| R wrote:
|
| >how far back does your memory go? if you're old enough, haven't you
noticed
| >some change from the days of edward r morrow to today, nationally?
|
| I'm 50, so my memory of Murrow is very dim. These media histories are
| always very selective. Murrow had many virtues but he still was years
| too late in going after McCarthy.
quite true. it's very hard to understand the amount of terror associated with the mcCarthy purges unless one lived through them or had close relatives who lived through them. just being called a communist could cost a person their job and with it their families. which is why today calling a person a communist is slander and libel per se, as i recall, unless it's provable beyond all doubt.
murrow was the only one to go after mcCarthy until it became safe.
murrow wasn't perfect. my point was that there's no one like him today anywhere in the mass corp media. if he were a young man today, he'd have to look for work elsewhere.
CBS kept blacklisting Commies even
| after McC's censure by the Senate.
true. just as the media black list investigative reporters today, and denies it. the black lists in those days hit obvious targets which where out of favor with the power elite and the bulk of society. today, black lists hit everything.
Going way back, when Alexander
| Woollcott delivered an anti-Nazi commentary on CBS radio in 1935,
| Paley freaked out, imposing a new "fairness policy": "broadcasting
| must forever be militantly nonpartisan." Paley consciously picked the
| narcotic Cronkite as Murrow's successor - someone safe and
| unthreatening.
that's right. |
| Oh there was the Woodward & Bernstein moment but the establishment
| had already turned on Nixon, and after it was over, Katharine Graham
| said "never again."
right again. yet there was a woodward and bernstein, at least once. now woodward writes for the CIA.
|
| So I'm still not clear on what the good is that's set against the
| concentrated bad.
|
| Doug
doug, you've given two marvelous examples of what media concentration can do that's bad. the more concentrated, the more concentrated bad. apart from paley's cowardice and grahams, there was always the chance that something would get published that was meaningful. with today's concentration, and the further concentration to come, the chance is gone. not only are we treated to garbage media that says nothing, we get unedited CIA/govt propaganda wall to wall. the chance for a small, dissenting media outlet, press or TV or radio, to survive and reach a larger audience than today's specialty political magazines, for example, is gone.
did you listen to the speaches nathan's dissenting democrat on the FCC board gave? didn't they communicate anything to you which sheds light on your question? don't the analyses of FAIR and other media watch dogs give you anything to go on?
R
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