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Shadows of Liberty (2012)
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Temperatures are generally in the upper 50's to around the 60 degree mark and they'll be rising. Thanks, I'm Bill Griffith. We have an update on that crash that was causing tie ups on Southbound 163 near the 15. We spoke to the DEP's Deputy Commissioner moments ago and he says that this main burst simply because it's old, 100 years old to be exact. Also good to know, I think I remember the Roeblings built the Brooklyn Bridge 125 years ago. In this country, the most powerful country on earth, is is so actually difficult to get information, especially outside our borders. Not to mention what's going on inside this country. Four hours and 20 minutes ago at 9:42 PM Eastern Time that would have put it at five. Public information, the news we rely on to learn about what's happening in the world, to learn about one another, is in the hands basically of commercial enterprises. And agreement on health care is close, - but support could still crumble. - Giant media corporations like Time Warner and News Corporation, Disney, and so forth, they get to decide what is news, what is newsworthy, and what is not newsworthy. This is America, how many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage? What the press is pushing is distortions, lies, lack of balance. I have 900 channels on my TV but 700 of them are selling the... The American public knows far more information about sex scandal, celebrities, Hollywood, than they know about economics and the environment. That's by design. When was the last time, Governor, that you were at a Wendy's and had a Frosty? Make no mistake about it, it's to control people's ideas, it's to control their imagination. They wouldn't say it in that way but they would edit my pieces, they would push me in different directions, they would turn down stories that were more critical. We're in a profound crisis of democracy. You can't choke off discourse and have a free society. This is what you get with drunkard kneeling, it's... it's gonna happen. These are stories you will not be told on radio, in newspapers, or on television. A clash between two worlds, big media corporations spinning public perception for profit versus the defenders of truth who stand for liberty and democracy. And that's our news for tonight. I'd often been asked if there was any pressure on me because of the kinds of stories that I do. I was always asked, "Are there some stories that you can't do? Are there sometimes that you're not allowed to report on certain things because of advertisers?" And my answer is always, "Absolutely not." Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War the United States lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam. And CBS chief correspondent Roberta Baskin looked into one corporation's search for cheaper labor markets. The premise for the story was the fact that Nike were subcontracting to these factories on the other side of the planet, but they weren't really taking responsibility for how the shoes were made. And I asked to follow the trail. In August of 1996 Baskin and a CBS News film crew flew to Vietnam to investigate the Nike factories. We were able to kind of peek through the keyhole but... We were not allowed inside. We were barred. Go! One of the things that really shocked me was to discover that the word Nike had become a verb. The word Nike meant to abuse your employees. There were incidences of physical abuse, women who had their mouths taped shut for talking on the line. 15 women who were systematically hit with a top part of a Nike shoe around the face and the neck. It was this disparity between seeing the corporate image that the company sells and the reality in these factories. "Just do it, or else." Roberta Baskin's news report about Nike abuses was broadcast on CBS News television across the United States. CBS was very pleased, submitting it for prestigious awards. For me what was really... exciting about it was that the phones rang off the hook. There was picketing of Nike towns across the country. There were boycotts that were being organized by students on campuses. We are not a Nike school. We are not a Nike school. I realized that it had touched them kinda nerve. Nike's labor abuses reached the media and the shoe giant came forward to limit the damages. We don't have abusive labor conditions in our factories, and really never have. With Nike in denial, CBS News commissioned Baskin to do a follow up investigation working with a Vietnamese labor group. Roberta's work was mainly about the corporal punishment. We helped add another dimension to the problems, the wages and the excessive amount of overtime. Nike's not the good guys. Even though they've done a lot of commercials saying they are, but people at that moment realize that they are not part of a good team. As Baskin was putting together the updated news report on Nike's labor practices she received unexpected news from inside CBS. I got a call from my executive producer who said, "The story is not gonna air, it's been taken off schedule. There's some sort of deal being made between Nike and CBS News for the upcoming Winter Olympics." The air went out of my soul. CBS News was paying an enormous amount of money for the rights. And so by definition, they would be seeking out commercial sponsors who would pour lots of money into it so that they could recoup the millions that they were paying for the rights of the Olympics. The 18th Olympic Winter Games on CBS. As CBS revealed their Olympic coverage, the deal between Nike and CBS was plain to see. The women's super-G... Correspondent after correspondent are wearing these Nike jackets on the air with a little CBS something or other, you really couldn't read it, in a big swoosh on the shoulder. Is also scheduled on the adjacent race course. That was the deal. Nike had convinced CBS News to turn it's correspondents into billboards. It was heartbreaking. The CBS News correspondents were furious. They had to wear the Nike harkus whenever they appeared on air. It's just not done. Baskin wrote a memo requesting CBS management to take the Nike logo off the correspondents. CBS had crossed this incredible line. How do you trust serious stories when you're seeing the reporter wearing a bunch of logos? Immediately the President of CBS News responded saying, "This was a breach of professional etiquette." It meant that I should shut up. How dare I raise a question about the integrity of CBS News. After questioning the deal with Nike Baskin was removed from her position as the chief correspondent of CBS News. It wasn't an ordinary transfer, a change, it was a demotion. And it was a demotion that was ...uh... to send a message. I ended up asking if I could get out of my contract. The president responded, "Great." They were, you know, happy to see me go. Hi, Mr. Southron. - I'm Roberta Baskin from CBS News. - Yeah? - Yeah? - I wanted to talk to you about the problems... To this day CBS network has buried both of Baskin's reports on the Nike sweatshops. These are the kind of fundamental conflicts of interest that result in censorship, that result in a narrow debate, and they come directly from the fact that we have made these historical choices to allow corporations to own and control our media. Media today is dominated by a handful of corporations. This is a far cry from the original ideals of the country. As Americans fought for independence from imperial rule, the revolution found it's inspiration in an unexpected place. The United States was in many senses founded by a journalist, Tom Paine, who called Americans to revolution against a British Empire that was thought to be completely unbeatable. This country was really founded on the concept that if you gave citizens the information they needed they could govern themselves. The founders of the United States gave citizens the fundamental right to a free press. A revolution for freedom of information. One of the primary reasons for freedom of the press was that it was the only way that people outside of power could keep the government from becoming an empire. Stop militarism, stop the corruption, the secrecy, and the cronyism. That was the function of freedom of the press. There is a reason why our profession, journalism, is the only one explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. 'Cause we're supposed to be holding those in power accountable, asking the critical questions. One of the first steps of the new government was to encourage the distribution of independent news through subsidies. Read all about it! This was actually America's revolutionary contribution. The genius of the subsidies is that it did not discriminating, it's the content of the newspapers. The abolitionist movement didn't start in Congress, it started in those freely distributed weekly newspapers. And that was really where we began to address the most fundamental sins of the American experiment. It's simply information that is power. It's information that frees us, because when people get information they then can decide what to do. Today the founding vision of America's journalistic independence has become deeply distorted. Media is the conversation we have as a society. It's the way we learn about the world, it's the way we learn about one another. We see the range of public debate constrained because there may be many things that citizens of a democratic society need to know about that private corporations may not be interested in telling them. The International Silver Company. Just as newspapers had been the driving force behind democracy, the great hope of the 20th century was the birth of mass media. We think Google and Facebook is a big deal, imagine what it must have been like in rural Kansas to suddenly be able to listen to a broadcast from New York City every night. And now we move down 45th Street to the Music Box Theatre. You people must have faith. You must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Together we can not fail. It was apparent to people at that time that the control over this medium was going to be a form of social control. With advertising money pouring in, corporate networks pressured Congress to uphold profit as the basis for American broadcasting. Your cigarette taste. This was publicly owned property, and lots of American protested the we would turn over this scarce resource, these extraordinary airways, to a handful of private commercial interests to make money by selling advertising to us. From Hollywood, the Rolly's cigarette program. In 1934 Congress passed the Communications Act, sealing the future of America's broadcasting as a for-profit system. NBC, CBS, ABC, these huge empires, were built upon the gift for free of monopoly rights to government property. It was an extraordinary corporate welfare that boggles the mind. With broadcasting set up as a commercial enterprise, government regulations were put into place to prevent monopolies. There was a cross party agreement that commercial activity would be regulated by the government. No individual should have such dominance of our media that they could effectively define the discourse. The great transition came in the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States. Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. Ronald Reagan believed the answer to any concern, any question as regards how to create a good media system was to get government out of the way. In order to restructure media ownership Reagan removed regulations. Driving the bears back into permanent hibernation, we're going to turn the bull loose. That whole model was the idea that if you removed all controls and regulations and allowed the free market rip, then everything would be fine, everything would be wonderful. In reality what it does is it allows a handful of giant corporations to come in and gobble up everything. And these conglomerates don't see journalism as actually being central and essential to the functioning of a democracy. Their main interest is making profit. One merger symbolized the takeover of mass media by conglomerates seeking ever higher profits. For General Electric, here is Ronald Reagan. Good evening, on this last Sunday before Christmas. The Christmas season is a time for the family. People should remember that Ronald Reagan was funded by large corporations. And so suddenly we saw a radical transformation of the media system in the United States. General Electric and RCA, two of America's biggest and best known companies, in a dramatic move last night the two announced plans to merge. We'll now have the strongest network, we'll have a stronger defense piece. This is gonna be one dynamite company. The concentration of mass media in the hands of a very few, very large international corporations who have a lot of different businesses. Defense business, theme parks. And news became a smaller and smaller part of ever larger corporations. The Reagan administration approved General Electric's purchase of major media holdings, despite ongoing violations of industry laws and practices. Meanwhile, from General Electric and from my family and myself, a merry, merry Christmas. Eddy, don't you want to say Merry Christmas? The original sin was going to Wall Street. The demands of wall street will require empty desks in your newsroom. So why don't you minimize your actual product and make more money? Capitalism is not the best judge of what's good for society. When I knew it was time to go the last speech I got from a CEO, he had been selling cereal, breakfast cereal, before he was selling newspapers. He came in at the bottom where he gave a speech about the product. He never once mentioned news. He never once mentioned... the role of a newspaper. We're now at a stage where every journalist who isn't asleep understands that corporate power has made it impossible for them to do the job as it needs to be done. Police, freeze! One of the biggest news stories of the 1980s was the explosion of crack cocaine in the United States. The crack epidemic not only destroyed lives in the sense that people were addicted to this powerful drug, but also it set off gang wars. Certain communities like the African American communities were disproportionately hurt. Gary Webb, he began investigating that. Gary Webb, he thought being a reporter was the best thing you could be. The only independent force in the society to establish truth. What first caught his eye, he's got Nicaraguans dirty in a drug deal and they're not going down, they're getting a walk. Now if you're a reporter you look into that. As Webb looked at the suppliers of the crack trade in Los Angeles, the trail led back to a U.S.-sponsored war a decade earlier in Central America. The Reagan administration wanted to be proactive... uh... in... uh... sticking it to the communists around the world. President Ronald Reagan authorized the CIA to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building, supporting, directing the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. They are the moral equal of our founding fathers, we can not turn away from them. Sponsoring violence in a small Central American country was far more important Than stopping drugs from flowing in to our cities and our communities. After a year long investigation Webb's report broke new ground by becoming the first major news investigation published both in print and on the Internet. As a consequence, even though the San Jose Mercury News is considered a regional newspaper, it was able to get national traction and even international traction on this story because it was now on the web. We've got all the DEA undercover tapes, we've got the FBI reports, we've got the court records, and they're all posted for people to see. By the way, when you look at his research and what he was doing, and tracing it, and he was hip enough to check it and know it was true. By November 1997 the website was getting over a million hits a day. Thank you. What is the word on the street now? Have you heard about the CIA? Well you know what? We have heard, we have seen, and now we are moved to action. With the CIA on the defensive and the public demanding answers, the major national newspapers waded into the controversy. You have the fact that the San Jose Mercury News being in Silicone Valley was sort of challenging the gatekeeper function that the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, and other big papers, had assumed was theirs. The Washington Post weighs in and says, "Gary Webb got it wrong, but we can't tell you exactly how he got it wrong cause we haven't the fainted god damn idea." It was accompanied by a piece that declared that the African American community was conspiracy prone. So that sort of set the tone that Webb's story would be dismissed and to agree, ridiculed. You had major media outlets going to the CIA and saying, "Is this true?" And the CIA would say, "Oh no, this is not true." And then the reportage was, "Oh, well it's not true." This is nonsense. Come on, come on. I mean, come on. Listen, listen, there has never been a conspiracy in this country. The fact is that the shoddy reporting on this story was not from Gary Webb, it was from his corporate back detractors. Now, I had a drink with a major figure at the L.A. Times and I asked him about the crack back, and he said, "Look, there were meetings in the building that they weren't gonna let a guy from San Jose, California come into their turf and win a Pulitzer Prize." Expose CIA. Expose CIA. Expose CIA. As the press attacked Gary Webb, the public protested. I got involved with the protests because Gary Webb, he had no hidden agenda, he's not lying. And we gonna put the CIA and this country on notice. With the national media calling for a retraction, the Mercury News took down the Dark Alliance website and reassigned Webb to a bureau 150 miles from his home. - In the beginning, they were behind you. - That's right. And then they caught a wild world of hell from the establishment media and now they're not behind me anymore. And here is this guy that had all these awards, they scar that and broke a story that everyone warned him not to break. All of a sudden a journalist that should be hailed is treated like a piece of crap. A year later the CIA released it's internal report into the agency's involvement with Contra drug traffickers. There are instances where CIA did not in an expeditious or consistent fashion cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity. The contents of the report, if you go into the actual nitty-gritty of them, what you find is that there was a serious problem that the U.S. government knew about it, and that the Contras were far more guilty of drug trafficking and the CIA was more guilty of looking the other way than even Gary Webb had suggested. With the CIA's report about it's relationship with Contra drug traffickers, the media had a chance to vindicate Webb's investigation. The New York Times, they do a story that is half kind of mea culpa, "we should have done more with this, it was worse than we thought." And half, "Gary Webb's still an idiot." The Washington Post waits several weeks and does a rather dismissive article. And the L.A. Times never reports on the CIA's findings. So even though Webb was proven correct he's still considered a flake who got a story wrong. When he was interviewing on another job, they'd always say, "Aren't you the guy who wrote Dark Alliance?" And then they would kill the interview. He couldn't make a living being a journalist anymore, and that ripped his heart out. He's despondent about his inability to find work. He got his father's pistol, laid out a certificate for his cremation, and then he shot himself. Frankly you know, if I have to stand up and take a beating for putting the issue of government complicity in drug trafficking on the national agenda, I'll take that beating any day of the week. I mean, I was glad to do this story, I'm proud of what we did, and I'd do it again in a second. We killed one of the few decent working reporters in the country. By that we, I mean the business I'm in, media. With the new technological revolution, Congress began drafting new media legislation. The media conglomerates created the fantasy that if they were allowed to own dramatically more media they could make dramatically better media. Big is better, effectively. Media corporations need that favorable policy that's gonna allow them to grow and make more and more money, and politicians need that media to give them the air time that they couldn't exist without. Who's left out of that deal, of course, is the public. At that point behind closed doors these media conglomerates are asking for the rules to be loosened even more. Fantasy became reality for the media conglomerates when President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecom Act into law. This law is truly revolutionary legislation that will bring the future to our doorstep. Telecom '96 really rang the dinner bell for media conglomerates to come and eat up every station that they wanted. Following the Telecom Act a wave of massive mergers swept through the media industry. A handful of entertainment stars using mega mergers are preparing to dominate TV and movie screens worldwide. The combination of the two together gives us the opportunity to become the strongest creative company in the world. The superlatives were flying as Viacom and CBS announced the biggest media merger ever. A new multi media giant will soon control an enormous amount of the entertainments. Viacom is buying CBS, parent of CBS News. When you think about the new Viacom, you really only have to remember a single number, that's number one. Capitalize on the convergence of media, entertainment. Almost as American as apple pie. The world's largest provider of Internet access is merging with the world's largest When media consolidation began to happen the local broadcasters weren't able to compete. Well guess who those local radio station owners were? They might have been a person of color, or it might have been a woman. This really just knocked people out of the game. We've totally destroyed the localism of broadcasting purely to serve corporate interests. There's nothing in market economics that justifies it, it's pure crony capitalism at it's worst. In this high tech digital age with high definition television and digital radio, all we ever get is static. A veil of distortion and lies and misrepresentations and half truths that obscure reality. In times of war the press loses all critical distance. Journalists see themselves as first and foremost, patriots. The result is essentially the dissemination of propaganda. In the word's media capital, on September 11th, 2001, the unthinkable happened. The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon. The terrorist attack of September 11th, as tragic as it was, was almost like a godsend to the Bush administration because it gave them the raisondetre that they were looking for to invade Iraq. To link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 the Bush administration turned to the intelligence community. You have to remember this is not an inductive process, it's inductive. You decide to go to war and then you go find the justification. And this is exactly what happened. Look, I ran Iraqi operations. We didn't have any information. With no evidence of Saddam Hussein's role in the attacks, defectors starting emerging from Iraq with exclusives for U.S. news outlets. There was an Iraqi by the name of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. He claimed to have evidence of you know, biological and nuclear, and various kinds of weapons of mass destruction. He also talked about various facilities being under Saddam's main palace, he talked about nuclear facilities being disguised as water Wells. I mean, he was their best corroboration that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. Among other sources we've gotten this from first hand testimony from defectors. We know where they are, they're in the area around Tigrett and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat. The success of their propaganda campaign would depend on one news outlet. I watched this from the inside. They created a stage and broad journalists into the audience dutifully took notes and reported it. They believed all the crap they were fed. The New York Times is the intellectual and political opinion leader in the United States. Sucking up the government in the most outrageous ways. Constantly trying to placate the Military Intelligence Complex. There's a story in the New York Times this morning. Read in the New York Times today. And I want to trip to the Times and I want to talk about this week. Closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. The smoking gun... That could come in the form of a mushroom cloud. With the mainstream media convinced of the necessity for war, the administration took their case to the world stage. The coup de gras and the most brilliant propaganda maneuver of all was Colin Powell's absolutely fraudulent presentation in front of the united nation's security council. Let me share with you what we know from eye witness accounts. We have first hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails. And Saddam Hussein has not... Much of the fabricated information that was passed on by the quote on quote, "defectors" form the basis for Colin Powell's accusations. He didn't have any hard evidence, but... You should have seen the press fall all over themselves as soon as he was done saying that this had been a definitive case for war. This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today. Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today. He just flooded the terrain with data. He has closed the deal. CNN, FOX, CBS, ABC, the giant echo chamber that creates public perception in the United States were giving out the administration lines. Show down Iraq. If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC. If you looked at the television screens with these graphics, and drum-rolls, and countdown to Baghdad, and this kind of stuff, it was a raw and open celebration of American power. This hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free it's people, and to defend the world from grave danger. After the fall of Saddam, Al Haideri, the INC's defector, finally had the chance to show the world the justification for war. Mr. Haideri couldn't bring these guys to a single place that he claimed had housed the weapons of mass destruction programs. The media fell hook, line, and sinker for the administration's case for war. And in fact, certain publications appear to have been deliberately used and openly receptive of information that the Bush administration produced that was wrong but that bolstered it's case for war. Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States. King, John king. This is a scripted... Thank you, Mr. President. How... You can not go against the White House and survive. You're finished. April. Did you have a question or did I call upon you cold? - I have a question. - Okay. I'm sure you do have a question. The whole idea in Washington is to marginalize people who go against the consensus, and they do it very well, you don't get invited to the party. For me to blame the reporters is to miss the point, you have to blame the owners. These are the people who are responsible for the conduct of the people who work for them. I want everybody to get back, in the back of it now. It is my belief that wars really are started by the mainstream media. It is my belief that the press getting too close to the government, actually, we are talking about a sort of interbreeding or intermeshing between the structures of the mainstream media and this structure of the Military Intelligence Complex. The impact is that we've got all of these innocent people in Iraq that have died, we've got thousands of American soldiers and British soldiers that have died. They died for a lie that was so easily uncovered, but it wasn't allowed in the biggest news outlets. These private corporations are making profit off the killing. They push for more war, it builds their audiences. They limit the discussion about whether war should continue. The bring you the general versus the colonel, or the pro-war Republican versus the pro-war Democrat, and they have these extremely limited debates. When most people are outside of that spectrum, most people are against war. The rapid consolidation of media across broadcast, also into film, book publishing, created a situation where instead of having the democratic media system that the founders anticipated, with thousands of different owners of small weekly newspapers. You no longer had Tom Paine, you had Rupert Murdoch. Rupert is any agenda that you want to shape. For example, take the war. You're having a global media enterprise, and if you shape that agenda at all in terms of how the war is viewed? No, I didn't think so. I mean, we've tried. Tried in what way? Well, we basically supported our papers, and um... I would say supported... uh... The Bush policy. News Corp and others have eaten out nearly every single independently managed newspaper with the United States. That is something that is quite dangerous, in putting it's business interests and it's political interests over the top of all that. In order to prevent media monopolies the Federal Communications Commission was charged with regulating the media. The most important job the FCC has is looking out for regular citizens and making sure that whatever media policy is made, that it's the best for the public and the best for democracy. - I'm available for questions. - So. Colin Powell leads the drum beat for war, and his son Michael Powell was attempting to lead the war against diversity, of voices at home. Once in office Powell waged war against the last remaining rules on media ownership. Here is this agency that very few people knew about. And they were trying to push through regulations that said, "In a town, the... Newspaper, radio, and television could be owned by one person." By a media mogul, someone like Rupert Murdoch. This is what people feared the most, that all the content for TV, radio, and the newspaper, coming out of one shot. A one size fits all, one news room community. There was almost no public scrutiny until Michael Powell called network coverage of the Iraq war, "Thrilling." There were these millions of people and they hear the FCC guy is calling the coverage "Thrilling" while he's trying to obliterate the last remaining rule. And it just tapped into this anger that people were feeling about the war. Despite millions of people protesting against the FCC, Michael Powell didn't get the message. Mass communication Is the end of democracy Even when people did say, "Hey FCC, we're the public, we don't want you to do this." The FCC turned around and did exactly what those mega-corporations wanted it to do in the first place. With victory at hand, the media giants publicly expressed their gratitude. And it was pretty stunning. The head of Viacom, the Sumner Redstone, he repeatedly said, "Having a Republican in the White House is better for my company. And I vote Viacom and for that reason I endorse Bush's election." These large conglomerate companies, they contribute to political campaigns. They expect to get something for their money. Deciding on their own and for their own purposes the news we see and hear. Is an inescapable conclusion that we must reach if we are to have a better society. The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit. Thank you. Every aspect of our lives, from what we buy, what is sold to us, who produces it, all those things are connected. It's not only a monopoly of wealth, it's a monopoly of information as well. In 2007, with the FCC reviewing it's media ownership rules, the public came forward. Millions of people wrote to Congress, wrote to the FCC, emailed, spoke out at forums. You'd have a forum of 1,000 people, this was unheard of, saying, "No." One media mogul can't own the radio, television, and newspaper in a city. Here was an example where the public had intervened and gummed something up. Under new Chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC announced public hearings on media ownership in cities across the U.S.. We have some of the most entertaining people on the planet, but we don't know a lot about what's going on in the world because the way our world is, we have something. Four companies controlling the 6% of four places of your markets. That is not diverse, it is not competitive. Look where I am, we are concerned citizens. We're tying to believe that we matter, don't make fools of us. And I beg the FCC to help us. You can switch from channel to channel and see the same thing. It's very clear that this country has become profits over people. Despite overwhelming public opinion against more consolidation, Kevin Martin sided with the media conglomerates and removed the cross ownership ban. The two Democratic commissioners have voted. What Kevin Martin did was demonstrate his absolute thoroughgoing contempt for doing his job and representing the public interest. Embracing entirely the interest of wealthy corporate benefactors, period. Pure and simple. I think the people that own the media would be much happier if we were a nation of mindless consumers rather than a nation of informed, active citizens. To seize this moment we have to ensure free and full exchange of information. That starts with an open Internet. I will take a back seat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality. Because once providers start... It's simple, it's net neutrality, it's non discrimination, and it's a basic principle that politicians pay lip service to it. That if the same players like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner, are able to take over the Internet through lax public policy, that we'll lose even the Internet. Despite his election promises, President Obama has brought in new Internet pricing rules, going against the principles of a free and open Internet. It is by making publishing cheap, that permits many more people to become publishers that permits many more different voices. That's where the Internet has really excelled. Blue Helix has published a lot of information about war, about militaries, how they behave, intelligence organizations. And that information often comes as a surprise to the public. It's because the public has been lied to. Come on, fire. We have moved the envelope for what is acceptable for people to publish. The United States do something to stop Mr.Assange. We're looking a that right now. Mr. Connels says he's a high-tech terrorist, others say this is akin to the Pentagon Papers, what do you comment? I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers. The greatest fight we have had in bringing the first amendment to the world was in the bringing the first amendment to the United States. This guy's a traitor, a treasonist, and... and... and he has broken every law of the United States. Will the Internet remain free or will a few companies be able to control and monetize it? That's the debate of the era. We have to stop, recognize that our media is in crisis, and ask ourselves, what is the media that we want? We want more information, access to more information, we have fewer people who control the information. Can't allow this country to go down for the count 'cause some guys in Wall Street can't make money producing garbage news. The media is that kind of issue where if we want it to be better we have to fight for it. These are the critical battles we face right now in the United States and frankly, in the countries around the world. How we respond to this moment will be every bit as definitional as how the founders responded to their moment. This is really about having a conversation about what kind of decisions we want made in our name. That's really what will save us, is when we really know what's going on. Not filtered through the lens or the microphone of corporation. |
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