like a respect an insane chimp with a loaded automatic weapon in a small room

Remember Jon Leiberman - fired by Sinclair after outing the company for pushing anti-Kerry political propaganda (Stolen Honor) as news?

In an interview published Monday, Jon Leiberman told The Baltimore Sun that Sinclair Broadcast Group's decision to air the 45-minute film as a news program was "biased political propaganda."

Leiberman later told CNN he was fired after the story hit newsstands.

"The reason for my firing was that I relayed what they called proprietary information from an in-house meeting and I divulged it to the media, which is against company policy," he said.

Corporate spokesman Mark Hyman confirmed Leiberman's dismissal and said the company did not comment on personnel matters.

Huh. Well, that says a lot right there, doesn't it?

Several comments have been made about "Main Stream Media, aka MSM". I strongly suggest this animal does not exist, and I no longer use the term. The change has been very noticeable since the 1980s with the Iran-Contra, Oliver North scandel being the most memorable. A little research can pinpoint the connection between the media and the vast military complex as described by IKE in the 1950s. These Multi-National Corp.s control in the range of about 90%, so it is very hard for a small magazine, electronic news, or newspaper to reach the vast majority of the american people. These are cold hard facts, and the money/power is the controlling factor.

I've long liked and even admired most of what you write. BUT, I do wish you'd leave out such terms as odious, notorious, etc when describing individuals and groups. It detracts from your on point messages and makes it harder for me to convince people on the fence about your views being accurate. Thanks much, John George PhD, Professor Emeritus, Political Science & Sociology. Specialist on Extremism/Terrorism, Public Opinion, Sociopolitics of Sport, Phony Quotations. (If you doubt a quote, check with me. No guarantees, but I still have one hell of a file) JG

Sounds like kindergarten is in session.

No, that would be Redstate.com. Clearly, the matter under discussion is far too serious for someone as young as yourself.

You are paraphrasing Peewee Herman's line:

"I know what you are, but what am I?"

...except for the useful indiscretions to which Karl has admitted, there is no evidence for the allegations against him.

Well, sure they were "useful" -- but did Halperin mean "youthful? Youthful, as in when Rove was a Young Republican Pig.

Few people are able to poiut the hypocrisy of a "liberal media" better than Glenn. Facts do not bother the corporate pundit media.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/content/view/1272/135/

The Republic you wanted -- and at one time might have had the power to take back -- is finished. You no longer have the power to keep it; it's not there. It was kidnapped in December 2000, raped by the primed and ready exploiters of 9/11, whored by the war pimps of the 2003 aggression, gut-knifed by the corrupters of the 2004 vote, and raped again by its "rescuers" after the 2006 election. Beaten, abused, diseased and abandoned, it finally died. We are living in its grave.

The annus horribilis of 2007 has turned out to be a year of triumph for the Bush Faction -- the hit men who delivered the coup de grâce to the long-moribund Republic. Bush was written off as a lame duck after the Democrat's November 2006 election "triumph" (in fact, the narrowest of victories eked out despite an orgy of cheating and fixing by the losers), and the subsequent salvo of Establishment consensus from the Iraq Study Group, advocating a de-escalation of the war in Iraq. Then came a series of scandals, investigations, high-profile resignations, even the criminal conviction of a top White House official. But despite all this -- and abysmal poll ratings as well -- over the past eight months Bush and his coupsters have seen every single element of their violent tyranny confirmed, countenanced and extended.

Pretty much sums it all up, doesn't it?

While we gnash our teeth and rend our garments, the Busheviks consolidate their power and persuade their "opposition" to go along with it.

A fine mess...

Sorry for the typing mistake.

Perhaps the word conspiracy, in its literal meaning, could be replaced by co-ordination. This co-ordination does not have to be like a blood-brother's vow but flows naturally from common interests, common goals that are shared or clearly known by all.

The word of the day appearing on Drudge is routinely parroted and circulated by the other media and enters the mainstream.

Little by little participating journalists are rewarded, the others buried in the inner pages. Editor's decisions can dig deep holes.

The hatcheting of Phil Donohue and other journalists who raised their voices chilled those not equiped with steel spines.

There is also the eavesdropping that must send tingles of fear and encourage tepid opinions or comments especially among those in TV who are the most prominent..it is like Darwinian survival of the "fittest".

The bottom line is the sense of entitlement - the world and its resources belong to us and the end justifies the means.

Morality is for the rabble, the real world is business and journalists are one of our tools.

I submit that it is not required that we initially prove each and every step involved regarding the systematic failures of our major news producers before we can understand the systematic nature of the failure.

A classic learning experiment is called a "black box" problem, which may be an actual experiment or a thought experiment.

What it means that you are given a device which is hidden away from your inspection. I.e., as though it were put in a "black box" in which all you can see is (1) What goes in, and (2) What comes out.

Occam's razor is also involved, sort of. If you know that you have a voltage going in and that the voltage coming out is halved, there could be any number of things going on in the box, but in the end, the only relevant factor for you at the moment is that the innards halve the voltage.

Inside that box anything could be happening, you could have an incredibly simple device composed of one element, or you could have an incredibly complex device which does a million things, only one of which is the halving of voltage.

The major news producers consistently act like these "black box" systems, whose operations may or may not be hidden from prying eyes, but whose output is systematically measurable just the same.

The major news producers consistently fall in line and fail in their basic journalistic responsibilities nearly every time the Executive and other power sources make very serious moves toward hawkish foreign policies.

They do so in ways which are childishly predictable and which are largely immune to most of our complaints.

They have done so all of my life, and they have done so fairly consistently for pretty much the last century.

Further, somehow the major news producers have fairly successfully suggested that these failures should only be examined by themselves or sources they trust (as opposed to independent academics, etc.), and that the default assumption we must all make is that somehow 'accusations' of 'bias' (i.e., simple measures of their mind-numbingly consistent and massive failures in favoring hawkish policies) face far larger burdens of proof than lazy assumptions of general good will.

Isn't this amazing?

Wouldn't you expect that, in hypothetically sane societies, such institutions of concentrated power such as major information and 'news' disseminators would bear the responsibility of proving their reliability?

If we were anthropologists studying the information disseminated by some ancient priesthood, would we face some huge challenge or higher burden of proof to suggest that the priests and their underlings tended to believe things and disseminate beliefs related to the structure of their priesthood and the measurable interests of that priesthood?

Rather than seeing our major news producing institutions as some sort of presumed objective information sources, we must protect ourselves from those who demand we not see them as cultural institutions, institutions which are embedded in relations of power and beliefs just like any other institution we set out to study.

For example, we might note that in the news production business, a valuable personal commodity is "agency", or autonomy -- it is considered (for sensible reasons) invaluable that journalists make their own decisions, unlike some other hired writers who labor in other fields.

Therefore, anthropologically, we could expect to see the evolution of systems of selection and control by these institutions which seemed to preserve "agency" or autonomy, while still ensuring institutional influence over the content being produced.

That is that hiring & selection & promotion process discussed on here earlier.

When you have direct intervention by powerful interests, it seems an exception. When the New York Times' Ray Bonner accurately reported on Reagan's 'foreign policy' (hired slaughters) in El Salvador, this displeased all sorts of powerful interests (Reagan, right wing flack groups, the Wall Street Journal), and the NYT responded by removing Bonner from that 'beat'.

They did not tell him to change his opinions, or his content, or any such punishment which would undercut their valued image of preserving the autonomy of their journalists.

They simply removed his ability to report on the entire topic of his professional focus. The fact that 10 years later in the wreckage of bodies massacred by Reagan's friends, the anthropological evidence confirmed Bonner's reporting, and the NYT graciously re-hired him -- precisely too late for it to matter to the powerful interests who wanted him silenced in the first place.

So I suggest to Glenn that although, yes, we should be curious as to the particular activities and organizational features give rise to news producers' measurably systematic output, it should not be our first responsibility.

Like the black box problem, our first responsibility is to carefully observe what goes in, and what comes out.

The secular priesthood of the major news producers and their related intellectuals may complain that we do not know the amazingly complex processes hidden within the box, and that we must know this before we proceed any further, but we can answer that, no, we can measure what goes in the box, and what goes out, and, just like engineers, we are free to hypothesize the simplest possible explanations for what goes on inside to create the measured output.