Media Elites Hate Democracy

Discussion in 'Media & Commentators' started by Horhey, Oct 20, 2016.

  1. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    [​IMG]

    Occasionally I'll watch some corporate news shows to get a sense of the latest propaganda themes and 2 nights ago I happened to be watching Charlie Rose when Face the Nation commissar John Dickerson was on talking about the leaked Clinton emails. He said, paraphrasing, 'for us in the media the email's contents are no big deal because it's just business as usual but for regular folks they may hurt Clinton because they don't approve of politicians having a public and private position on issues'.

    So by implication, the establishment media believes that's how it's supposed to be. They don't believe in Government that works for the public. "Democracy," in elite media parlance, is Government run by business that may or may not have credible elections to ratify elite decisions.

    As one prominent U.S. commissar put it:

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    "The influence of elite opinion is an important check on majority rule. The public should be kept away from policymaking."

    -Josh Barro, Senior Editor at Business Insider. MSNBC contributor.

    The Trilateral Commission couldn't have said it better:

    Combine these sentiments with 24/7 stenography for the State and you get a sophisticated propaganda system:

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    These principles are also applied abroad. Under the media's interpretation of the phrase, it is indeed true that "the yearning to see American-style democracy duplicated throughout the world has been a persistent theme in American foreign policy," as Times correspondent Neil Lewis declared:

    U.S. "benevolence" in those years:

    Examples abound from Latin America to the Far East, which is why I hesitate to give examples. So take Iran under the murderous U.S.-backed dictatorship, where parties and all public dissent were outlawed:

    The People rest.
     
  2. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    [video=youtube_share;JvJ1ZuJDNbQ]http://youtu.be/JvJ1ZuJDNbQ[/video]​

    In the words of James Madison, the "Father of the U.S. Constitution":

     
  3. WJV

    WJV Banned

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    Well why bother with it? Everyone else hates it too.

    The only people that like 'democracy' really are the worthless political and media classes. Why not get rid of them?

    Look how easy the elites have it in places like China.

    The way to end history is not through liberalism or democracy.
     
  4. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    At least try to make sense.
     
  5. LiveUninhibited

    LiveUninhibited Well-Known Member

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    Why do you assume democracy is the best way to make decisions?

    Sure the media is "liberally biased"... because the truth is liberally biased. And average people shouldn't be making big decisions about who will lead the free world based upon their charisma. This is a stupid criterion for choosing a leader, so the results in real, policy terms will be random at best. There has to be a better way. I have an idea of the best way to govern, but first I want to know why you think what you do.
     
  6. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    I agree with your statement in bold but I also believe and I think it's well confirmed that if people are sufficiently informed they will make decisions based on what is best for themselves and the country within which they live. And I didn't say the media is liberal. I agree with the "well confirmed though not proven thesis" that:

    Media elites pretty much agree with the Marxist-Leninist or fascist view echoed by Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr:

    Central to the "manufacture of consent," which we are all exposed to every day, are "necessary illusions" that are "presupposed" and not asserted:

    Example:

    Let alone the fact that, as Americas Watch stated stated, in the 1984 elections, "the Sandinista party obtained a popular mandate."

    So in this system, it is the critics of U.S. policy that are the most serviceable to power:

     
  7. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    The New York Times approves of Henry Kissinger's "messy compromises", involving the overthrow of democracy in Chile and the murders of hundreds of thousands of people in Southeast Asia and Latin America:

     
  8. LiveUninhibited

    LiveUninhibited Well-Known Member

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    Absolutely consent can be manufactured. I don't see how it's been proven that well-informed voters make better decisions than, say, a panel of experts. Even if we called average people smart, the kind of expertise required to make or even evaluate good policy decisions will be out of reach unless that's their career. And for the most part such expertise is not even set up. Sociology has the right approach, but a dogmatic philosophy and low level of development. Policy must be studied as scientifically as possible. For example, people continue the war on drugs because they say drugs=bad. But the measure of policy is its effect, not its intention. So even if drugs are bad, an ineffective policy against them is not necessarily better than nothing. Average people so far seem unable to understand even this most basic element of policy, and resources would be better spent getting them employed rather than making the whole country scientifically competent at policy.
     
  9. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    You're assuming the media has been doing their job. If the public were sufficiently informed about the drug war, most people would oppose it. Like how younger people tend to favor legalization of MJ. Most people in the US don't know (*)(*)(*)(*) about the world. It's painful for me to hear how people talk sometimes. Then I watch or read corporate news and it's clear why that is. So I just ignore it and let them talk.
     
  10. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    North Dakota State’s Attorney Ladd Erickson charged Amy Goodman, in his words, reporting "from the position of justifying the protest actions". Ignored by the corporate media. It was reported by BBC News, The Independent, The Nation and CommonDreams.

     
  11. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    [video=youtube_share;JZAFD5chKmA]http://youtu.be/JZAFD5chKmA[/video]​

    Political Police working for Big Oil oppress Native Americans protesting the North Dakota Access pipeline, which will pollute drinking water on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation and destroy cultural artifacts.

     
  12. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    Amnesty responds...

     
  13. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    [video=youtube_share;YCwIvRDRSVo]http://youtu.be/YCwIvRDRSVo[/video]​

     
  14. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    A 1960s-style false flag operation. I'm sure the media will present this guy as an actual protestor with an assault rifle.

    [video=youtube_share;XyUKpw3aOyo]http://youtu.be/XyUKpw3aOyo[/video]​
     
  15. xwsmithx

    xwsmithx Well-Known Member

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    This is hardly surprising. This whole Trump election has been a tremendous eye-opener as the whole liberal media establishment has thrown even the pretense of impartiality out the window in order to foist Lady Macbeth on the American public. However, I don't think much of the wisdom of the populace myself from a right-wing perspective. Just for starters, New Yorkers voted for Hillary to be their senator, which by itself made me lose all faith in the American public. And then there was the brilliant observation by someone ages ago that pointed out democracy's Achilles heel: that democracy will fail when the public figures out they can vote themselves other people's money. What's worse is the government pretending that it ISN'T other people's money, like in the Social Security fraud, where retired people think that they are collecting the money they paid into the system instead of the truth, that they are taking money from working people in the same year it's paid in.
     
  16. Horhey

    Horhey Well-Known Member

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    Again I say, it's because political campaigns and media coverage focus on personalities and the "extravaganza" rather than policy differences in factual manner. It's he said she said this or that. People have to be informed to be able to make decisions that effect their lives. The media is not doing its job.

    And even they do "have the time, energy, or commitment to carry out a research project," most of them don't know where to look. It takes years to figure that out. So they do the easy thing and go to Alex Jones and they remain non the wiser and no one takes their views seriously.
     

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