By Dean Henderson
One of the great things about traveling overseas is that you don’t tend to watch much television. Fine by me. I think if every American tossed their tube there would be a revolution inside of a week. It has long been the primary tool of the global elite in the brainwashing of the masses.
When we do have a room with a TV while travelling we are always struck by the varying quality of the international news channels. In Thailand we got Le Monde out of France, the British BBC, DW from Germany, China’s CCTV, Al Jazeera from Qatar, NHK out of Japan, as well as news channels from South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, Russia and the US.
What is most disturbing is that the US news – Fox News and CNN – are far and away the worst. In fact they are not even news channels. They titulate and entain with their Ken and Barbie fashion show, hiring illiterate supermodels to deliver the daily dose of gossip column quality distraction.
My wife had a great idea for a t-shirt: FOX- Fear Or Xenophobia. I won’t bother to define the latter word since those who don’t know what it means are problem busy watching, well, Fox News. From the scary Swine Flu to the ominous Guantanamo prisoners who would surely somehow bomb New York if tried there, to the goulish ”socialist” health care bill. Every purported news story on Fox News one morning was instead a giant fear bomb dropped on the viewer to put them into a mindless inert state of blind obedience to some invisible right-wing robocop fascist corporate state.
Al-Jazeera is one the best news channel I watched there. That’s why many of the best US and European journalists including David Frost have been hired away from the fluff channels and now work for Al-Jazeera. Yet al-Jazeera is barely shown in the US. Ostensibly, I suppose, because Fox has told it’s viewers that it is run by “those people who attacked us”? Ignorance and fear are a very bad combination.
Al-Jazeera has, however, gained a foothold in the US. Their recent purchase of Current TV should expand their presence. I would encourage all of you to write a letter of support to both your Congressperson and the FCC in support of this excellent news source. While you’re at it, suggest the possibility that Fox News and CNN have, by virtue of their dumbing down of the population, become a threat to our national security and that their licenses shoud be revoked.
Two even better television news networks are Russia’s RT News and Iran’s Press TV. I have recently had the honor of working with the latter network, which is owned by the government of Iran. Recently Press TV was dropped by Eurosat in a blatant act of censorship by the EU. You will find links to both of these excellent news sources in the links section of this blog.
News media have a contractual obligation to serve the public good. All news has a certain bias, if only because of what is considered newsworthy in the first place. A diversity of opinion is healthy in a democracy. But the public owns the nation’s airwaves, which the FCC is charged with doling out to radio and TV stations. The public then, has the right to decide on a democratic basis who gets to use those airwaves. It’s not about “money equals free speech”, as the whacko far right would have us believe. The Constitution says nothing about that. It’s about public airwaves employed for the public good.