I know exactly what you mean. I don't own a TV and do not want one.
Nor I.
These days I find it excruciatingly uncomfortable to be in a room with commercial TV playing. The Dumbness per Second is just too high to bear.
Comparing Corporate Nonsense News vs Faux News is pointless too. Just different heads on the same Hydra.
Sadly, it appears most here assume stupidity such as the "more sunlight in Germany" comment is just accidental. It is not. It's a widespread, deliberate program of confusion and disinformation, intended to produce a public incapable of thinking rationally about anything, and thus, unable to act cohesively.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
-- William Casey, Director of Central Intelligence. An observation by the late Director at his first staff meeting in 1981.
"Advertising is legalized lying."
-- H. G. Wells
"A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy."
-- Aldous Huxley
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."
-- Edward Bernays
"Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play."
-- Joseph Goebbels
"All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume."
-- Noam Chomsky
"Through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way round, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise."
-- Adolf Hitler
http://poorrichards-blog.blogspot.com/2010/10/who-owns-media-6-monolithic.htmlMonday, October 4, 2010
Who Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost Everything We Watch, Hear And Read
http://saladin-avoiceinthewilderness.blogspot.com/2011/02/public-enemy-no-1-main-stream-media.htmlPublic Enemy No. 1 The Main Stream Media
"The media is the enemy!" This is the title of the introductory narrative of American Free Press.net. AFP offers: "In the old Soviet Union, the government controlled the media. Not a word of substance could be published without prior approval from the Bolshevik commissars. Today, in the United States, the situation is starkly similar. But most Americans don't even know it.
In the United States today, it is a select handful of super-rich families and tightly-knit financial interests-a plutocratic elite-who own the Big Media and who control the government through their ownership of that media. . . . Every single one of the major media outlets is controlled by this powerful interlocking combine."
Book: Manufacturing Consent, by Noam Chomsky.
http://everist.org/archives/links/!_MSM_control_links.txt
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/bernprop.htmlPropaganda (1928) (Includes text of the book, supposedly. But is it true?)
by Edward Bernays
(review by Chomsky)
[The] American business community was also very impressed with the propaganda effort. They had a problem at that time. The country was becoming formally more democratic. A lot more people were able to vote and that sort of thing. The country was becoming wealthier and more people could participate and a lot of new immigrants were coming in, and so on.
So what do you do? It's going to be harder to run things as a private club. Therefore, obviously, you have to control what people think. There had been public relation specialists but there was never a public relations industry. There was a guy hired to make Rockefeller's image look prettier and that sort of thing. But this huge public relations industry, which is a U.S. invention and a monstrous industry, came out of the first World War. The leading figures were people in the Creel Commission. In fact, the main one, Edward Bernays, comes right out of the Creel Commission. He has a book that came out right afterwards called Propaganda. The term "propaganda," incidentally, did not have negative connotations in those days. It was during the second World War that the term became taboo because it was connected with Germany, and all those bad things. But in this period, the term propaganda just meant information or something like that. So he wrote a book called Propaganda around 1925, and it starts off by saying he is applying the lessons of the first World War. The propaganda system of the first World War and this commission that he was part of showed, he says, it is possible to "regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies." These new techniques of regimentation of minds, he said, had to be used by the intelligent minorities in order to make sure that the slobs stay on the right course. We can do it now because we have these new techniques.
This is the main manual of the public relations industry. Bernays is kind of the guru. He was an authentic Roosevelt/Kennedy liberal. He also engineered the public relations effort behind the U.S.-backed coup which overthrew the democratic government of Guatemala.
His major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke. Women didn't smoke in those days and he ran huge campaigns for Chesterfield. You know all the techniques—models and movie stars with cigarettes coming out of their mouths and that kind of thing. He got enormous praise for that. So he became a leading figure of the industry, and his book was the real manual.
-- Noam Chomsky
(From Chomsky's "What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream": a talk at Z Media Institute, June 1997)
This post purely for informational purposes, for anyone interested. I will not debate these issues here.
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