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Hightower Lowdown
"The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it's conformity." -- Jim Hightower
January's Lowdown
Yes we can manage this country without the corporate priesthood--the cooperative movement shows us how
We're being told by today's High Priests of Conventional Wisdom that everyone and everything in our economic cosmos necessarily revolves around one dazzling star: the corporation. This heavenly institution, the HPCW explain, has such financial and political mass that it is the optimal force for organizing and directing our society's economic affairs, including the terms of employment and production.
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In This Issue
Corporate greed triumphs over patient need
How they took the care out of our health care system
Also in this issue:
- Victory in the sweatshops
- Congress reaches out to families
- Casualties of war
- Bogging down in colombia
- Put the "public" back in pbs
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Put the "public" back in pbs
Whatever happened to the "public" in PBS, the Public Broadcasting System? The original mandate for this public network was to offer programming different from the commercial networks, and specifically to "provide a voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard." Professor William Hoynes of Vassar College has done an independent analysis of PBS programming, viewing all the news shows, interview shows, business, and documentary programs for a two-week period. His findings are stunning.
Consider the coverage of politics. Like every other network, half of PBS's sources were the same old establishment politicians and government officials, a third were journalists, and 11% were corporate executives, lobbyists or PR flaks. Consumer, environmental, or labor sources were almost invisible.
How about PBS's coverage of economics? Fully 75% of the voices on the air were from the corporate world. Most of the others were from academics or government. Labor was only 1.5% of the total, consumer advocates were less than half of 1%, and the general public less than 2%.
Prof. Hoynes' study is on the Web site of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org).