Penny Fletcher
Forty-year journalist Penny Fletcher describes how drastic changes in US news stem from Supreme Court decisions favoring corporations and from the elimination of the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine. But she doesn’t leave you trying to sort truth from propaganda pushed by the six corporate owners who have bought out all the national media in the United States. Remember, this does not apply to the local newspapers and local television stations covering only a small radius around the town where you live. Local reporters usually know they are responsible to their readers and viewers because they interact with them in places of business and on the streets. It’s the changes made by Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Supreme Court that allow large corporations to own all the media in sizable geographical areas that have made it so that only one view is often given to hundreds of millions of people. How national news is delivered by mainstream media has changed drastically during the last thirty years, often leaving readers and viewers no choice but to listen to one-sided news. The Fairness Doctrine had requirements that stated, 'all sides of issues must be printed or aired,' and 'nothing that would deliberately harm any person or group may be presented without giving that person or group a chance at rebuttal for the same cost and amount of time on the same platform.' Elimination of this, little by little, enabled (first) television and (finally) newspapers, to present one-sided arguments favoring the positions of their owners and financiers. This translated quickly to politics, accounting for opinions, and even advertising, to be presented as news so that their readers and viewers would know only what their corporate owners wanted them to know about candidates, political party platforms, and even an individual’s personal actions. Furthermore, because of a clause in one Supreme Court decision claiming the FCC’s governing Doctrine had 'chilled free speech,' it became easier for reports to favor or disfavor individuals and companies, and especially political figures. Now, because of the ability to say just about anything legally, disinformation is widely spread in every corner of the country. No one knows or understands the injustices this has caused more than the reporters who must follow the directions of their superiors or get out of the newsroom. In this book, Fletcher teaches readers how to recognize editorial opinion by marking all of her own Editorial Opinion in bold. She calls attention to the words that make it commentary, and shows how sometimes it takes just one word to make a news story into an opinion piece. In recent years, native advertising has made this even more difficult to recognize because native advertising is a paid-for ad made to read or look just like a news story. Then there’s propaganda, which is almost always something slanted to put a person, product or issue in a 'good,' or 'bad,' light. This book doesn’t pull any punches. It reveals not only whose $$$ pays for the news you watch, hear, or read, it also tells how these news sources subsidize or harm political parties and individuals by slanting their news reports. Internet memes and false quotes are sometimes even placed under someone’s photograph making it look like that person said, or did, something they knew nothing about. Yet despite this constant and deliberate maze, every person can learn to dig for the truth of every issue, and the real position behind every media source, political party, or corporate PAC.
