1 So, I guess somebody has just awakened to the fact that truth is valuable and rare and not necessarily availible to anyone who cares to gawp at a TV set. You get what you pay for. There is no more than 25 cents worth of truth in a newspaper, nor has there ever been, nor should there be. "Citizens of the [U.S. and U.K] are far more distrustful of the mainstream media than are citizens in developing countries." Both countries are involved in military adventures, and we have caught some propaganda over that, but I don't think this accounts for the discrepancy. Both the U.S. and the U.K. have something also not found in screwed-up countries: a vigorous free market. Amercans and Brits are bombarded from birth with advertisements; that is, we are trained to deal with sophisticated professional liars who are out after our money. Americans who don't learn to be real skeptical real quick get ripped off real fast. Our attitude toward the news is just an extension of our suspicion of all mass-marketed products. Your news is no more likely to be scrupulously balanced and truthful than your laundry soap is to be new and improved.

2 uh statistics ...... Proper analysis first requires an absence of emotion .Statistics. are soooo easy to manipulate to show whatever one wishes. It is a temptation hard to resist. While it is true that Fox,being the one and only, right wing broadcaster, had the highest rating of trust, the sum total left wing stations had a total of TWICE all those on the right. So in brief 11% trust the right wing station (s) 11% trust most the centrist (CNN) and 22% trust the left wing stations. In a highly competitive and profit/prestige driven enviorment the American people have made their selections. The figure that I found most attention grabbing was the people who most trust PBS. At 3% it was higher than I expected.

3 Interesting that Fox, the rightwing network, garnered the highest level of trust amongs all major networks, yet the majority of righwing blogsites have made an industry of bemoaning/villafying/delegitimizing the MSM. What to make of it? Fox isn't MSM (multi-billion dollar budgets seem to rule that out)? Fox has diehard "fans" along the lines of talk radio, unlike the other networks who rely on "viewers"? Despite the rhetoricc, rightwingers are bigger media dupes? What is it?

4 I have less trust for the mainstream media. Up until a couple of weeks ago I thought the media was intentionally manipulating the population of this country in order to further a political agenda. I have since modified this view, albeit slightly. I am now comming to the conclusion that it is the major media itself that is being manipulated. If one can control the message the reporters are fed, then one can control the message being fed to the people. PR companies such as Fenton Communications have dozens of groups as clients. This allows Fenton to spoon feed information to reporters and package the message in a consistant manner so the various clients don't work at cross purposes to each other. The result is a very broad array or sources for journalists to interview and columns for them to print that all create the same general picture. Having all of these groups' messages fine tuned by the same PR agency offers them a certain "economy of scale" when it comes to getting their message out and they can reinforce each other. The net result is that the major media outlets are handed a particular viewpoint in a silver platter but because the message seems to come from so many different sources, it isn't immediately apparent that all of this information is being managed from a central location such as Fenton Communications. Our journalists have gotten lazy and are allowing themselves to be spoon fed the agenda, the message, the issues, everything. Organizations like Fenton (though I admit, I haven't seen any others in addition to them quite as complete in their ownership of a political agenda) are able to make an issue the hot topic of the week by getting interviews and columns into the media in little mini issue-blitzes. You might some a source from The Center for This That and The Other quoted in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Christian Science Monitor all within a week or two from each other. Possibly even different individuals from the same group will interview with various outlets. The issue then becomes a "hot topic" and the second string picks the story up but Fenton has already set the tone, they control the issue. I am getting a clearer picture of what is going on and it is huge but I am not yet to the point of being able to explain it in a succint manner. It is kind of like trying to desccribe a camel to someone who has never seen a mammal before. So basically, it isn't so much the media manipulating us as it is the media itself being manipulated and it could be that Fox doesn't allow itself to be manipulated as easily. O'Reilly has noted some interesting Fenton Communications links in his show years ago but the story doesn't gain any traction with the main media and why should it? It is Fenton itself that controls the message those journalists get. Reporters seem to be too lazy or too timid to go out on a limb and expose this for what it is. We need some old reporter nearing retirement to bust this whole scam open. Maybe someone like a Woodward (but probably not Woodward).

5 Here is just one example of Fenton's reach and how they manipulate the media: http://tinyurl.com/jozb2

6 crosspatch: good article. There were a couple things mentioned in there I'd already known of, but didn't know who was behind it. Particularly the part about organic foods. They're not proven at all to be better for you. In fact, sometimes they're worse.

7 BTW, I've added you to my reading list. Good blog.

8 What? they didn't poll Canada? I'm slightly offended (I bet the trust in MSM is low here too)