Propaganda makes you feel dirty.

posted by The Vidiot @ 8:00 AM Permalink

So, for some odd reason, we ended up watching 60 Minutes last night. First, was the Al-Hurra story (which is the US administration's answer to Al-Jazeera.) Wow. You have to watch it to believe it, but my favorite part was when the interviewer asked the former head of CNN, and now former head of Al-Hurra this question (and I paraphrase) "So how do you maintain journalistic credibility?" without a hint of irony.

Then, we watched the second segment with Anderson Cooper about starving kids in Niger. Seems they've come up with some sort of cheap food thing made of peanut butter, dried milk and vitamins that malnourished kids can eat to make them nourished, I think it was called something like Plumpy Butter or something. Any way, we're watching this thing, and it's one of those, "See? Capitalism works for the Africans! We've found a solution to the problem of the poor starving children! See? The system works!" -type stories. And they interviewed one of the doctors and she seemed like a very sincere and caring physician who just wants to help these kids and she gets her one chance to speak to the world and when Cooper asks her something where the answer SHOULD'VE been a harsh criticism of the US and US policies in Africa that caused the starving in the first place, she just says something completely unmemorable.

So we couldn't take that anymore so we switched over to Bill Moyers where he was talking about race and neither one of the guys he was interviewing said a damn thing. Really. One guy talked A LOT and didn't say anything. We kept waiting for him to make a point and he never did.

After all of that, we just felt so dirty and propagandized and Mr. Vidiot (who didn't even own a TV before me) asked "Have they always been like that? Mouthpieces for the system?" and I had to answer that I assumed yes, but that I wasn't much aware of it before December 12, 2000.

To cleanse our brains, we watched some animated movie on Ovation called "Dante's Inferno" which was pretty cool.

Labels: corporate owned media, MSM