The US media

When the USA and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, I watched CNN for a few hours. CNN spent much of its time showing how US forces were being humanitarian above all, dropping ration kits to fleeing refugees. Lots of airtime was devoted to showing how these kits were being dropped at low altitudes in such a way that they would land safely without needing parachutes. 37,000 kits were being dropped, an impressive-sounding number. (I’m glad I remembered the number correctly: a Google search for "afghanistan ration 37,000" found this U.S. Defense Department press release confirming details of the ration program.)

Well, the number 37,000 was meant to be impressive. It was mentioned that one kit would feed one refugee for one day. CNN was also saying that there were at least a million refugees. Am I the only person who can do arithmetic? One million refugees (minimum), trekking for multiple days, would need millions of meals. Of course they had brought some food themselves, but compared to a requirement of millions, 37,000 is almost nothing; it’s in the neighbourhood of one percent. Yet CNN, toady of the Bush administration that it is, was trumpeting it as an important indicator of how much the USA cared about the people whose country it was invading.

The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the Cold War. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media. Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives—not by journalists—whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers. Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home.

—Paul Craig Roberts, columnist and formerly U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury

This may not be my Web 2.0 blog, but Web 2.0 is what gives me hope. In future Americans will get less of their news from giant corporations and more from smaller entities that have fewer sacred cows. They may end up going backward, in a good way. The American Revolution was partly inspired by a pamphlet called Common Sense. It was written and published by just one person, Thomas Paine, yet was very widely read, with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, a massive number for that time and place.

Since the age of 14 I have looked to the USA as my inspiration for freedom for all the people of the world. Lately, not so much — but Americans, I have not given up on you. The centre of the Web 2.0 revolution is in the USA.