Saturday, 05 January 2008
by Thomas Boothe and Danielle Follett
... The accusation of partisanship is best understood in the context of the ongoing consolidation of US media into the hands of a few large corporations, which spend millions lobbying the five members of the Federal Communications Commission, upon whom they rely for friendly regulatory policies. This process intensified in the 1990s with measures enacted under President Bill Clinton. According to Eric Klinenberg, professor of sociology at New York University, “the government did not so much deregulate the market as re-regulate it”, allowing “big media companies
expand and consolidate ownership across outlets." The Telecommunications Act of 1996 had especially dramatic effects on radio, allowing a single media company to own eight or more radio stations in a community ...
By late 2001, many mainstream news sources were preparing public opinion to accept an attack on Iraq. When, citing federal officials, these outlets began to weave in information suggesting that “Bin Laden’s evil pal Saddam” was behind postal anthrax attacks on press and politicians, Democracy Now called attention to the fact that “Bush administration officials and the media have persistently tried to link Iraq either to the September 11 attacks or to the anthrax attacks” and that the FBI was following leads in other directions.
Closer to the time of the invasion, when the British press reported that the US government was tapping the phones of Security Council members at UN headquarters, Democracy Now was almost alone in reporting this news in the United States ...
It has had occasional success in influencing corporate news coverage. In March 2004, while the mainstream press was dismissing the coup in Haiti as a popular uprising against a corrupt dictator, it pursued the matter further. In an exclusive interview with exiled Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, it discovered that the US military had forced his resignation at gunpoint and kidnapped him. The extensive coverage obliged mainstream sources to come back to the situation with new questions ...
http://pacificfreepress.com/content/view/2092/81/
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