spacekatgal - Edwards Defeat Proves Chomsky's "Propeganda Model."

John Edwards surrendered yesterday to the reality that he will not be president in 2008. It was a hard day for many progressives like myself - we'd just lost Dennis Kucinich days earlier. Many of us feel that the chance to reverse the damage of the Bush Apocalypse TM went with him.

I think most Americans are unaware of how extremely right-wing the political dialog is in this country. We're not given a true right and a true left perspective, because there's no socialist perspective given to us in the mainstream media. Instead, we're given a right-wing extremist and a left-wing centrist/corporatist range of dialog.

This is fully in concordance with Chomsky's famous "Propaganda Model."

According to his theory, our news is not censored in a strictly fascist sense. Instead, our privately owned news media operates in it's own best interest and only allows dialog within the narrow framework which benefits itself and the power elites. The indisputable point of his model is that institutions like the media and the elites MUST operate in their own best interest - otherwise they wouldn't last for very long.

I sometimes watch Fox News to understand what the hell the right-wingers are thinking. The last time I did, I was watching Bill O'Reilly slander Edwards, painting him as a left-wing extremist, a socialist ambulance chaser, and a number of the other propaganda buzzwords they use to marginalize the left. This has a pernicious influence on the mainstream, leaving Americans to choose between Hillary, a status-quo corporatist and Obama, a corporatist with better rhetoric and less experience.

It's so frustrating being a progressive in a country synthesized to think right-wing lies are in their best interest.
Bri