“roughly 80 percent” of the media is controlled by no more than six, and possibly as few as four, corporations.

Washington's Blog

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Rather pointed out that “roughly 80 percent” of the media is controlled by no more than six, and possibly as few as four, corporations.

This is only newsworthy because Rather said it. This fact has been documented for years, as shown by the following must-see charts prepared by:

• Media Channel

• The Nation

• Free Press

And check out this list of interlocking directorates of big media companies from Fairness and Accuracy in Media, and this resource from the Columbia Journalism Review to research a particular company.

This image gives a sense of the decline in diversity in media ownership over the last couple of decades:

Pulitzer prize: networks have been active participants in a Pentagon sponsored propaganda campaign intended to sell the Iraq and Afghanistan wars

The Creek | | Pulitzer Prize Winning Story News Networks Won’t Report | | By Matt Sullivan / RCFP

The Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting was awarded last month to David Barstow of the New York Times but you didn’t hear a word about it from the TV and cable networks. The reason for their silence is obvious; they don’t want you to know what Barstow revealed: that the networks have been active participants in a Pentagon sponsored propaganda campaign intended to sell the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (among other things) to the American public.

In the words of the Pulitzer Committee, Barstow’s prize was “for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.”

The prize-winning stories appeared in The New York Times on April 20, 2008 and November 29, 2008 and were the product of a three year “Freedom of Information” effort to wrench documentation of the propaganda effort out of the Department of Defense (DoD).

Barstow revealed Pentagon documents that repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration themes and messages to millions of Americans as if were their their own opinions.

The Pentagon-controlled pundits, most of them retired generals, were given hundreds of classified Pentagon briefings, provided with Pentagon-approved talking points and flown at Pentagon expense to Iraq and other sites. But this extraordinary access came with a condition. “Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.” In their television appearances, the military analysts did not disclose their ties to the Pentagon, let alone that they were its surrogates. The military analysts were little more than puppets for the Pentagon. In the words of Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret who was a Fox News military analyst, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.’”

David Barstow wrote, “Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.”

The blatant refusal of the TV and cable news organizations involved to even mention what Barstow uncovered in his reporting, reveals a lot about the depth of the networks’ involvement in the deception. In fact, many of the Pentagon sponsored “analysts” named in Barstow’s story are still employed, still being given air time and are still spinning their views at the very same cable news outlets that now refuse to inform viewers about this Pulitzer Prize winning story. ...

OpEdNews � Fascism Coming to a Court Near You; Corporate Personhood and the Roberts' Court

OpEdNews � Fascism Coming to a Court Near You; Corporate Personhood and the Roberts' Court

by Thom Hartmann Page 1 of 3 page(s) www.opednews.com

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Get ready.

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This new case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, presents the best opportunity for the Roberts Court to use its five vote majority to totally re-write the face of politics in America, rolling us back to the pre-1907 era of the Robber Barons.

As Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker ("No More Mr. Nice Guy"): "In every major case since he became the nation's seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party."

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Chief Justice Roberts weighed in, too, in the main decision. It's a fascinating decision to read - and search for occurrences of the word "corporation" - and here's one of Roberts' more convoluted observations in defense of corporate free speech rights:

Accepting the notion that a ban on campaign speech could also embrace issue advocacy would call into question our holding in Bellotti that the corporate identity of a speaker does not strip corporations of all free speech rights. It would be a constitutional 'bait and switch' to conclude that corporate campaign speech may be banned in part because corporate issue advocacy is not, and then assert that corporate issue advocacy may be banned as well, pursuant to the same asserted compelling interest, through a broad conception of what constitutes the functional equivalent of campaign speech, or by relying on the inability to distinguish campaign speech from issue advocacy.

Bottom line - corporate free speech rights are Real Rights that Must Be Respected.

Justice Souter wrote a rather frightening dissent (this was a 5-4 decision, with the usual right-wing suspects on the "5" side): "Finally, it goes without saying that nothing has changed about the facts. In Justice Frankfurter's words, they demonstrate a threat to 'the integrity of our electoral process, which for a century now Congress has repeatedly found to be imperiled by corporate, and later union, money: witness the Tillman Act, Taft-Hartley, FECA, and BCRA.

"McConnell was our latest decision vindicating clear and reasonable boundaries that Congress has drawn to limit 'the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth,' and the decision could claim the justification of ongoing fact as well as decisional history in recognizing Congress's authority to protect the integrity of elections from the distortion of corporate and union funds.

"After today, the ban on contributions by corporations and unions and the limitation on their corrosive spending when they enter the political arena are open to easy circumvention, and the possibilities for regulating corporate and union campaign money are unclear.

"The ban on contributions will mean nothing much, now that companies and unions can save candidates the expense of advertising directly, simply by running 'issue ads' without express advocacy, or by funneling the money through an independent corporation like Wisconsin Right To Life."

Sounding almost depressed, Souter closed his dissent with these words: "I cannot tell what the future will force upon us, but I respectfully dissent from this judgment today." ...

Raw Story � Will Supreme Court allow unlimited corporate contributions to election campaigns?

Raw Story � Will Supreme Court allow unlimited corporate contributions to election campaigns?

The most troubling part of the court’s action is the brave new world of politics it could usher in. Auto companies that receive multibillion-dollar bailouts could spend vast sums to re-elect the same officials who hand them the money. If Exxon Mobil or Wal-Mart wants something from a member of Congress, it could threaten to spend as much as it takes to defeat him or her in the next election.

– From an editorial in the New York Times, July 4, 2009

If this editorial in the Times has it right, American democracy could be in for a rough ride in the coming years.

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This is important because that was the Supreme Court case which ruled that restrictions on campaign contributions by corporations, unions and other organizations were legal despite their infringement on First Amendment rights.

Simply put, if the Supreme Court decides to overturn Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, it will mean that any restrictions on campaign spending by corporations will be invalid because they violate those corporations’ right to freedom of speech.

“The court, at the very least, is considering reversing more than 100 years of campaign finance precedent prohibiting corporate spending,” Paul Ryan, associate legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, told The Hill. “It would be a pretty large step, and remarkable step, for the court to overturn a century of public policy.”

Judicial observers fear overturning the 1989 ruling would mark the beginning of a wild, unbridled era where elections are won by the highest bidder.

“Banks like Citigroup, investment firms like Merrill Lynch, insurance companies like AIG and corporations like General Motors and Chrysler would be free to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of their corporation’s wealth” on elections, Fred Wertheimer, president of advocacy group Democracy 21, told the Washington Post. ....