Who Controls The News

 This is article #1 of 5 for random week.

If you did not already think that Rupert Murdoch was a twat, then the recent news should have you thinking otherwise. Fox News, also owned by Murdoch, has been doing a lackluster job reporting on the issue; by simply not reporting on it. Recently, this aired on Fox News:

The problem with this article is that Murdoch's tabloid was doing the phone hacking! I remember in fifth grade when my teacher told us how lucky we were to live in America because we have freedom of press. How when the moon landing happened, in Russia there was no reporting on story because they didn't have freedom of press, and they were jealous. I'm sure.

Fox has done other misleading things too. When Ron Paul won in a poll against Mitt Romney, Fox News superimposed boos over the announcement of him winning. I am not even fucking kidding:

How long are we really going to put up with this bullshit?

I really hope it is apparent to all of us that all of our news sources are owned by companies. ABC is owned by Disney, NBC is owned by GE and Comcast, CBS by Westinghouse, etceteria. The finer points of this article can be summed up by this TV Funhouse clip from SNL:

How absurd is it when a cartoon pointing out media control, is owned by NBC. By the way, this video only aired once and was pulled for defaming GE  and alluding to Don Olhmeyer as the reason why Norm MacDonald was fired (Olhmeyer was a friend of O.J. Simpson and many of McDonald's jokes, especially on Weekend Update, lampooned the issue).

Coca-Cola created Fanta to sell
in Germany during the 1940s

The problem with this whole situation is apparent for reasons outside of our "news" being a shell of anything close to informative. Take for example The History Channel, which is owned by A&E, which in turn is owned by Disney, NBC (GE), and The Hearst Corporation. When you watch the History Channel, you are getting a revisionist view of history, which apparently only consists of the Romans, Nazi Germany, and UFOs. The reasons why these topics are constantly covered is due to the fact that they are noncontroversial. Nazis are universally bad,  nobody is going to protect them, and the Romans are ancient history. Have you ever seen anything objectively critical or controversial on the History channel about Disney?Will you ever? You certainly will never see a Howard Zinn special about how companies like GE or Coca-Cola sell their weapons and products to both sides during wars.

Incidentally there are other TV Funhouse episodes that have been pulled. They are even taken down from the Internet when they are posted, so there is little use in linking to them. One of them is called The Disney Vault and pokes fun of Disney's use of releasing terrible sequel after sequel as well as controversial things they have done in the past, and the other makes fun of the way Disney reinvents history with a fake ad about a new Titanic cartoon with an anthropomorphic boat and Anne Frank. Why would Saturday Night Live be afraid of these videos?

THIS is why the Internet is so important. It allows news from all over the world, from everybody to be shared with everyone else. Egyptians posting about the riots in the country, citizens filming the police, and just being able to access the "hive-mind" reactions of thousands of people in an area when something happens is quicker and more informative news than the fluff we get fed on a daily basis. Incidentally the chaotic flow of news from the Internet works better than any news company could hope.