When will the D.C. village pundits realize that we know that they are trying to deceive us and it is not working? Has their arrogance so blinded them that they do not realize that they are disrespecting everyone of us when they try to get away with "fooling all of the people, all of the time," or are they gambling on the idea that they only need to fool some of us, most of the time? It appears that the only way that the corporate media will listen to us is if we stop reading its newspapers and magazines watching its propaganda because we understand that the product it has been feeding us is utterly and completely worthless.

CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NYT, WP executives must have lost their minds while sitting around in their offices to come up with new and more unique means to take our money while they behave deceitfully toward us. Certainly, they must understand that they are not going to steal all of our liberty, independence, and nonconformity, so that we become obedient consumers. Such an attitude is loaded with so much disrespect the corporate media should consider itself lucky that we do not tar and feather its careerist betrayers and have horses drag their pimply bums out of town.

It is the way the magazine was intended to be from the beginning, only in the Luce days, it was a lot more entertaining about it.

But there was never a time, never, when Time was anything but a breezy right wing propaganda rag. There have been lots of falsehoods over the generations the magazine has been published (the China stories during the Luce years, for example, are all too frequently fabrications) but to do its job -- its job being propaganda for the right wing agenda, NOT "journalism" -- it often wasn't necessary to fabricate, just distort through the peculiar prism that is and has always been "Time."

Yet the way Time is and has always been is somehow surprising to so many observers today. I can't say exactly when I became aware of what kind of publication Time was, but surely I was no older than early teens, which is probably when I first started reading it. Previously, of course, the main "grown up" magazine I read was Life, a sister publication to be sure, but one much more attuned to the masses, and usually less overtly wingnut. Perhaps it was that familiarity with Life that made reading Time such a shock to the system, for the contrast between the two publications was acute (I didn't see let alone read Fortune until I was in college, and then... OMG). It was obvious that Time was a propaganda tool for right wing and corporate interests.

Maybe it is the absence of a publication like Life as a contrast to Time that allows Time to masquerade as responsible journalism when it has never been anything of the kind.

Without a popular mass market contrast, how would a reader know?

How long ago was Life jettisoned? Ah. Wikipedia is our friend. It stopped weekly publication in 1972.

Well, there you are.

These people want us to assume that there are certain people in government who are unlike other human beings in that without oversight and accountability we can “trust” them to be doing “only” the right thing and they would never use the information they scoop up to blackmail anyone or to make him keep his, damn, mouth shut. This is based on the assumption, of course, that Americans are idiots and suckers who would trust a “special” or a different “class” of people that is, presumably, not subject to the frailties of the “other” class of human beings, the rest of us. This has its roots in the fascist assumption that there exists a class of people who are, in fact, superior to the average, and since they currently hold power, the dogma and misleading information they promote should be accepted by all “good” Americans. Obviously, such a conclusion depends entirely on one’s definition of “good”.

That Goddamn TIME. No matter how often you call 'em on their bullshit, they just keep it up. And it's intentional, too.

Piss on TIME. Don't buy the rag, and don't read it.

This will give away how ancient I am, but when I was in my first journalism class we were given assignments to write about current affairs. Two of the recommended sources were Time and Newsweek. Time because it represented the "establishment" perspective and Newsweek, because it did so a little less.

I grew up in a city where the morning paper represented the republican point of view, and the afternoon paper the democratic one, although both of them represented the establishment.

The use of polls on the actions of the government should be viewed with suspicion for two reasons. First, the pollster, who is ususally politically interested, can frame the question to get the desired response. As an extreme example, a pollster could ask 100 people "Would you object to the government tapping a phone without a court order if the person on the phone was holding your daughter hostage and threatening to rape her?" Response would be 100% no. Second, the Founders recognized that Governments tend to do things that the populace approves of because Government has its ways of making people think the Governor is "noble and good." In the 1700's this was done by having a British monarchy with all its beautiful trappings. The populace loved it and the British love the monarchy to this day. The Founders recognized this and restrained the American Government with search and seizure limits. That does not mean that the US Government will not try to make the populace think it is "noble and good" so there will be approval of its actions. Bush once joked that it would be a "lot easier if I were King." The US has no King, but the government has its ways, including getting the news media to fawn all over it like Time Magazine, of getting people to blindly support it. The Founders wanted people to ALWAYS mistrust government. Sadly, both the Republican and Democratic parties work together to try to get the populace to reject that concept. When I see a politician with an American Flag pin on his lapel, I want to barf. The NASCAR dads seem to eat it up and believe the politician is a "good" American.