Hence we have all the sensationalist pop culture nonsense which dominates the news, dumbing down the public and providing cover for wrong doers. The fifth estate is no longer doing its watchdog function.

I think that you mean the “Fourth Estate” which is the press. I couldn’t agree with you more.

War is usually about making money and this is no exception.

Who makes the money? All the corporations which produce the products of war… and a few bits go to the wages of the men and women who fight and die and work in the war factories.

Saw this in the Lew Rockwell blog titled ‘The Documentary Film Mother Lode’. It talks about a site that showcases free documentaries online called Top Documentary Films. website: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/watch-online

This particular one is somewhat interesting. Don’t know if everything is accurate but it has some interesting allegations like how the media is kept under control or manufactured.

It’s called ‘Behind The Big News: Propaganda and the CFR’

The acyual video is hosted on Google videos and you can download it via the ‘Download video’ link on the google page.
Here’s the link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6632255652046262625

This amounts to a completely uniformed public and a skewed debate.

If this because the reporting is not being done? Or that the editors and management are inserting ideology into the news and framing it? Probably so. How can this be changed?

We certainly are faced with the echo chamber effect where one story is completely based on another and no original reporting is done or drilling into the backstory. And what is more troubling is that the source for so much of the new is “official sources” and from annonymous officials who refuse to be named…. and who leak “information”.

This puts even an honest reporter in a tight place as he or she wants the scoop, but all they are doing is passing along “hearsay” with no accountability or independent corroboration.

We live in an age when news is not only managed, but part of a for profit enterprise. That alone means that stories are created to sell advertising or simply to ring the hit meter. Hence we have all the sensationalist pop culture nonsense which dominates the news, dumbing down the public and providing cover for wrong doers. The fifth estate is no longer doing its watchdog function.

So we have the conflation and synergy of two problems – controlled information from anonymous or simply authoritative sources which is to be taken as fact, and the need for news to make money for the press.

Net effect – criminals get away with murder.

[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.

“..it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan.”
Wilson wanted to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan; why else would you push to introduce foreign weapons (stinger missiles) to the battlefield thereby destroying any plausible deniability of the covert operation and risk direct confrontation with the USSR, if not to actually win?

“FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end­ public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West’s pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms has yet to be understood.”
True, but Afghanistan has historically been a buffer state and as such been geographically condemned to being a bleeding ground. Has been a bleeding ground since before America began, and likely will be a bleeding ground long after it ends.