How the media help Bush stay in office and amass power

it's about time we faced the fact that we do not have a free press, we have propaganda organs...

(thanks to jamison foser at media matters...)

Six months into the Iraq war, a study by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland found that most people who get their news from Fox News, CNN, or the three broadcast networks had serious mistaken beliefs about Iraq -- that U.S.-led forces had already found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there, that links between Iraq and Al Qaeda had been found, that world public opinion approved of the war in Iraq, or some combination of the three. Eighty percent of Fox viewers held at least one of these mistaken beliefs, as did 71 percent of CBS viewers, 61 percent of ABC viewers, and 55 percent of NBC and CNN viewers -- clear majorities in all cases. Nearly half of those who got their news from the print media held one of these mistaken beliefs; among consumers of public broadcasting, only 23 percent did.

These mistaken beliefs had serious consequences: People who believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction were more likely to support the war; people who supported the war were more likely to vote for President Bush, and so on. The world's greatest democracy made a series of decisions about war and peace; life and death; and about the world we will pass on to our children, all based on faulty information.

[...]

And how did they come to believe these false things? Bush administration lies and misstatements surely played a role. But so did news organizations that repeated those lies and misstatements, either in their own voice or by quoting administration officials and war proponents, without correcting the misstatements. News organizations that, long after it had been established that Iraq did not have WMD, treated it as an open question with two equally valid viewpoints. News organizations whose coverage was "strikingly one-sided" and that refused to give "the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale," as Howard Kurtz and Leonard Downie of The Washington Post described their newspaper's coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war. News organizations that falsely told viewers that WMD had actually been found. Reporters who have so thoroughly absorbed the prevailing spin that they robotically repeat it even in 2006.

That's why conservative misinformation in the media is the most significant issue of our time: Because the media shape our understanding of every other issue.

Because the world's greatest democracy made a decision to go to war, and to re-elect a president, based on false information -- false information spread by the media.

[...]

Whatever issue you care most about, the media are likely skewing the public debate badly.

the battle for control of the last remaining bastion of free speech and un-spun information, the internet, is playing out before our eyes... for many of us, were it not for the internet, we would be completely at sea regarding the daily destruction of everything that means anything in this country... and when it's gone, what then...?

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