Good Morning 99%'ers!

This week, Melissa Harris-Perry quit her show after sending an email to NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, in which she complained about she was being treated and how her show had been pre-empted several times in recent weeks. The gist of the conflict between Harris-Perry with MSNBC and it parent, NBC News, came down to the control over the content of her show, according to a New York Times article.

Even by the occasionally dramatic standards of television news, this was an unusually messy breakup. In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Ms. Harris-Perry said that she was frustrated that MSNBC had effectively sidelined her.

MSNBC, which significantly trails Fox News and CNN in ratings, is in the midst of an overhaul, pivoting away from its left-leaning identity toward hard news in the daytime hours. Ms. Harris-Perry had been the host of her show, which focused on issues like racism and social justice, since 2012.

On Friday, she went public with an email that she sent earlier that week to staff members in which she complained that the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, and Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, were letting her twist in the wind.

“I will not be used as a tool for their purposes,” she wrote. “I am not a token, mammy, or little brown bobble head. I am not owned by Lack, Griffin, or MSNBC. I love our show. I want it back.”

What happened with Melissa Harris-Perry's show is simply another example of how the consolidation of the media has led to a homogenization of "news" packaged as entertainment and watered down to its lowest levels driven by ratings.

It has been exactly twenty years since Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act. This law has allowed for large corporations to increase their holdings via buy outs and mergers. The result of all these mergers, buyouts and media consolidation has been devastating to the independence of news reporting and ultimately to our democracy.

In October 2013, Bill Moyers published an interactive map showing the effects of consolidation of local television stations by four large corporations since the enactment pf the Telecommunications Act. The map was compiled by Free Press which is an independent organization dedicated to fighting media consolidation. This interactive map shows just how quickly local television stations became consolidated under the umbrella of only four major corporations.

Free Press has made an embed version available for use. However, the embed code does not work on this site, so I am linking it.

Five major conglomerates now own 90% of all US media. Let that sink in. Five huge corporations control the overwhelming majority of what people in the United States see, hear, and read on a daily basis. Is it in their corporate interest to present news and information in an unbiased way? I think not.

Obviously when news is driven by ratings, the news follows what sells. Hence most people never really get the opportunity to learn unslanted information because real journalism is no longer the primary factor behind the media. It has been bought and sold to the highest bidders whose primary concern is the bottom line.

There aren't numerous US mass media news sources at all; there are just five. Five giant corporations control 90 percent of US mass media. And direct links connect all five of these media conglomerates to the political establishment and the economic and political power-elites of the United States.

These five conglomerates are Time Warner, Disney, Murdochs' News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (formerly CBS). Their control spans most of the newspapers, magazines, books, radio and TV stations, movie studios, and much of the web news content of the United States. These conglomerates are in large measure responsible for inculcating the social, political, economic, and moral values of both adults and children in the United States.

These five conglomerates not only control the media, but are heavily embedded in both the political process through campaign donations and lobbying, and in the United States government itself. They are a powerful player in how US foreign policy is marketed to the public. In other words, they effectively function as the propaganda arm of our government. The merger of government, corporations, and the media paints a frightening picture.

It is notable and should be emphasized that all the five major media conglomerates are corporate members of the Council on Foreign relations. This organization is a US think-tank whose members have been instrumental in formulating US government policies resulting in sanctions, destabilization efforts, and outright military attacks on nations which have never attacked the US.

We should not wonder why the media is spending so much time on Donald Trump or covering the horse race instead of the issues in our Presidential campaign. It is all about monetizing politics, not about practicing good journalism.

Promoting elections has become an industry of its own and TV networks are at the center of it. They are not devoting much time to promoting voter registration or voter education. They don’t provided many free ads and in fact often refuse to run issue-oriented ads bought by activists.

This agenda is wrapped up in the mantle of enabling democracy but it is of course much more than that. Most of the coverage is about the personality parade and horse race, not the issues. It focuses on candidates more than on political organizing.

We can thank the destruction of independent media for the lack of quality journalism today. We can also thank the big influx of campaign money for the way our elections are being covered. Not allowing the people to read and learn from factual information is truly destroying our democracy. Our media is being used to manipulate us and to manufacture consent. Most of us do not know that it is happening to us. But all we have to do is follow the money because that is all that matters to the corporate media.

UPDATE: I am editing this to include a link to Chancey DeVega's excellent post at dkos. HT to shaharazade who first posted the link here earlier as a part of her excellent comment in Cassiodorius' article. DeVega's diary is quite long and worth reading in its entirity. Here is just a small snippet from it that is relevant to my essay above.

It appears that the right-wing news entertainment complex has facilitated the Dunning-Kruger effect on a massive scale.

The “uneducated” or “poorly educated” are not the group most responsible for the rise of Donald Trump.

A Republican Party that sold itself to Fox News and the right-wing news entertainment complex is much more responsible than the uneducated or poorly educated American.

A 24/7 news cycle driven by a faux “liberal” corporate news media brought us Donald Trump, because he brings ratings and ad revenue.

This is an Open Thread, so feel free to post whatever you wish.