, not the doctors—still collude with government and, when they can, the church. Virtually every college and university in America depends on grants from government and contributions from private donors. Big Pharma practices the “other” Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
Big Pharma has a big say in what is taught in medical schools. Around 20 years ago, only four medical schools in America required a course in nutrition, and most medical schools didn’t even offer them. The record has improved somewhat, but Big Pharma still has the edge. Thus, all medical doctors know how to prescribe drugs for illnesses, but many of them know very little about how to keep healthy.
Thomas Edison once forecast that, in the future, there would be less and less distinction between medicine and food. On the other side of the world, there’s a Chinese proverb, “Food is medicine, and medicine is food.” Not with Big Pharma in charge of the flow of information. Today, Big Pharma learns the secrets of traditional healers, makes an artificial version of it through chemistry, and puts a patent on it. Thus, the real thing is called “alternative” medicine if not “superstition,” and a poor imitation is called “enlightened, modern” medicine.
(To their credit, many doctors have the wisdom to look beyond the infomercials and have become more holistic in their approach to health and healing. Unfortunately, many others still wear the blinders for which they were fitted in medical school.)
What about Big Pharma’s collusion with government, and what does this have to do with whether your congressman is representing you—or Big Pharma? There’s not a month that goes by that I don’t hear of some new attempt to use their prostitutes in congress to squeeze out the competition.
Their latest attempt is called the Dietary Supplement Safety Act. The DSSA would effectively reclassify food supplements (vitamins) as drugs and give the FDA control over them. The excuse they give for taking away Americans’ freedom of choice is that some baseball players were known to have taken illegal steroids. Can anyone tell me what illegal steroids have to do with vitamins?
For more info on the Big Pharma bill sponsored by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Bryan Dorgan (D-ND), click here.
Click here to write a polite letter to your congressman to ask him to vote against this violation of our rights.