In a previous post I mentioned the mainstream media in America, and how much of it has become a right wing propaganda machine which puts out lies and half facts and hatred and basically tells the audience to vote for the Republican Party (see here). The main ethos of the Republicans is to lower taxes, particularly on the wealthy, and to have less government control over people’s lives. The mainstream media, of course, is owned and controlled by wealthy people. Here’s Glenn Beck, a well known radio host who gets a huge audience, losing his rag when a caller has the temerity to suggest that America should have a state run healthcare system…
This next clip is from the Mark Levin show. Levin gets a lot of listeners and his show plays heavily on patriotism and fear-mongering and American exceptionalism. Now, I can’t prove it but it strikes me that a lot of the callers to the Levin show are paid stoodges. Listen to the lady caller in this clip. Amongst other things she calls the mainstream media ‘leftist’, and says that she carries a copy of the Constitution around with her so that she can argue with the ‘looney left’…
Of course there is alternative media in America, particularly on the internet. This next clip is from Sam Seder’s podcast, The Majority Report, which has a segment called ‘Random Rush’. Rush Limbaugh’s radio show is even more popular than Beck’s or Levin’s…
This next clip has Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen (Dem) comparing Republican lies to Goebbels’ Propaganda. Note that CNN’s John King tries to skirt around what Cohen is saying…
Let’s get back to Rush Limbaugh again, because he’s such a laugh. In the following clip a Republican ex-marine calls Limbaugh a ‘brainwashed Nazi’…
We’ll finish this look at the weird and wonderful world of right wing talk show hosts with Sean Hannity. This clip is from Hannity’s show on the Fox News Channel (an oxymoron if ever there was one), where he gets a drubbing from Jesse Ventura, who is also a right winger. At the end of the clip, Hannity gives a childish spiel about Ronald Reagan (who’s worshipped by a Republican Party that has become some kind of quasi religious cult) and how he ‘saved us from evil’…
So, that’s the looney fringe of the right wing, but what about the supposed ‘liberal’ mainstream media in America, such as MSNBC? Ha! as I mentioned at the start of this post, the mainstream media are owned and controlled by wealthy people. It’s all propaganda. Here’s a good explanation of the set-up, when David Paxman interviewed Alyona Minkovski earlier this year…