We Just Might Rekindle the Patriot’s Dream, Bill Moyers

[Echo In Light]

We Just Might Rekindle the Patriot’s Dream
by Bill Moyers

Bill Moyers delivered these remarks Saturday, June 7, 2008 at the National Conference for Media Reform

* * *

Here we are again.

And our numbers are growing.

We were 1700 in Madison four years ago, 2500 in St. Louis a year later, 3200 in Memphis last year. And now here in St. Paul we are 3500 — and counting. You represent millions of Americans who see media consolidation as a corrosive social force. It robs them of their voice in public affairs, pollutes the political culture, and turns the debate over profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.

The patriarch of your movement warned a generation ago of what was coming. In his magisterial book Media Monopoly Ben Bagdikian wrote: “The result of the overwhelming power of relatively narrow corporate ideologies has been the creation of widely established political and economic illusions with little visible contradictions in the media to which a majority of the population is exclusively exposed.”

In other words, what we need to know to make democracy work for all Americans is compromised by media institutions deeply embedded in the power structures of society. Whether employing professional journalists trained at prestigious universities, or polemicists who serve partisan agendas, our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders; organizations whose self-styled mandate is not holding public and private power accountable so there is an equilibrium in society, but aggregating their interlocking interests; organizations whose reward comes from the manufacturing of news and information as profitable consumer commodities rather than the means to empower morally responsible citizens.

Why does it matter? What does the media do, anyway?

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/16/9670/

[RedEarth]

1. KR for a great journalist

[bdamomma]

2. kick

[Psyop Samurai]

3. Only part way finished, but came back to k&r...

Forget the psyop du jour... This is a must-read, folks. Moyers is amazing!

:thumbsup:

[DeepModem Mom]

4. K&R