Thread: Junk Food News and Manufactured Distraction

A term used often by the independent news organization Project Censored, junk food news refers to information that does not serve a purpose. Good examples of this include the crap that is in People's magazine, Newsweek, and Time. Manufactured distraction is a play on the book by Chomsky and Herman entitled "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media".

The free media's role in a democracy is to raise public awareness, promote public debate, and add information to the marketplace of ideas. That said, it brings me great disgust to address the issue of rising junk food news and manufactured distraction.

One terrible news publication, if you could call it that, is the Huffington Post. Their article on Britney Spears was especially stupid:

"Britney Spears and her son Jayden James Ferderline are gonna work it on out!
The circus singer and her four-year-old put in some time at the kiddie gym in Los Angeles on Thursday, getting some exercise and looking extremely cute while doing so. While Jayden opted for a Batman t-shirt accessorized with a fake tattoo on his neck, Brit-Brit went with a black backless number that brought a little glamor to the workout."

I am going to make sure the press comes and watches me lift weights the next time I go to the gym. That would be so cool if people could watch me work the bicep on national television. I will be sure to wear my sexy sleeve-less shirt and blue shorts. The girls will be so impressed!

Then there was that utterly stupid article about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's hair.

"Hillary Clinton worked a new 'do on Sunday at the United Nations, using a jaw clip to keep her locks off her face. The Secretary of State is no stranger to hair accessories, breaking out an occasional headband here and there, but what do you think of her latest coif? Take a look and let us know."

Below the text is a picture of her and a multiple-choice question: is Hillary's hair clip too casual for the U.N.? Users have the option of selecting yes, no, or who cares what she wears?

just out of curiosity, I voted "who cares what she wears", and the results:

Yes: 42.51%
No: 28.85%
Who cares what she wears?: 27.64%

Why is it news outlets find this vile garbage newsworthy? Are their ad sponsors so anal about what they publish that they cannot find anything better to report on? Or are the editors involved in some conspiracy where they act like good people to the public, but behind closed doors they are trying to make us all stupid so they can get away with something scandalous?

The corporate media feed the American public this disgusting junk food news 24 hours a day. It is their diet.

A while ago I listened to Media Roots interview columnist Chris Hedges, author of Death of the Liberal Class and American Fascists. Hedges talked about the disintegration of the media. When big corporations took ownership of the media, the communication system that connected buyer to seller ended. In the traditional media system, news articles were researched and written, evaluated and fact-checked, and released to the subscribers and news stands. Back then the news outlets wrote for the citizens alone. Today the corporate-run news outlets have to keep such a close eye on their profit-margins, so they only write what sells. They face many problems: economic pressure from advertisers, and legal pressure from lawsuits. Under such tight control, they must rely on what the "official" government sources say at press conferences and releases. Since they want to attract advertisers, a source of their profits, they publish news favorable to big companies they do business with and keep quiet about bad news unfavorable to their ad sponsors. Look at People's magazine. It is nothing more than a booklet of ads and ads disguised as news articles. Democracy depends on journalism, or, more specifically, democracy depends on the stories we tell. In the present-day political economy of the mass media, the citizens only hear the stories that sell.

The best case in point involves reporters Jane Akre and her husband, Steve Wilson. Fox News assigned them a story on Monsanto's Bovine Growth Hormone, which had links to cancer. They planned on running the story, but Monsanto bought ads and threatened to sue Fox News. One of the editors wanted to pay them to go away and keep quiet about the dangerous growth hormone, and they refused. So the editor made them rewrite the story more than 80 times with Fox News's attorney present. They manipulated all the information to make it appear Monsanto was not guilty. It was obvious the editors were only stalling until the first window of Akre's and Wilson's contract came up so they could be fired. When it did, they gave them the boot, and the married couple sued them because they now had the whistle blower status. One of the lawyers flat-out admitted the company fired them for refusing to distort the news. After Akre and Wilson won the first court case, Fox appealed and the court ruled in favor of the news outet; declaring it was not illegal to distort the news. Fox even reported on the court case against them, and said "Fox News obviously does not distort the news". The reporter who said that lied right through his teeth. The jury ruled unanimously that the company fired Akre and Wilson for refusing to lie. For Jane Akre's full story, read the award-winning book Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, and see the documentary The Corporation.

Fox News is easily the worst news program in America. It is nothing more than a 24/7 GOP campaign advertisement. The editors only run the stories that purposely make Democrats look stupid and Republicans look smart. The O'Reilly Factor intentionally covers stories that upset non-conservatives. He insisted on having Jeremy Glick, whose father was killed in the 9/11/01 terrorist attacks, on the show. Glick endorsed an ad saying America was a terrorist nation. During the interview with O'Reilly, Glick tried to tell him that America was indeed a terrorist nation, as the CIA had trained Al Qaeda to help the U.S. Government battle the Soviets during the 1980s, then Al Qaeda used their CIA-trained skills to attack the World Trade Center in 2001. But O'Reilly kept interrupting him and cut his microphone. During the next episode, O'Reilly said Glick was rude on the show, when in reality a security guard had to escort Glick out of the news station for fear of someone attacking him. O'Reilly even endorsed Peter King's congressional hearings on Islamic extremism, when almost twice as many domestic terrorism cases involve non-Muslims than Muslims, and many of them have even helped catch terrorists. But an argument like that is typical of O'Reilly. He doesn't like Mexican immigrants because they challenge the "white Christian male power structure" that he is a part of.

Given the garbage known as advertorials (the words "advertisement" and "editorial" combined) the reporters on Fox News spew out, it is no surprise the corporation had the most misinformed viewers in the country. Hardly any of them knew what party held a majority of seats in the U.S. Congress, nor knew whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But it is not as though MSNBC is any better. I do not know that much about it, but it has donated money to Democrats, and is basically just a liberal version of Fox News.

So, what can we do for media reform? The problem is, as Hedges pointed out, the reporters for independent news outlets are not paid for their work. Democracy Now and Propublica depend on donations from viewers, and they do not sell their work to the readers and viewers. So the best action to take now would be to donate more to news outlets like the previously mentioned and other independent media. I hope someday our media can inform us, instead of distract us.

Get Netflix and go to the library for books. There are plenty of legal and illegal ways to get stations like Fox News, CNN, Discovery, The History Channel, etc on the Internet.

NPR for everything else. They've pissed off both Conservatives and Liberals in the past so they seem like an obvious choice.