Ted Turner Explains Propaganda — It All Comes From Fox
Vol: 19 Issue: 26 Saturday, April 26, 2003
“There’s really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It’s not healthy.” So said CNN’s Ted Turner, who spent the 1990’s helping to centralize that media control by merging Time, Warner Bros, CNN and AOL into the world’s second largest media conglomerate.
Turner made his comments while slamming the world’s first-largest media conglomerate – Newscorp, belonging to arch-rival Rupert Murdoch.
Turner called rival media baron Rupert Murdoch a ‘warmonger’ for what Turner said was Murdoch’s promotion of the U.S. war in Iraq.
“He’s a warmonger,” Turner said in an evening speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco of Murdoch, whose News Corp. Ltd. owns the fast-growing Fox News Channel. “He promoted it.”
Fox News Channel has been the most popular U.S. cable news network during the conflict, trumping AOL Time Warner Inc.’s CNN, which Turner started more than two decades ago and came to prominence with its blanket coverage of the 1991 Gulf War.
Asked by an audience member for his thoughts on Fox’s larger ratings share than CNN’s, Turner said, “Just because your ratings are bigger doesn’t mean you’re better.”
“It’s not how big you are, it’s how good you are that really counts,” Turner said.
THAT comment reportedly drew hoots from the audience.
Turner, who has pledged to give $1 billion to the UN, a committed globalist who is dedicated proponent of population control and the destruction of the nation/state, dismissed Murdoch’s Newscorp as being driven by politics, rather than journalistic ethics.
To Turner, Murdoch is political because he did NOT oppose the United States, whereas CNN is less political because it supports the UN. But that is the mindset of CNN’s decision makers. Coverage is ‘politically slanted’ unless it dovetails with the CNN worldview. And what a worldview that is.
In an interview with the BBC, Turner said both the Israelis and Palestinians were engaged in terrorism. Only a few months after 9/11, Turner called the hijackers ‘very brave’.
Speaking of CNN’s own audience, Turner once said, “When you’ve got 80 channels like you do here, people watch whatever they want. And that’s the sad thing about it, because the more cerebral, the more complex, the more forward-looking the story is here in the United States, to a large extent the smaller the ratings are.”
So Turner thinks his ratings are slipping because CNN’s political positions are beyond the grasp of the average American. He once told a forum of CNN broadcasters, “The United States has got some of the dumbest people in the world. I want you to know that. We know that.”
Assessment:
Turner got support from his position from that other bastion of neutral impartiality, the state-owned British Broadcasting Corporation.
BBC Director General Greg Dyke said U.S. broadcasters’ coverage of the Iraq war was so unquestioningly patriotic and so lacking in impartiality that it threatened the credibility of America’s electronic media.
Dyke singled out for criticism Fox News Channel and Clear Channel Communications Inc., the largest operator of radio stations in the United States.
“Personally, I was shocked while in the United States by how unquestioning the broadcast news media was during this war,” Dyke said in a speech at a University of London conference.
Note he was ‘shocked’ — shocked, he says.
I wonder if the BBC was ‘shocked’ at the revelations from CNN that it covered up much of what went on in Iraq during the past twelve years, withholding the truth about what it knew in order to keep their money-making Baghdad bureau in operation. As CNN’s Eason Jordan admitted, if CNN had told the truth about what they knew they would have been kicked out of the country.
So they stayed and lied, and kept CNN’s competitive edge in Baghdad while Fox was forced to report from the sidelines from Amman or Kuwait City.
What is even better is that America has ‘shocked’ the national media, the entertainment industry, academia and liberal weenie preachers. We aren t listening to them, and they can t stand it. The literati believe we are too dumb to think on our own, so their duty is to tell us what to think. Especially Ted Turner’s crowd.
The television networks made a big deal out of the fact that their personnel wouldn t wear American flag lapel pins. CNN pontificated that if they wore American lapel pins, they wouldn’t be perceived as ‘objective’ outside the United States. ABC, CBS and, early on, MSNBC spouted the same nonsense.
The one exception was Fox News Network. Their folks wear flag pins. Guess who had the biggest audience during the Iraqi war? Duh!
I watched CNN cover the toppling of the Saddam statue in downtown Baghdad. They showed a couple of excited young soldiers the the statue of Saddam and briefly cover his face with an American flag.
Wolf Blitzer and Christiane Amanpour looked like they were sucking lemons as they reported the story.
Seeing an American flag over Saddam’s face was just too . . well, shocking.
Omegaletter 