7 Things About The Mainstream Media that They Don’t Want You to Know

By Michael Snyder  – Economic Collapse

20 May 2013 –
Source Article

Have
you ever wondered who controls the mainstream media?  In America today,
we are more “connected” than ever.  The average American watches 153
hours of television a month, and we also spend countless hours watching
movies, playing video games, listening to music, reading books and
surfing the Internet.  If someone could control the production of all of
that media, that would make them immensely powerful.  They would
literally be in a position to tell people what to think.  Well, what if
I told you that there are just six enormous media conglomerates that
combine to produce about 90 percent of all the media that Americans
consume.  Would that alarm you?  It should alarm you.  The truth is that
our attitudes, opinions and beliefs are greatly shaped by what we allow
into our minds.  After all, they don’t call it “programming” for no
reason.  Even those of us that realize that we are connected to “the
matrix” probably greatly underestimate the tremendous influence that the
media has over us.  We live at a time when it is absolutely imperative
to think for ourselves, but most Americans are being absolutely
overwhelmed with information and seem more than content to let others do
their thinking for them.  Sadly, this is greatly contributing to the
downfall of our society.

And of course
the mainstream media desperately does not want you to look at “the man
behind the curtain”.  They just want you to stay plugged into the
“programming” that they are feeding you without asking any questions.

Fortunately, a
growing minority of Americans are waking up and are starting to reject
the mainstream media.  An increasing number of people are beginning to
recognize that the mainstream media is the mouthpiece of the
establishment and that it is promoting the agenda of the establishment.

So why is the
mainstream media so bad?  The following are 7 things about the
mainstream media that they do not want you to know…

#1 The
Mainstream Media Has Very Deep Ties To The Establishment

Did you know
that the president of CBS and the president of ABC

both have
brothers that are top officials in the Obama
administration?

The big news
networks have developed an almost incestuous relationship with the
federal government in recent years.  But of course the same could be
said of the relationship that the media has with the big corporations
that own stock in their parent companies and that advertise on their
networks.

This is one of
the reasons why we very rarely ever see any hard hitting stories on the
big networks anymore.  The flow of information through the
corporate-dominated media is very tightly controlled, and there are a
lot of gatekeepers that make sure that the “wrong stories” don’t get put
out to the public.  As a result, many of the “big stories” that have
come out in recent years were originally broken by the alternative
media.

#2 The
Mainstream Media Gets Things Wrong Very Frequently

Even prominent
members of the mainstream media admit that this is the case.  For
example, during a recent speech at Quinnipiac University CBS anchor
Scott Pelley confessed that journalists in the mainstream media “are
getting big stories wrong, over and over again”…

“Let me take
the first arrow: During our coverage of Newtown, I sat on my set and I
reported that Nancy Lanza was a teacher at the school. And that her son
had attacked her classroom. It’s a hell of a story, but it was dead
wrong. Now, I was the managing editor, I made the decision to go ahead
with that and I did, and that’s what I said, and I was absolutely wrong.
So let me just take the first arrow here.”

#3 The
American Public Does Not Consider The Media To Be Very Trustworthy

Trust in the
mainstream media has definitely been slipping.  In fact, a Gallup poll
taken last year found that distrust of the media had reached an

all-time high.
According to that poll,

60 percent
of Americans “have little or no trust” that the media is reporting the
news accurately.

A separate
Rasmussen Reports survey found that

only 6 percent
of all Americans consider the news media to be “very trustworthy”.

Hopefully this
trend will accelerate and a lot more people will stop trusting the media
blindly.

#4 The
Mainstream Media And The Politicians That They Worship Hate The Fact
That They Cannot Control Internet News Sites

In the old
days, the mainstream media had a virtual monopoly on the news.  But
these days, anyone with an Internet connection can put up a news site,
and this is driving the establishment absolutely bonkers.

For example,
Barack Obama is known to have a great dislike for the alternative
media.  The following is from a recent WND
article…

NBC News
Political Director Chuck Todd says President Obama was making it “clear”
at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner over the weekend how he feels
about the rise of Internet news sites like Politico, Buzzfeed and …
well, WND.

“He hates it.”

Appearing on
“Meet the Press” Sunday morning following Saturday night’s media,
politics and celebrity soiree, Todd explained the president’s disdain
for independent online news sources was showing during his speech.

“It did seem …
I thought his pot shots, joke-wise, and then the serious stuff about the
Internet, the rise of the Internet media and social media and all that
stuff – he hates it, OK? He hates this part of the media,” Todd said.
“He really thinks that the, sort of, the buzzification – this isn’t just
about Buzzfeed or Politico and all this stuff – he thinks that sort of
coverage of political media has hurt political discourse. He hates it.
And I think he was just trying to make that clear last night.”

#5 The
Mainstream Media Is Extremely Liberal

When it comes
to politics, the mainstream media is far more liberal than the general
population is.

For example,
one survey found that 41
percent of American voters believe that the average
reporter is more liberal than they are, while only

18 percent
believe that the average reporter is more conservative than they are.

A very
disturbing

UCLA study
on media bias discovered that the vast majority of media outlets are
“left of center”…

Of the 20 major
media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS’ “Evening
News,” The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second,
third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street
Journal.

And even MSNBC
has confirmed the liberal bias of the media.  According to

MSNBC,
mainstream journalists are far more likely to donate their own money to
Democrats than they are to Republicans…

MSNBC.com
identified 143 journalists who made political contributions from 2004
through the start of the 2008 campaign, according to the public records
of the Federal Election Commission. Most of the newsroom checkbooks
leaned to the left: 125 journalists gave to Democrats and liberal
causes. Only 16 gave to Republicans. Two gave to both parties.

#6 Six
Mammoth Media Corporations Produce About 90 Percent Of The Media That
Americans Consume

As I mentioned
at the top of this article, there are six giant media behemoths that
control almost all of the media that we consume.  These corporate giants
own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers,
magazines, publishing houses, video game makers, music labels and even
many of our favorite websites.

The media
ownership chart posted below originally comes from a previous article
that I authored entitled “Who
Owns The Media? The 6 Monolithic Corporations That Control Almost
Everything We Watch, Hear And Read“, but it has been
updated to reflect some of the latest information.  The power that these
companies have is so vast that it is hard to put into words…

#7 The
American People Are Absolutely Addicted To The Mainstream Media

In

a previous
article about the media, I noted that the average
American watches

153 hours
of television a month.

When you allow
that much information to be downloaded into your brain, it is going to
have a dramatic impact on how you think.

Americans are
more “connected” than they ever have been before.  This is especially
true of our kids.  They are constantly on one sort of electronic device
or another.  The following is a brief excerpt from a recent article
by Daniel Taylor…

According to

a 2010 LA Times
report, young people spend on average 53 hours a week
watching TV, playing video games, and sitting at the computer.

Facebook users
spend about 15 hours a month on the social networking
site.

People are
walking – and driving – blindly while texting, sometimes

walking into
fountains and even

falling off
cliffs.

If that Los
Angeles Times report is true, that means that our young people are
spending more than 200 hours a month connected to the media.

But we are only
awake for about 480 hours a month.

When it comes
to influencing the American people, nobody has more power than the big
media companies do.

And until we
can break this sick addiction to the mainstream media and get people to
start thinking for themselves, we will never see widespread changes in
our society.  As long as people are being “programmed” by the mainstream
media, they will continue to express the opinions, attitudes and beliefs
that have been downloaded into their minds.

Please share
this article with as many people as you can.  It is crucial that we wake
as many people up as possible while we still can.