Saturday, April 21, 2007

Great Article

I really should link to my Actor212 Media Network sources more often. I don't, but I should.

I found an interview at Internationalist Magazine yesterday that I wanted to share with you. Dr. Peter Phillips of Project Censored, a media watchdog and accountability group, said something that made me take a step back, because in a phrase, he summed up my anger at the mainstream media:
Q: When it comes to covering Anne Nicole Smith, Britney Spears, etc. would these mass media companies be remiss if they didn't constantly give the public what it supposedly wants?

We could set up cocaine sales booths on campuses and they would be very popular as well. But we have laws against that. Corporate media has abdicated their responsibility to the First Amendment to keep us informed about what the powerful are doing. We need public financed media to fill the role.
Now, Dr. Phillips and Project Censored make some pretty wild and inaccurate claims about what a "news story" is (as an example, Dr. Phillips cites Building 7 at the World Trade Center as a missed story, which it clearly was not), however, he has a point in that forests of paper were spent on Anna Nicole, but not few words were said about the Congolese genocide, which over the past ten years was as extensive as the slaughter in the Holocaust.

Read the rest here. Internationalist Mag should get the bulk of your eyeball time on this.