Alex Jones strikes again

Our perception of the larger world comes mainly from a concept we call ‘the news’ – radio, tv, newspapers, etc; sounds obvious, I know, and the age-old problem with ‘the news’ is that it tends to be owned and controlled by rich and powerful people, who of course will only tell us what they want us to know. This is none more so than in present day America, where five corporations (Time Warner, Disney, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Bertelsmann and Viacom) own more than 90% of the mainstream media. Americans don’t get ‘news’ anymore. Instead they get a corporate agenda, which by its nature is right wing (exactly the same thing is happening in the UK).

As a counterbalance to the corporate media we have the so-called ‘independent media’ (also known as ‘alternative media’), which resides almost entirely on the internet and is free from government and corporate interference; or at least it is for the time being. This independent media is, by its nature, made up of small operations, such as Democracy Now, Sam Seder’s Majority Report and The Young Turks, which is the largest online news show in the world and is hosted primarily by Cenk Uygur. A recent guest on The Young Turks was Alex Jones; this, following his controversial and hilarious appearence on the Piers Morgan Show (here). Alex Jones, of course, is a conspiracy theorist from Austin, Texas. Mr Jones shot to fame on the morning of 9/11, when he told his listeners that the US Government brought down the World Trade Centre (which many people now believe). Cenk Uygur is a skillful interviewer (and was a lawyer at one stage) and even manages to ask Jones if he has ever sought mental health treatment…

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