Well, I would consider Congress, the President, and all mainstream media (including PBS) to be complicit in the crime-spree America has engaged upon under the name of "war on terror." PBS may have ACTED against the war in Iraq in some way (initially--possibly to give the appearance that there is no influence), but did ANY of the stations display horrible outrage that Congress and the President conspired (somehow) to override the Constitution. By this I mean that Congress did not officially declare war on Iraq (presumably because there was NO GOOD REASON), but somehow managed to "authorize" the President's criminal activities (you can bet MONEY is involved at many levels somehow--including the Congressional and media pockets).
Things like the Abu Ghraib scandal make me very concerned about what is taught in our military--but it is played off as some isolated incident of some few soldiers. Hah! And then the Commander-in-chief appoints pro-torture people to important posts--like Gonzalez and Chertoff.
When you've got a Congress and a President that apparently utterly despise the Constitution, something is wrong. It's not just Bush...it's not the just the republicans...it's leaders at all levels of BOTH parties. BOTH parties HATE the Constitution and lie constantly (and have for decades).
Look for these police-state propaganda messages common in many programs:
- What the police need (for our safety, of course) is the ability to track anybody anytime (or more information on everybody)
- Constitutional rights are "technicalities" that impede justice
- the government has only your best interest at heart, but is sometimes inefficient at doing its job...it probably needs more power
- To keep America safe, we need stricter gun control laws
- It is good for police and military to work together
What's funny to me is that people believe that the government doesn't control the media in this country. There's this huge potential to influence hundreds of millions of people in minutes, hours, or days (in the case of movies in theaters), but the government doesn't control it--except maybe for the rating system. And the government doesn't control the schools it funds, either, which is only the second easiest way to influence the masses (start when they're young, too). I mean, sure, federally funded schools teach federally approved materials using federally approved teaching methods learned at similarly federally funded colleges to children some 40 hours per week, but there is no way that the government has mixed any propaganda in any of this to influence the public in any way.
The bad thing about good propaganda is it won't LOOK like propaganda at all.
--TheLit
This message has been edited by TheLiteralist, 02-14-2005 06:03 AM
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