As an American citizen...
or American resident, it is your duty to understand certain things about your nation and it's recent history, and potential future. You are unlikely to learn these things by watching the media or surfing corporate websites, but the information can help you know your country and the world better. By sewing together the facts like McGruff, the crime dog, you will become a more learned individual and capable of participating in democracy.

Democracy is a cookoff, not a buffet. America is a representative republic. All of our modern laws are voted upon by elected officials, all of whom are wealthy and spend a considerable amount of money on their campaigns. The only way to collect enough votes to get elected is to be able to afford to publicize yourself in major media, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars traveling and speaking before large audiences, or by getting a political party to give you the money to do this.

The two parties are democrats and republicans. Both have enormous voter support and registration, both pull in millions of dollars per campaign and are represented in every major and most minor elections in every state. Few other parties have public support or are represented.

Because mass media is so expensive and there are so many people to reach, the richest folk get the most airtime and poorer folk are left relatively disorganized. This leaves the agenda of the nation primarily decided by the richest folk, who often also have interest in the ways they have become wealthy, such as owning a large company or having a seat in government. The rich folk in charge of networks and companies can often even decide the sway of the topic they brought up by choosing what to have reporters and publicized people say or not say about it. Large radio and television audiences in particular are shut out of the communications process almost completely, and all but entirely on a national level.

Now, a brief movie clip. In this clip, George W Bush forbids the FBI from investigating Al-Qaeda in executive order W-199i, issued months before the 9/11/01 disasters. Any FBI agent who investigates Al-Qaeda before this time would be arrested for breaching national security. [If the link is down, mamma or google will still be up and you can search for the video or information on the story there.]

Media companies must spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to maintain licensures, pay staff and personalities, acquire programming, set up broadcast towers and studios, and bring the signal to people in every city in the country. They also lobby the government and maintain corporate status. This requires hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily coming from advertisers. Since these corporations need these advertisers' money, they are often willing to sacrifice news in order to get or keep the advertising. Controversial stories about companies or products or the industry are unlikely to be aired because of this conflict of interests.

Furthermore, since the media company is a publicly trading corporation, they probably have some interest in the company that advertises with them, or the advertising company has some stock in the media company. And if a story breaks that hurts the economy or consumer confidence, the media company will have less business and be responsible for propagating information that caused the downturn. The same thing happens in the entertainment industry, except they are not held to the responsibilities of the press. For these reasons, the media is unable to serve as an accurate purveyor of the social news.

You may also want to read this article, or here, which describe how George W Bush had networks air false news stories, claiming they were true. This is crime.

The White House is a primary section of news for most media outlets, and they choose when and how, and often to whom, to dispense it. This gives them massive public sway over media. Any media outlet that does not show the government in a favorable light or cooperate fully with them is likely to be last in line or not picked for distribution, and get the news from their competetors. This is also a very unattractive situation for a news organization facing a budgets and markets of scores of millions, likely to be avoided rather than break hard news.

So I break it, along with others on the internet, where information is basically free and widespread minus publicity. The publicity is yours. Examine http://weeklyworldthingy.blogspot.com for a duplicate of selections from this page and for additional media analysis.

Expect more from this site every day, and if you get the chance link it to your site or tell someone who know and care about it. You can sign up to dispense news you care about at www.blogger.com, or a billion other blogging sites. This kind of news source relies on its news being interesting and valuable rather than all over the front page, and on viewers who care and search it out, and want others to know. I want YOU to know.