Fair & Balanced?

This morning I watched the documentary ‘Outfoxed‘ by Robert Greenwald. It’s about how Fox News in the USA is not a fair & balanced media channel, that it’s full of lies and right-wing propaganda. I didn’t really need a documentary to tell me this because I knew already but it was insightful nevertheless.

Watching this comes a day after I wrote a post on whether Rupert Murdoch was the most divisive figure in the UK newspaper industry on my Media blog. In it I likened him to “the modern day equivalent of Joseph Goebbels“. I stand by this statement as he has constructed a corporate propaganda machine the likes of which are unprecedented in the history of the world. His NewsCorp conglomerate does push a political agenda and isn’t a neutral organisation. It uses fear to achieve this goals, be afraid of terrorism, muslims, foreigners, immigrants, blacks, gays, socialists, teenagers and anyone who is different. They’re all out to get you, so look to your government for security, hand over civil liberties and keep a gun under your bed.

The United States of America does have free speech, so does the United Kingdom, but both their media is dominated by a cultural hegemony of capitalist ideas. A media controlled by private corporations isn’t too different from a state in which the media is controlled by the government. When it can’t promote it’s own ideas it turns the news into entertainment by reporting sensationalist non-stories about celebrity culture. There’s no such thing as a ‘slow news day’, only a lazy journalist day.

On Thursday, the BBC announced it would be scaling down it’s website because it was competing with private news companies (such as NewsCorp). A recognised national institution like the BBC should be able to ward off such nonsense. I suggest that instead of cutting the news, they cut Jeremy Clarkson, Jonathan Ross and Russel Brand – people who have no place on national television.

I’d also like to mention a couple of blogs I follow which expose the lies of the corporate media:

• Mailwatch – scrutitises the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. The front page of each newspaper is uploaded daily to be commented upon.
• The enemies of reason – general musings and an analysis of the lies printed in various papers.
• Angry mob – I don’t actually subscribe to it as I only came across it last week, but it’s more of the same scrutiny and analysis.
• Bad science – written by Ben Goldacre. He exposes bogus scientific stories which aren’t properly researched.