The answer to the question “Why isn’t our media reporting the real news?” is fascinating and scary and explains a lot:
…by law the media had an obligation to cover the news and to cover news affecting their community, and to cover all sides of an issue/event. That law was called the Fairness Doctrine. It also forbade the consolidation of businesses, including the broadcasting companies. “The airwaves belonged to the public…(the Fairness Doctrine) mandated local control and diversity of control, ” Kennedy explained and that was the idea behind the writing of that law, which was called the Fairness Doctrine. “They used to have an obligation until 1988. (It was) the proviso that they used them to advance democracy and promote the public interest. That was the law.”
That law and responsibility was abolished by Ronald Reagan in 1988.
Since that time mergers and consolidations have become endemic, and Kennedy points out that the media has focused more on gaining returns for its shareholders than keeping citizens properly informed as they were once mandated to do.
“(Now), instead of reporting the news, they’re entertaining us. They’re appealing to the prurient interest that all of us have in the reptilian core of the brain for sex and celebrity gossip. So they give us Michael Jackson, Lacey Peterson and Kobe Bryant, but they’re not telling us about global warming, the mercury in our food or particulates in the air which are causing our children to have asthma attacks. The typical American, when he learns that he can no longer fish locally — which is true in 19 states not a single freshwater fish is safely edible, in our 48 states at least some of the fish are now inedible — (the citizen) is not connecting that to the president’s policies, which he should be.”
… “We’re the best entertained and least informed people on earth. There was a report, … a massive survey that was done at the time of the election by the University of Maryland. And what it showed was that the values that Americans share — Republican and Democrats — are identical. There was no difference between red states and blue states, no moral difference, no values difference.“ The difference was informational,” he said.
