Elites Push Government-funded "Public" Media
(The New America) -- by William F. Jasper --
...Big Media, Big Foundations, Big Government, Big Money
On July 14, Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal provided Lee C. Bollinger, the president of Columbia University, with generous space for an op-ed entitled "Journalism Needs Government Help." The crux of his appeal was contained in the subtitle: "Media budgets have been decimated as the Internet facilitates a communications revolution. More public funding for news-gathering is the answer."
"[T]he financial viability of the U.S. press has been shaken to its core,"� Bollinger wrote. "The proliferation of communications outlets has fractured the base of advertising and readers. Newsrooms have shrunk dramatically and foreign bureaus have been decimated."
"The institutions of the press we have inherited are the result of a mixed system of public and private cooperation," says Bollinger. "Trusting the market alone to provide all the news coverage we need would mean venturing into the unknown — a risky proposition with a vital public institution hanging in the balance."
Bollinger (a member of the board of directors of the Washington Post) is a big fan of socialized media, praising Communist China's "news" agencies, as well as the British BBC and our own PBS and NPR. "Ironically," he notes, "we already depend to some extent on publicly funded foreign news media for much of our international news-especially through broadcasts of the BBC and BBC World Service on PBS and NPR."...
Bollinger's claims and premises went largely unchallenged by the mavens of the mainstream media. Indeed, his call for government funding is music to their ears. Many, apparently, have no problem with his implied message that government-funded media — not only the BBC and Al Jazeera, but CCTV and Xinhua news — are the shining exemplars of "full journalistic independence" and "great journalism" that will lead us to a "free and dynamic society." We are not aware that any journos of the "prestige press" bothered to ask Bollinger some fairly obvious and elementary questions, such as: How many investigative stories have CCTV and Xinhua news done on the ongoing Communist persecution of Christians, Muslims, and Falun Gong in China? How many have they done exposing Beijing's ongoing policies of genocide in Tibet? How many editorials criticizing the Beijing regime's brutal One-Child policy or its extensive censorship of the Internet? How many editorials have criticized any of the Communist Party's decisions or government policies?
As for the vaunted BBC, to take just one example, consider how slavishly it has flogged the "global warming" hysteria for years, refusing to give coverage to the wide array of world-renowned scientists that dissent from the Al Gore "climate crisis" thesis. And how did BBC deal with exposure of the "Climategate" email scandal at East Anglia University's Climate Research Unit last year? Well, it has since come to light that BBC knew about the emails before other media did, but had suppressed them. To compound its culpability, over the past months the BBC has given only spotty, grudging coverage to this hugely important issue and, for the most part, has continued to push its "crisis" bias, the corollary to which is that we need global government controls over all human-generated CO2. Which means, of course, government controls over all human activity.�
Bollinger's appeal for a Mussolini-style public-private cartelized media is more fully explicated in his book, Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century published by Oxford University Press this year — to rave reviews and beaucoups favorable media coverage, naturally, from the usual intelligentsia who demand the right to forcibly extract from us the wherewithal to fund what they deem appropriate for us to read, watch, and listen to. Yes, the title and the content are an incredible, oxymoronic mismatch — like dry water or socialist free enterprise. But Bollinger's message resonates with the higher powers who seek to transform America. Within days after his WSJ editorial paean to the fascist-socialist-corporatist media model, Bollinger was voted in as Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New York Federal Reserve, the lead bank in the Federal Reserve System that has been fanatically pushing the fascist-socialist-corporatist model for all sectors of our economy.
Variations on Bollinger's government-must-save-journalism theme have been proliferating over the past year. The institutions, organs, and venues promoting it include: the USC/Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, Nation magazine, the Aspen Institute, the Free Press, the Knight Foundation/Knight Commission, PBS, Rep. Henry Waxman, the Los Angeles Times, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
The Pratt House Matrix and "Ruling Class Journalists"
Big Media has been the handmaiden to Big Government for decades. Now that the Internet and independent media are challenging the statist game plan, Big Media and Big Government are desperately seeking to formally legitimize their longstanding illicit affair. To longtime observers it is not in the least surprising that the key players in this perverse Big Government-Big Media-Big Foundation symbiosis seem to hale disproportionately from the membership roster of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Like the slime trail that leads to the slug, most of the major efforts to centralize, nationalize, and cartelize political and economic power over the past century can be traced back to the CFR and the matrix of corporations, foundations, think tanks, and universities its members dominate. So it is with the current push to have the federal government fund and control more and more of the media...MORE...LINK
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