“Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis,

Well worth the time to read this article----


http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/10/25/journalism-and-its-discontents/


.......The growth of a countervailing conservative media machine has also been a decisive political factor in mobilizing public opinion and insulating a part of it from contamination of “liberal bias.” In October 2004, the University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes conducted a study, “The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters,” revealing that 72 percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam Hussein had WMD and that it had been proven, even though there had been extensive news reports from the Iraq Survey Group that it had found no WMD. Furthermore, 75 percent of Bush supporters believed that Saddam was substantially helping al Qaeda, 63 percent believed that that evidence had been found, 60 percent believed that experts agreed with that conclusion, and 55 percent believed that the 9/11 Commission had proven the point, even though it proved exactly the opposite. Bush supporters did not hold these misperceptions because of inattention to the news. Another University of Maryland study, “Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War,” revealed that misperceptions varied significantly according to news sources and that higher levels of exposure to Fox News in particular compounded factual misperceptions and approval of Bush. Eighty percent of those who cited Fox News as a major source of their information suffered serious misperceptions, according to the study, compared to 23 percent citing National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System.

“Without protection against propaganda, without standards of evidence, without criteria of emphasis, the living substance of all popular decision is exposed to every prejudice and to infinite exploitation,” Lippmann wrote in Liberty and the News. “The quack, the charlatan, the jingo, and the terrorist, can flourish only where the audience is deprived of independent access to information.” Yet Lippmann assumed that the people were passive, acted upon by politically motivated elites. Today, about one-third of the public actively chooses sources of information that play to their prejudices. The readers, listeners, and viewers of the Drudge Report, the Rush Limbaugh show, and Fox News have consciously selected “the quack, the charlatan, the jingo” to seal themselves from objective information. The “breakdown of the means of public knowledge,” as Lippmann called it, rests on a carefully cultivated preference for crank opinion over unsettling fact. The more reality defies this public’s understanding, the more fervently it redoubles its resistance to it, embracing the distorted stereotype as the only true account.

The entrenchment and exploitation of this segment of public opinion has become big business and political necessity on the right. In May 2003, Matt Labash, a writer for the neoconservative journal The Weekly Standard (published by Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News), explained how the conservative attack on “liberal bias” operated as a profitable game. “While all these hand-wringing Freedom Forum types talk about objectivity, the conservative media likes to rap the liberal media on the knuckles for not being objective,” he said. “We’ve created this cottage industry in which it pays to be un-objective. It pays to be subjective as much as possible. It’s a great way to have your cake and eat it too. Criticize other people for not being objective. Be as subjective as you want. It’s a great little racket. I’m glad we found it actually.”

The degree to which this “great little racket” has been accepted and assimilated by members of the press was expressed by Mark Halperin, then political editor of ABC News, in an appearance on a right-wing radio talk show in October 2006:.........

"creating reality" and "public myths".

It is why they all "fail" at the day-to-day governance of their subjects. Well, that and the fact that Nazis and Neoeocons and all of them Left or Right, despise the people they rule and defraud.

stupid? If not, we're screwn.:(