In: knowledge.
Backlinks: censorship, propaganda, wikipedia.
Mainstream media
“Mainstream media” (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence many people, and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought.
The term is used to contrast with “alternative media”.
The “mainstream media” is a collective journalistic entity that provides news and information to a large audience.
This is in contrast with the “alternative media”, which reaches a much smaller and often more specific audience (eg: the people who seek the real news)
Mainstream media show you news based on their financial incentives and political affiliations.
Some news websites are only making money from ADS (commercials) which means the content is completely irrelevant, just enough to make people want to visit the ads.
They influence you in their best interest, so that they can make more money. The news is not a goal, it’s just the means to the objective of making a profit.
This makes them untrustworthy and unreliable.
Today’s mainstream media is much more like Hollywood movies, and much less like news.
Quotes
If you don’t read the newspapers, you are uninformed. If you do read them, you are misinformed.
– Mark Twain
Television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation… Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.
– Neil Postman
Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your Honor. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
– Mark Twain
It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and myths that surround it.
– John Pilger
The press is our chief ideological weapon.
– Nikita Khrushchev
Freedom of press is limited to those who own one.
– Henry Louis Mencken
I take a grave view of the press. It is the weak slat under the bed of democracy.
– A. J. Liebling
The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the ‘best’ sources.
– Walter Karp
The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets.
– Lawrence Grossman, longtime head of PBS and NBC News
Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.
I ought to know. I do the same thing.
– Philip K. Dick
Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.
– David McGowan
The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.
– Malcolm X
Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.
– Jim Morrison
Mainstream news wants to keep you as a useful idiot. Instead, try being a non-useful idiot.
– Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information.
– Christopher Hitchens (English-born American author, journalist, and literary critic)
Just because something isn’t a lie does not mean that it isn’t deceptive. A liar knows that he is a liar, but one who speaks mere portions of truth in order to deceive is a craftsman of destruction.
– Criss Jami
Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people.
– Black Hugo L.
Articles
Mainstream media poses ‘major threat to democracy’ according to poll
By “Tyler Durden”, Saturday Oct 22 2022
https://zerohedge.com/political/mainstream-media-poses-major-threat-democracy-according-poll
Respondents were asked to rank various people and institutions. The top threat? The mainstream media, with 59% saying it poses a “major threat to democracy,” 24% saying the MSM poses a ‘minor’ threat to democracy, and just 16% who think there’s no threat at all.
GOLDSTEIN: Former CBC journalist lowers the boom on its ‘radical agenda’
Author Lorrie Goldstein, published Jan 04, 2022
https://torontosun.com/news/goldstein-former-cbc-journalist-lowers-the-boom-on-its-radical-agenda
In a column posted to social media, Speaking Freely: Why I resigned from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Tara Henley, who joined the public broadcaster in 2013, said working there today, "is to embrace cognitive dissonance and to abandon journalistic integrity … it is to consent to the idea that a growing list of subjects are off the table, that dialogue itself can be harmful. That the big issues of our time are already settled.
"It is to capitulate to certainty, to shut down critical thinking, to stamp out curiosity. To keep one’s mouth shut, to not ask questions, to not rock the boat … How could good journalism possibly be done under such conditions? How could any of this possibly be healthy for society?
"It is to allow sweeping societal changes like lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and school closures to roll out - with little debate. To see billionaires amass extraordinary wealth and bureaucrats amass enormous power - with little scrutiny. And to watch the most vulnerable among us die of drug overdoses - with little comment.
“It is to pretend that the ‘woke’ worldview is near universal - even if it is far from popular with those you know, speak to, and interview and read.”
Henley said the national public broadcaster is besieged by a journalistic culture obsessed with race and identity politics.
Asking, for example, “why, exactly taxpayers should be funding articles that scold Canadians for using words such as ‘brainstorm’ and ‘lame’,” or criticizing comedian Dave Chapelle’s Netflix special which has been attacked by critics as transphobic, while failing, “to include any of the legion of (his) fans, or comics, that did not find it offensive”?
