NIGHTLINE CENSORSHIP: Is this what it was like living in the USSR?

[ulTRAX]

My local ABC affiliate is owned by Sinclair and did not carry last night's Nightline. My only hope was to disconnect the cable and try to pull the signal off the air from ABC affiliates in neighboring states. So primitive.

I could barely see Kopple outline though the snow and no matter what I did could barely hear his monologue though the static.

Is this what it was like living in the USSR when people struggled to sort though the jamming to pick up the Voice of America?

[BlueEyedSon]

1. You should be more outraged at FOX

who broadcasts propaganda all day without eliciting letters form the likes of John McCain.

CNN ain't to hot lately either....

[workforpower]

6. Good News!

Hardly anyone watches cable "news channels". They average about 400,000 a day and a bit more in primetime. If I had cable I would watch something else. Most people think that way. Why do people pay to get angry?

[Mistress Quickly]

2. No not quite

nad to compare a private company making a decision with the USSR is silly and belittles the evil of the USSR at its height.

IIRC, some of the other local radio picked up where Sinclair dropped off, and did a radio broadcast of Nightline.

Now, if the gov't stepped in and didn't let ANYONE ANYWHERE in America broadcast the names, it would be closer to how the USSR worked.

Not to say we won't be there one day, but it ain't now.

[ulTRAX]

5. you miss the point

eye22004 wrote: "No not quite. nad to compare a private company making a decision with the USSR is silly and belittles the evil of the USSR at its height."

My point was OBVIOUSLY not making a comparison between this one example of corporate censorship and totalitarian government censorship... but what the frustration average person in the USSR might have felt trying to get a broadcast that was being censored.

[saigon68]

3. I never lived behind the iron curtain (but I guess so)

AM radio is now what it must have been like to live in a totalitarian repressive regime

[bemildred]

4. Land of the free?

Incarceration rate in George W. Bush's USA and Stalin's USSR:

USSR (1950): 1423 per 100,000 population
USA (2002): 2298 per 100,000 population

Incarceration rate for Black men in South Africa before ANC
rule and in contemporary USA:

South Africa (1993): 851 per 100,000
USA (2002): 7150 per 100,000

[teryang]

7. 30 minutes and 33 cents

...that's what the indigent accused of a felony gets from his public defender in this area.

For every dollar the prosecutor gets the defenders office gets 33 cents. The case load is so heavy, the trial lawyer allots 30 minutes to decide on the tactics for disposition of the case. Another 90 minutes may be available for telephone calls, investigation and actual court time. Not enough time to visit defendant in person in the jail "unless it is critical." They use a remote video setup to speak to their own attorney. The average felony trial attorney can expect to do one trial a year out of hundreds of cases.

[Ezlivin]

8. We need a new Voice of America - Beamed INTO the USA

The proletariats in the former USSR were at least secure in the knowledge that they knew the news was propaganda, that politics was really stagecraft and that the nice dachas on the outskirts of Moscow were never going to be flaunted on "The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous".

Here the signal is the noise and there's nothing really to jam.

[bobthedrummer]

9. Well, modulate the wave-forms to control metabolism and emotional

states, Ezlivin, welcome to DU!
:hi:

[papau]

10. nah - they only control 24% of broadcast media, need to add

the rest of Fox that they do not control, plus the right wing management of stations that fly the ABC, CBS, or NBC banner and are not in their corporate control.

I like it that they run under Fox, ABC, CBC, NBC, and god knows what other logo at their various stations, avoiding the consentration rules by owning 100% of station assets - while letting someone else keep the actual license - but with the proven ability even without actual license to send a memo out telling all on the air to promote Bush and dis the Dems or any others that do not line up behind the Cheney war plans for oil.

I wonder just how many stations are left that are not right wing controlled.

Damn good thing that the Reagan administratively ended the Fairness Doctrine, and then veto'd the Law passed by Congress to put the Fairness Doctrine back into our media.

But this is not like the media in the USSR - we get it 24/7/365 - and they were off the air for much of the day.