FCC CHAIRMAN KEVIN MARTIN: SNOTTY LITTLE REPUBLICAN SOCIOPATH

-by Noah

While media outlets distract the populace with the doings of barely sentient human-like cretins such as Britney, Paris, and Pat Robertson, endless 24 hour coverage of the latest kidnapped white girl (apparently kidnapped "others" don't rate unless they're the grandchildren of a right-wing congressloon taken by their mom), OJ's life story, constant attempts to get you to focus all of your frustrations on immigrants so you'll scapegoat them instead of the real corporate culprits, put criminal former Congressional leaders on camera 10 hours a day, enrich them and proclaim them experts on everything from tax code to God's will (like they'd know), something much more insidious is going on.

Our corporate media is becoming one very dangerous, mind-numbing, opinion controlling voice, hypnotically drilling its corporatist slogans into the public mind with that ONE voice. No diversity of
opinion. Forget Pravda. Forget Hitler's Big Lie. The world Orwell warned us about so many decades ago is here. Instead of telling you that the Food and Drug Administration has been gutted to the point of e.coli death by spinach dysfunction by the current criminal Lex Luther wannabe in the People's White House, they'll pump up the fear level about mystery plagues that are on our doorstep, due any day now, brought to you, no doubt, by the dreaded immigrants, or, worse, the Muslim family that's been living next door to you for the last 20 years. Instead of telling you who is profiting from the war, they'll tell you it's a war against terror and not a war for oil profits. They also won't tell you that while Saudi oil is now $100 a barrel, Venezuelan oil is half that. Why won't they tell you? Well, maybe it's because the biggest crime family in our country has "a close personal relationship" with their buddies, the Saudi royals while their relationship with Hugo Chavez is... not so good. They won't get their cut of the booty with the swarthy Latino guy. The media even tell you Chavez is nuts. Yeah, like Saudis who flog rape VICTIMS with 200 lashes and hold public beheadings every Tuesday afternoon are sane! Can anyone convince me that Bush is sane? Don't waste your valuable OJ News time trying. Saddam's biggest crime was that our leaders weren't getting a piece of the action. Chavez better watch out. How often do you hear that on your TV or read it in your paper or weekly corporate news rag? Nope, it's all Britney all the time. Everyone likes to run down the street to see the car crash.

How'd it come to this? It started with old senile Ronald Reagan's unholy lust for deregulation and his repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, a doctrine which mandated equal time provisions. It continued up through the present, enabled by some of the worst Presidents (including the absolute worst) this country has ever had. I now include cigar aficionado Bill Clinton. After all, it was he who between chasing plumpers around his desk in the Oval Office, found time to sign the Telecommunications Act Of 1996, a bill that was sold as a chance for the little guy to own a TV station. Yeah right. Now, due to the resulting merger and acquisition mania, you or any minority investor can buy an FM radio station, as long as they can meet the ever rising price tag, which zoomed to $200 million because of Clinton's pen. What the act was really designed to do is what it did. That one thing undid a lot of whatever good Clinton did for the country. It headed us down to Orwell land and totalitarian government. It removed restrictions on just how many media outlets a corporation could own. The result was a bunch of goons in San Antonio creating Clear Channel and buying up every station they could get their slimy money on. Now, instead of thousands of individual shows, you get the same damn one where ever you go, in the country or on the dial. All programming will soon come from one place. You already don't hear of the many Bush scandals and crimes in the mainstream media. Don't get me wrong. Clear Channel is not the only one of its nefarious kind. There's Infinity and a few others, all structured along the same lines. Just six media conglomerates control virtually everything you see and hear in the media. That goes for Radio, TV, Papers, Magazines, Books, and Films. Where there once was a multitude of diverse programming and opinion voices, now there is just a handful. Soon the mergers will increase and eventually there will be just one, kinda like State Radio; you know, like they had in the good old days of the Soviet Union. Just who won the Cold War anyway? What's happening to our media is the stuff that totalitarian governments are built on.

Dictators have dreams too. Their's consist of, among waterboarding and other delights, a media which just parrots government and corporate press release hand outs, kinda like the New York Times reporting on WMDs in Iraq. It isn't just Congress that protects Bush from Impeachment, Conviction, and Imprisonment for high crimes and the treason of outing CIA agents.

Now, the FCC wants to go even further. Despite a massive public outcry, FCC Chairman, Kevin Martin wants even more media consolidation. He's doing Bush's bidding. He wants to lift a ban on one company owning both a TV outlet and a newspaper in one market. Keep in mind that the FCC's charge is to ensure diversity, localism, access, and fairness. These concepts are an anathema to Republicans  and dictators. Showing typical Repug disdain for "ordinary citizens," Martin argues, unconvincingly, because like always with Repugs, the reality-based facts just don't back him up, that newspapers will wither and die unless they can have a TV station too. I would argue that our nation's newspapers would sell more copies if they actually had something people wanted to read other than government press handouts which go unedited and unquestioned by "reporters" and "editors" who would fail a junior high school journalism class. TV stations already have canned, prepackaged programming from government agencies that they run as news. Fake is fake, no matter what the media calls it. On top of all of this, the average profit margin of a typical newspaper in this country is a healthy 17-18%. That's higher than the average Fortune 500 company. So, who's suffering? In addition, two-thirds of our papers are already owned by conglomerates.

Martin also deviously claims that lifting the ban would only cover the Top 20 markets. Not so. He conveniently fails to mention a loophole that would open up all markets to the same corporate monopoly. I guess he forgot, but then, snakes like this heinous Bush tool (His previous job was General Counsel for Bush/Cheney during the Florida recount.) are not exactly in favor of Freedom of Information and a free exchange of ideas. Thomas Jefferson once said that if he was given the choice between a government without a free press or a free press without a government, he would opt for the latter. Kevin Martin is no Thomas Jefferson. If people like Martin have their way, coming generations of Americans will never even hear about Jefferson OR that little document he wrote called The Constitution. Like another Bush crony, Alberto Gonzales said about the Geneva Conventions being "quaint," I guess Martin feels same about The Constitution. We already know his boss does.

Finally, some reserved types would say we shouldn't get personal when writing about enemies of the country. I'm not one of those. Better men than cloying, sycophantic Kevin Martin have sold out their integrity for lowlifes like Bush and the chance of a very profitable post administration career in the corporate sector. Let's see what media corporation Martin ends up with in a high paying gig. Colin Powell, who's son Michael preceded Martin, was at least once thought to be a man of integrity before he threw it all out the window and lied, not just to his country, but the entire world about WMDs. Kevin Martin doesn't even rise to the stature of Chemical Ali, and, if you look at him in the video (below), Kevin needs a tailor REAL BAD. What's with those pants Kevin? Yeesh!