Corporate Media Outlets Push Bailout, Ignore Biden Win

The American people will get President George Bush’s unpopular $700 billion bailout bill shoved down their throats today primarily because of the nation's major television stations and newspapers, which serve as the current propaganda ministry for dead right-wing ideology.

Corporate media businesses, not surprisingly, are almost uniformly in favor of the bailout package, which will pay Wall Street bankers for their self-serving mistakes about the housing bubble. Still, it is frightening to witness how robotic, how goosestepish, the media businesses have been about the issue. Unfortunately, the lies and omissions of the mainstream press still have the ability to shape public opinion.

Let us be clear that reporters, editors and columnists are giving cover to those corrupt men and women who have been wrong about every domestic and foreign policy decision made on the national level in the last eight years. These journalists do so because they are paid—some quite lavishly--by corporations, which support the right-wing modus operandi of shifting wealth to a relatively small group of rich people. Everything they write and say is framed within this right-wing corporate rubric, within the confines of their paycheck. Their faux, tepid criticisms of the Bush’s bill are only a part of the frame. They exist, they “are,” because of corporations. It has always been that way, and it will be that way for the foreseeable future.

Let me state it once again: The Republican mythology that the corporate media is liberal is our era’s Big Lie. It is demonstrably false. It is not based on evidence or logical reasoning. Corporations exist to make profits for a small group of rich and powerful people, who then use their money to influence the political system.

So now that taxpayers have been saddled with a $700 billion debt to pay Wall Street corporations, which essentially employ most of our country’s paid journalists, watch the major media outlets attempt to get John McCain elected president.

Look, for example, at the prevailing media narrative about last night’s debate between vice presidential candidates Joe Biden and Sarah Palin. It was obvious that Biden won the debate overwhelmingly, and a CNN poll even reflected that people thought so. But the media spin is not that Biden trounced Palin, which he did. The spin is that Palin “delivers” and “outdoes herself.” These are lies. She is incredibly unprepared to become vice president or president. She proved that virtually every time she spoke last night. Most of the time, she did not even answer the debate questions. Again, look at the ridiculous, absurd Biden/Palin debate coverage. There is no rationality, no discernable center or substance to it. It is a fiction, a calculated lie designed to get McCain elected president.

So I ask you to take a moment to imagine a world in which John McCain is president and Democrats do not have enough veto votes in the Senate to counter his agenda. The economy collapses even further. You lose your health insurance. You lose your retirement. Your children and grandchildren cannot afford college or cannot get a job. The Iraq occupation continues. Meanwhile, rejecting diplomacy, McCain opens a new war against Iran. Oh, yeah, taxpayers remain saddled with a new $700 billion debt to ensure investment bankers keep their extravagant salaries.

Perhaps those Democrats who voted in favor of the bailout bill, and this includes presidential contender Barack Obama, believe November will give them a sweeping mandate to change things in Washington and thus a new economic plan that helps middle class people can finally win approval. This would mitigate the effects of the bailout bill. I hope this happens. I want Obama to win in a landslide. Obama is absolutely the best presidential candidate the Democrats or any political party have offered in decades. His presidency would be groundbreaking and signal to the world that the United States has come back from the brink of utter disaster.

Yet one cannot help but wonder if it will take a complete financial collapse, one that brings with it soup lines and massive poverty before people wake up and the fiction writers in the mainstream media can be supplanted as the arbitrators of our national reality.

This much is for sure: No matter what the election results in November, progressives need to continue to move away from the mainstream media and develop new ways to distribute information directly to the people.