Just plain damned lies

Obviously from The Conventional and Predictable
Mindset, Bill Moyers want's to 'reform' this
extinct animal called The Media as He Knew It.
He starts his speech by saying so.

Then he goes on to say...

In earlier times our governing bodies tried to
squelch journalistic freedom with the blunt
instruments of the law – padlocks for the presses
and jail cells for outspoken editors and writers.
Over time, with spectacular wartime exceptions,
the courts and the Constitution struck those
weapons out of their hands. But they’ve found new
ones now, in the name of “national security.” The
classifier’s Top Secret stamp, used
indiscriminately, is as potent a silencer as a
writ of arrest. And beyond what is officially
labeled “secret” there hovers a culture of sealed
official lips, opened only to favored media
insiders: of government by leak and innuendo and
spin, of misnamed “public information” offices
that churn out blizzards of releases filled with
self-justifying exaggerations and, occasionally,
just plain damned lies. Censorship without
officially appointed censors.

We can always relie on the Special Interests of
Power to promote themselves in the most positive
of lights. It has always been so, feeding the
public mind just enough to distract or entertain
it. The public info peddlers have developed it
to a fine art.

We'll have to look elsewhere, won't we.

What would happen, however, if the contending
giants of big government and big publishing and
broadcasting ever joined hands? Ever saw eye to
eye in putting the public’s need for news second
to free-market economics? That’s exactly what’s
happening now under the ideological banner of
“deregulation.” Giant megamedia conglomerates
that our founders could not possibly have
envisioned are finding common cause with an
imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce
not the sons and daughters of liberty but the
very kind of bastards that issued from the old
arranged marriage of church and state.

Real free market "deregulation" has happened already
outside of Bill's purview, it seems.

Now anyone with some blogspace can report what they
see fit to report.

Even to bashing old media dinosaurs that wouldn't
know a free market even if it jumped up and bit
'em on the ass.

Now that's deregulation, without anyone but
the participants doing anything but helping themselves.


In case you want to wade thru these many yards of
wet cement, there it is.

I didn't.