Loads of money

With the Democrats beaten again last year, the next election is guaranteed to be a monumental media war. Lets hope we don't go down that lesser of two evils route again.

There was the danger that if Kerry won, "lefties" would have seen it as a victory, "a step in the right direction." However most signs pointed to more of the same, only done with a little more subtlety (not the trickiest task).

Now that Bush has won, his policies continue, but so do his public gaffs. For serious right wing intellectuals he is a political nightmare. His value lies in his "religious enlightenment." The magnitude of this problem is not yet evident. But we can be happy he is not as "charming" as Clinton. Let those who voted for Bush see what they got themselves in for. There is absolutely nothing wrong in saying "I told you so" ad infinitum.

Now that huge numbers of people have taken an interest, the aim is to not lose them back to apathy after the election hype. Chomsky said he devoted about five seconds thought to his candidate of choice. Until there are at least two sufficiently different candidates to choose from, I guess five seconds is ample time.


Courtesy of Brave Sir Blogger:

Big Media & U.S. Politics: When political campaigns spend enormous sums of money on advertising, who benefits? Big Media. Whose job is it to cover elections fairly and rigorously? Big Media's. But, while the corporately owned media are quite happy to suck campaign coffers dry, they don't re-invest much of that money in quality news coverage. Local news leads with traffic accidents; and national news leads with show trials. Expanded news programming usually focuses on unsolved murders or investigates trendy weight-loss programs.

Robert McChesney, the founder and president of Free Press, chimes in:

Most Americans don't know that the presidential candidates and allied groups shattered all campaign finance records in 2004, spending $2 billion. That's right: billion. Most of that money bought political ads from the biggest media companies ... who gave us back deplorable election coverage.

As McChesney points out later in his column, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is expected to be re-opened within this calendar year. It's time for grass roots organizations such as McChesney's to prepare for the fight.

Get ready, because Clintonian Democrats and most Republicans are preparing to help the media serve you less.

at:

http://www.coffeeshoptimes.com/bravesirblogger.html