Thank you for this. I'd also recommend What's the Matter With Kansas and both books by Mark Crispin Miller: The Bush Dyslexicon and Cruel and Unusual.

Your crusade is nothing new to me. I was a huge fan of Media Whores Online and even was a watcher for more than a year. I've been a media junkie for 35 years and I've seen the horrifying slide of what our foul journalism corps has become.

I've bookmarked your site and will wander over when I can. I'm horriby burnt and discouraged. I finally found some coding I can do that's new and useful--hopefully I can volunteer for a campaign next year as I move on it. A demonstration will occur here soon, perhaps a week away.

I need the distraction. All this fucking yap on the blogs is killing me--fearful, anguished stories as we backtrack a deluge of evil and lies, virtually powerless to stop it.

Good luck.

Rather than the ICM, I suggest that the opposite of a liberal media is not a conservative media, it's a closed media. It's one that is controlled by corporate and state interest and essentially closed to the needs of the public, just the Republican Party is closed and disinterested in the needs of the people.

It's not conservative to create a media full of government and corporate propaganda. That's fascism.

My conservative pro bush boss recently warned me of the dangers of trusting the reporting of such liberal media outlets such as CNN. You see, it's very simple - CNN was founded by Ted turner. Ted Turner is a liberal. CNN is liberal. This man is smart and competant. A seemingly decent individual. One of the better bosses I've ever had. Yet he has no idea. Not a clue. This is the evil we are facing. One day, I may attempt to gather the energy to educate him about a little mom-and-pop operation known as Time Warner-AOL. (Sigh) I am not optimistic he will listen.

Why do any of you pay attention to what goes on behind the beltway. I think it would be far better to declare this government null and void-quit obeying them-they are 90% pimps and have no interest whatsoever for vox populi. Go have some dinner with friends, listen to some good music, quit paying your taxes, throw your TV out the window, if you watch the news no matter what your party preference, you are watching talking heads give you 30 second sound bites filled with lies an misinformation-the sound and the fury signifying nothing-banal bullshit. Your country is being stolen-hellooo wake the fuck up. Elect me as your next president, my IQ is quite a bit higher than shitheads and beneath this vulgar display of anger I actually like people and the last thing I would do is send young men and women to die for no reason whatsoever. These mini swinging dicks need to be yanked the fuck out of D.C. like ahora.
Thanks for the couch
Life without music would be a mistake-Nietzche
and they are doing their best to shit on everything beautiful
Burnie

I've been thinking about this issue for a long time and the problem I have is that if you try to mirror them by talking about "the conservative media" it's presumed you're talking about the more overtly conservative media of Rush, Fox, The Washington Times, etc.

If you talk about "the illiberal media", they are wont to agree, and sometimes use the same term, to refer to the Big Media outlets, they NYT, CNN, ABC/CBS/NBC, Newsweek, Time, and the local papers - but still maintaining that they are "illiberal" because they are biased to the left. (Words have rather confusing meanings to them anyway. They know "illiberal" is a negative word, so it still applies to us rather than them.)

So I've been kind of at a loss to find a term that is as easily understood to mean that the mainstream media is conservative, in the same way that they've succeeded at labelling Big Media as "liberal". The only thing I'm sure of that whenever we hear "liberal media" we have to make clear that they can only be talking about The Nation and AAR, since there's not much else out there that can accurately be called "liberal".

Neocon News (2N)

Simple, Avedon:

The Corporatist Media.

Its not spin, its a description of the ideology that drives their Corporate decision making. Corporatism does not equal Neoconservatism. Corporatism does not equal Social Conservatism. Corporatism does not equal fascism.

But Corporatism allows for the festering of all three, due to many societal and cultural factors affecting both the media market as well as the Corporate editors themselves. Libertarians would say something like "Americans want to live in a free capitalist society." What they really want is to have the unchecked ability to run wanton over the unlucky, the poor, and the uneducated. Unchecked Social-Economic Darwinism - the heart and soul of Corporatism.

Government's efforts to manipulate and encourage consolidation acting concurrently with basic Corporatist goals (short term capitalization) results in Propaganda which can lead to Fascism if left unchecked. There is simply too much common ground shared between the Neoconservatives of K-Street and the Corporatist interest from all sides. The difference being that the Neoconservatives running our government act with intent, the Corporatists are an apathetic bunch abusing their power to influence society in the pursuit of greed and ego.

What we have is a re-birth of the age of unchecked monopoly in critical sectors of private enterprise (media, defense, energy, transportation, telecommunications, etc). With present day technology, growth, and global markets, the opportunity for gross abuse and hoarding of wealth is going to be quite a bit more terrifying than it was before the Sherman Act put a stop to it a century ago.

The enemy of Corporatism is competition. Monopoly is each Corporation's ultimate goal. Thus, either we find a legion of George Soros types to wage war in the market, or we dust off Teddy Roosevelt's big stick and do some trust busting.

Thanks, Tampa Student. I don't know why I didn't think of that, since I refer to them as "corporatists" all the time anyway.

"Corporatist"...hmmm.

Thanks for the feedback. Let me think about this some more (I guess, ICM = Insidious Corporatist Media doesn't sound too bad).

If this works, let me suggest-

The Ministry of Truth.
The Ministry of Love.