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00:00We have an update on that crash that was causing tie-ups on southbound 163 near the 15.
00:30In this country, the most powerful country on earth, it is so actually difficult to get
00:53information, especially outside our borders, not to mention what's going on inside this
00:59country.
01:04Public information, the news we rely on to learn about what's happening in the world,
01:10to learn about one another, is in the hands, basically, of commercial enterprises.
01:18This is America.
01:19How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage?
01:23They get to decide what is news, what is newsworthy, and what is not newsworthy.
01:28This is America.
01:29How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor's mortgage?
01:31What the press is pushing is distortions, lies, lack of balance.
01:36The American public knows far more information about sex scandals, celebrities, Hollywood,
01:51things like that.
01:52And they know about economics and the environment.
01:53That's by design.
01:54When was the last time, Governor, that you were at a Wendy's and had a Frosty?
01:58Make no mistake about it.
02:00It's to control people's ideas.
02:02It's to control their imagination.
02:04We're in a profound crisis of democracy.
02:17You can't choke off discourse and have a free society.
02:21This is what you get with corporate media.
02:24These are stories you will not be told on radio, in newspapers or on television.
02:29A clash between two worlds, big media corporations spinning public perception for profit versus
02:36the defenders of truth, who stand for liberty and democracy.
02:41And that's our news for tonight.
02:59I'd often been asked if there was any pressure on me because of the kinds of stories that I do.
03:20I was always asked, are there some stories that you can't do?
03:24Are there some times that you're not allowed to report on certain things because of advertisers?
03:29And my answer was always, absolutely not.
03:31Two decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the United States lifted the trade embargo against Vietnam.
03:49And CBS chief correspondent Roberta Baskin looked into one corporation's search for cheaper labor markets.
03:56The premise for the story was the fact that Nike were subcontracting to these factories on the other side of the planet.
04:05But they weren't really taking responsibility for how the shoes were made.
04:10And I asked to follow the trail.
04:14In August of 1996, Baskin and a CBS News film crew flew to Vietnam to investigate the Nike factories.
04:24We were able to kind of peek through the keyhole, but we were not allowed inside.
04:29We were barred.
04:30One of the things that really shocked me was to discover that the word Nike had become a verb.
04:43The word Nike meant to abuse your employees.
04:48There were incidences of physical abuse.
04:51Women who had their mouths taped shut for talking on the line.
04:55Fifteen women were systematically hit with the top part of a Nike shoe around the face and the neck.
05:06It was this disparity between seeing the corporate image that the company sells and the reality in these factories.
05:14Just do it, or else.
05:17Roberta Baskin's news report about Nike abuses was broadcast on CBS News Television across the United States.
05:28CBS was very pleased submitting it for prestigious awards.
05:32For me, what was really exciting about it was that the phones rang off the hook.
05:38There was picketing of Nike towns across the country.
05:48There were boycotts that were being organized by students on campuses.
05:53I realized that it had touched some kind of a nerve.
05:59Nike's labor abuses reached the media, and the shoe giant came forward to limit the damages.
06:05We don't have abusive labor conditions in our factories, and really never have.
06:13With Nike in denial, CBS News commissioned Baskin to do a follow-up investigation, working with a Vietnamese labor group.
06:22Roberta's work was mainly about the corporate punishment.
06:26We helped add another dimension to the problems that wages and excessive amount of overtime.
06:34apenas Kevin-Baskin is up here at that point.
06:42Baskin is not the good guys.
06:47Even though they have done a lot of commercials saying they are,
06:49people at that moment realized that they are not part of the good team.
06:54a good team.
06:56As Baskin was putting together the updated news report on Nike's labor practices, she
07:01received unexpected news from inside CBS.
07:05I got a call from my executive producer who said the story is not going to air.
07:11It's been taken off schedule.
07:12There's some sort of deal being made between Nike and CBS News for the upcoming Winter
07:17Olympics.
07:19The air went out of my soul.
07:26CBS News was paying an enormous amount of money for the rights.
07:30And so by definition they would be seeking out commercial sponsors who would pour lots
07:34of money into it so that they could recoup the millions that they were paying for the
07:39rights of the Olympics.
07:40The 18th Olympic Winter Games on CBS.
07:44As CBS revealed their Olympic coverage, the deal between Nike and CBS was plain to see.
07:51Correspondent after correspondent are wearing these Nike jackets on the air with a little
07:57CBS something or other, you really couldn't read it, and a big swoosh on the shoulder.
08:04That was the deal.
08:06Nike had convinced CBS News to turn its correspondence into billboards.
08:12It was heartbreaking.
08:15The CBS News correspondents were furious.
08:18They had to wear the Nike parkas whenever they appeared on air.
08:23It's just not done.
08:28Baskin wrote a memo requesting CBS management to take the Nike logo off the correspondence.
08:33CBS had crossed this incredible line.
08:40How do you trust serious stories when you're seeing the reporter wearing a bunch of logos?
08:47Immediately, the president of CBS News responded, saying this was a breach of professional etiquette.
08:55It meant that I should shut up.
08:58How dare I raise a question about the integrity of CBS News?
09:09After questioning the deal with Nike, Baskin was removed from her position as the chief correspondent
09:14of CBS News.
09:17It wasn't an ordinary transfer, a change.
09:20It was a demotion, and it was a demotion that was to send a message.
09:33I ended up asking if I could get out of my contract.
09:39The president responded, great.
09:42They were, you know, happy to see me go.
09:46Hi.
09:47Mr. Southrink.
09:48I'm Roberta Baskin from CBS News.
09:51Yeah?
09:52Yeah?
09:53I wanted to talk to you about…
09:54To this day, the CBS network has buried both of Baskin's reports on the Nike sweatshops.
09:58These are the kind of fundamental conflicts of interest that result in censorship, that
10:06result in a narrow debate, and they come directly from the fact that we have made these historical
10:11choices to allow corporations to own and control our media.
10:24Media today is dominated by a handful of corporations.
10:28This is a far cry from the original ideals of the country.
10:40As Americans fought for independence from imperial rule, the revolution found its inspiration
10:46in an unexpected place.
10:58The United States was, in many senses, founded by a journalist, Tom Payne, who called Americans
11:05to revolution against a British empire that was thought to be completely unbeatable.
11:14This country was really founded on the concept that if you gave citizens the information they
11:21needed, they could govern themselves.
11:25The founders of the United States gave citizens the fundamental right to a free press.
11:31One of the primary reasons for freedom of the press was that it was the
11:42only way people outside of power could keep the government from becoming an empire.
11:46Stop militarism.
11:47Stop the corruption, the secrecy, and the cronyism.
11:50That was the function of freedom of the press.
11:52There's a reason why our profession, journalism, is the only one explicitly protected by the
12:00US Constitution.
12:01Because we're supposed to be holding those in power accountable, asking the critical questions.
12:11One of the first steps of the new government was to encourage the distribution of independent
12:16news through subsidies.
12:22This was actually America's revolutionary contribution.
12:29The genius of the subsidies is that it did not discriminate against the content of the newspapers.
12:36The abolitionist movement didn't start in Congress.
12:39It started in those freely distributed weekly newspapers.
12:44And that was really where we began to address the most fundamental sins of the American experiment.
12:50It's simply information that is power.
12:54It's information that frees us because when people get information, they then can decide what
12:58to do.
13:00Today, the founding vision of America's journalistic independence has become deeply distorted.
13:08Media is the conversation we have as a society.
13:13It's the way we learn about the world.
13:14It's the way we learn about one another.
13:18We see the range of public debate constrained because there may be many things that citizens
13:24of a democratic society need to know about that private corporations may not be interested
13:30in telling them.
13:37Just as newspapers had been the driving force behind democracy, the great hope of the 20th
13:46century was the birth of mass media.
13:51We think Google and Facebook is a big deal.
13:54Imagine what it must have been like in rural Kansas to suddenly be able to listen to a broadcast
14:00from New York City every night.
14:01And now we move down 45th grade to the music box there.
14:05You people must have faith.
14:07You must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses.
14:11Together, we cannot fail.
14:13It was apparent to people at the time that the control over this medium was going to be
14:17a form of social control.
14:19With advertising money pouring in, corporate networks pressured Congress to uphold profit
14:26as the basis for American broadcasting.
14:28Businesses was publicly owned property and lots of Americans protested that we would turn
14:35over these scarce resources, these extraordinary airways to a handful of private commercial interests
14:40to make money by selling advertising to us.
14:44In 1934, Congress passed the Communications Act, sealing the future of America's broadcasting
14:51as a for-profit system.
14:53NBC, CBS, ABC, these huge empires were built upon the gift for free of monopoly rights to
15:01government property.
15:02It was an extraordinary corporate welfare that boggles the mind.
15:07With broadcasting set up as a commercial enterprise, government regulations were put into place
15:24to prevent monopolies.
15:29There was a cross-party agreement that commercial activity would be regulated by the government.
15:35No individual should have such dominance of our media that they could effectively define
15:44the discourse.
15:47The great transition came in the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the United States.
15:53Government is not the solution to our problem.
15:57Government is the problem.
16:02Ronald Reagan believed the answer to any concern, any question as regards how to create a good
16:08media system was to get government out of the way.
16:17In order to restructure media ownership, Reagan removed regulations.
16:23We're driving the bears back into permanent hibernation.
16:26We're going to turn the bull loose.
16:36Their whole model was the idea that if you removed all controls and regulations and allowed
16:43the free market rip, then everything would be fine, everything would be wonderful.
17:00In reality, what it does is it allows a handful of giant corporations to come in and gobble
17:05up everything, and these conglomerates don't see journalism as actually being central and essential
17:12to the functioning of a democracy.
17:14Their main interest is making profit.
17:19One merger symbolized the takeover of mass media by conglomerates seeking ever higher profits.
17:25People should remember that Ronald Reagan was funded by large corporations, and so suddenly
17:39we saw a radical transformation of the media system in the United States.
17:44General Electric and RCA, two of America's biggest and best known companies.
17:50In a dramatic move last night, the two announced plans to merge.
17:54We'll now have the strongest network.
17:57We'll have a stronger defense piece.
17:59This is going to be one dynamite company.
18:05A concentration of mass media in the hands of very few, very large international corporations
18:13who have a lot of different businesses.
18:16Defense business, theme parks, and news became a smaller and smaller part of ever larger corporations.
18:26The Reagan administration approved General Electric's purchase of major media holdings,
18:31despite ongoing violations of industry laws and practices.
18:37Meanwhile, from General Electric, from my family and myself, a merry, merry Christmas.
18:42Patty, don't you want to say Merry Christmas?
18:44The original sin was going to Wall Street.
18:47The demands of Wall Street will require empty desks in your newsroom.
18:51So why don't you minimize your actual product and make more money?
18:58Capitalism is not the best judge of what's good for society.
19:07When I knew it was time to go, the last speech I got from a CEO, he had been selling cereal,
19:13breakfast cereal, before he was selling newspapers.
19:16He came into Baltimore.
19:16He gave a speech about product.
19:18He never once mentioned news.
19:19He never once mentioned the role of a newspaper.
19:22He never once mentioned the role of a newspaper.
19:30We're now at a stage where every journalist who isn't asleep understands that corporate power
19:37has made it impossible for them to do the job as it needs to be done.
19:41One of the biggest news stories of the 1980s was the explosion of crack cocaine in the United States.
20:00The crack epidemic not only destroyed lives in the sense that people were addicted to this powerful drug,
20:06but also it set off gang wars.
20:11Certain communities, like the African-American communities, were disproportionately hurt.
20:16Gary Webb, he began investigating that.
20:22Gary Webb, he thought being a reporter was the best thing you could be,
20:26the only independent force in the society to establish truth.
20:34What first caught his eye, he's got Nicaraguans dirty in a drug deal,
20:39and they're not going down.
20:41They're getting a walk.
20:42If you're a reporter, you look into them.
20:45As Webb looked at the suppliers of the crack trade in Los Angeles,
20:50the trail led back to a U.S.-sponsored war a decade earlier in Central America.
20:55The Reagan administration wanted to be proactive in sticking it to the communists around the world.
21:03President Ronald Reagan authorized the CIA to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building, supporting, directing the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
21:16They are the moral equal of our founding fathers.
21:19We cannot turn away from them.
21:22Sponsoring violence in a small Central American country was far more important than stopping drugs from flowing into our cities and our communities.
21:37After a year-long investigation, Webb's report broke new ground by becoming the first major news investigation published both in print and on the Internet.
21:48As a consequence, even though the San Jose Mercury News is considered a regional newspaper,
21:53it was able to get national traction and even international traction on this story because it was now on the web.
22:00We've got all the DEA undercover tapes. We've got the FBI reports. We've got the court records. They're all posted for people to see.
22:07Brother Webb, when you look at his research and what he was doing and tracing it, and he was hipping up to check it and know it was true.
22:20By November 1997, the website was getting over a million hits a day.
22:26What is the word on the street now?
22:29Have you heard about the CIA?
22:33Yes.
22:34Well, you know what? We've heard. We've seen. And now we are moving...
22:39With the CIA on the defensive and the public demanding answers, the major national newspapers waded into the controversy.
22:46You have the fact that the San Jose Mercury News, being in Silicon Valley, was sort of challenging the gatekeeper function
22:52that the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, and other big papers had assumed was theirs.
23:00The Washington Post weighs in and says, Gary Webb got it wrong, but we can't tell you exactly how he got it wrong
23:06because we haven't the faintest goddamn idea.
23:08It was accompanied by a piece that declared that the African American community was conspiracy-prone.
23:14So that sort of set the tone that Webb's story would be dismissed and, to a degree, ridiculed.
23:22You had major media outlets going to the CIA and saying, is this true?
23:27And the CIA would say, oh, no, this is not true.
23:29And then the reportage was, oh, well, it's not true.
23:33This is nonsense. Come on, come on. I mean, come on.
23:37There has never been a conspiracy in this country.
23:42The fact is that the shoddy reporting on this story was not from Gary Webb.
23:48It was from his corporate-backed detractors.
23:51Now, I had a drink with a major figure at the LA Times, and I asked him about the crack-back.
24:01And he said, look, there were meetings in the building that they weren't going to let a guy from San Jose, California, come into their turf and win a Pulitzer Prize.
24:10As the press attacked Gary Webb, the public protested.
24:20I got involved with the protests because Gary Webb, he had no hidden agenda. He's not lying.
24:28And we're going to put the CIA in this country on notice.
24:34With the national media calling for a retraction, the Mercury News took down the Dark Alliance website and reassigned Webb to a bureau 150 miles from his home.
24:43I know.
24:47In the beginning, they were behind you.
24:49That's right. And then they caught a world of hell from the establishment media, and now they're not behind me anymore.
24:55And here, this guy that had all these awards, this guy that broke a story that everyone warned him not to break.
25:04All of a sudden, a journalist that should be hailed was treated like a piece of crap.
25:11A year later, the CIA released its internal report into the agency's involvement with Contra drug traffickers.
25:17There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity.
25:33The contents of the reports, if you go into the actual nitty-gritty of them, what you find is that there was a serious problem, that the U.S. government knew about it,
25:42and that the Contras were far more guilty of drug trafficking, and the CIA was more guilty of looking the other way than even Gary Webb had suggested.
25:52With the CIA's report about its relationship with Contra drug traffickers, the media had a chance to vindicate Webb's investigation.
26:00The New York Times, they do a story that is half kind of mea culpa, we should have done more with this, it was worse than we thought, and half Gary Webb's still an idiot.
26:08The Washington Post waits several weeks and does a rather dismissive article.
26:13And the L.A. Times never reports on the CIA's findings.
26:19So even though Webb was proven correct, he's still considered a flake, who got a story wrong.
26:27When he was interviewing with another job, they'd always say, aren't you the guy who wrote Dark Alliance?
26:32And then that would kill the interview.
26:36He couldn't make a living being a journalist anymore.
26:39And that ripped his heart out.
26:41He's despondent about his inability to find work.
26:46He got his father's pistol, laid out a certificate for his cremation, and then he shot himself.
26:55Frankly, you know, if I have to stand up and take a beating for putting the issue of government complicity and drug trafficking on the national agenda, I'll take that beating any day of the week.
27:05I mean, I was glad to do this story, I'm proud of what we did, and I'd do it again in a second.
27:09We killed one of the few decent working reporters in the country.
27:17By that, we, I mean the business I'm in. Media.
27:21With the new technological revolution, Congress began drafting new media legislation.
27:46The media conglomerates created the fantasy that if they were allowed to own dramatically more media, they could make dramatically better media.
27:59Big is better, effectively.
28:03Media corporations need that favorable policy that's going to allow them to grow and make more and more money.
28:09And politicians need that media to give them the air time that they couldn't exist without.
28:13Who's left out of that deal, of course, is the public.
28:19At that point, behind closed doors, these media conglomerates are asking for the rules to be loosened even more.
28:28Fantasy became reality for the media conglomerates when President Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecom Act into law.
28:36This law is truly revolutionary legislation that will bring the future to our doorstep.
28:43Telecom 96 really rang the dinner bell for media conglomerates to come and eat up every station that they wanted.
28:53Following the Telecom Act, a wave of massive mergers swept through the media industry.
28:58A handful of entertainment stars using mega mergers are preparing to dominate TV and movie screens worldwide.
29:07The combination of the two together gives us the opportunity to become the strongest creative company in the world.
29:14The superlatives were flying as Viacom and CBS announced the biggest media merger ever.
29:23A new multimedia giant will soon control an enormous amount of the entertainments.
29:28Viacom is buying CBS, parent of CBS News.
29:31When you think about the new Viacom, you really only have to remember a single number.
29:40That's number one.
29:42...on the convergence of media, entertainment...
29:46Almost as American as apple pie.
29:48The world's largest provider of internet access is merging with the world's largest media and entertainment company.
29:54When media consolidation began to happen, the local broadcasters weren't able to compete.
30:03Guess who those local radio station owners were?
30:06It might have been a person of color, or it might have been a woman.
30:10This really just knocked people out of the game.
30:24We've totally destroyed the localism of broadcasting purely to serve corporate interests.
30:29There's nothing in market economics that justifies it.
30:31It's pure crony capitalism at its worst.
30:38In this high-tech digital age with high-definition television and digital radio, all we ever get is static.
30:45A veil of distortion and lies and misrepresentations and half-truths that obscure reality.
30:54In times of war, the press loses all critical distance.
31:07Journalists see themselves as first and foremost patriots.
31:13The result is essentially the dissemination of propaganda.
31:16In the world's media capital, on September 11th, 2001, the unthinkable happened.
31:37The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.
31:42The terrorist attack of September 11th, as tragic as it was, was almost like a godsend to the Bush administration,
31:52because it gave them the raison d'etre that they were looking for to invade Iraq.
31:56To link Saddam Hussein to 9-11, the Bush administration turned to the intelligence community.
32:06You have to remember this is not an inductive process, it's deductive.
32:12You decide to go to war, and then you go find a justification, and this is exactly what happened.
32:17Look, I ran Iraqi operations. We didn't have any information.
32:26With no evidence of Saddam Hussein's role in the attacks, defectors started emerging from Iraq, with exclusives for US news outlets.
32:34There was an Iraqi by the name of Adnan Issan Said Al-Hadari.
32:40He claimed to have evidence of, you know, biological and nuclear and various kinds of weapons of mass destruction.
32:47He also talked about various facilities being under Saddam's main palace.
32:52He talked about nuclear facilities being disguised as water wells.
32:55I mean, he was their best corroboration that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
33:06Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.
33:10Among other sources, we've gotten this from first-hand testimony from defectors.
33:14We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad, and east, west, south and north somewhat.
33:19The success of their propaganda campaign would depend on one news outlet.
33:30I watched this from the inside.
33:32They created a stage and brought journalists into the audience who dutifully took notes and reported it.
33:38They believed all the crap they were fed.
33:42The New York Times is the intellectual and political opinion leader in the United States,
33:47sucking up to government in the most outrageous ways.
33:51Constantly trying to placate the military intelligence complex.
33:55There's a story in the New York Times this morning.
33:56Meet in the New York Times today.
33:58I want to trip to the Times. I don't want to talk about, obviously...
34:01It's closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.
34:03I don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
34:06The smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
34:09With the mainstream media convinced of the necessity for war, the administration took their case to the world stage.
34:21The coup de grace and the most brilliant propaganda maneuver of all was Colin Powell's absolutely fraudulent presentation in front of the United Nations Security Council.
34:32Let me share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts.
34:38We have first hand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails.
34:45And Saddam Hussein has not...
34:47Much of the fabricated information that was passed on by the quote unquote defectors formed the basis for Colin Powell's accusations.
34:55He didn't have any hard evidence, but you should have seen the press fall all over themselves as soon as he was done, saying that this had been a definitive case for war.
35:08This irrefutable, undeniable, incontrovertible evidence today, Colin Powell brilliantly delivered that smoking gun today.
35:18He just flooded the terrain with data.
35:20He has closed the deal.
35:21CNN, Fox, CBS, ABC, the giant echo chamber that creates public perception in the United States were giving out the administration line.
35:34Showdown Iraq. If America goes to war, turn to MSNBC.
35:38If you looked at the television screens with these graphics and drum rolls and countdown to Baghdad and this kind of stuff, it was a raw and open celebration of American power.
35:47This hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.
36:00After the fall of Saddam, Al-Hadari, the INC's defector, finally had the chance to show the world the justification for war.
36:15Mr. Hyderi couldn't bring these guys to a single place that he claimed had housed the weapons of mass destruction programs. The media fell hook, line and sinker for the administration's case for war.
36:29And in fact, certain publications appear to have been deliberately used and openly receptive of information that the Bush administration produced that was wrong, but that bolstered its case for war.
36:44Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
36:48King, John King. This is scripted.
36:50Thank you, Mr. President.
36:54You cannot go against the White House and survive. You're finished.
36:59April, did you have a question or did I call upon you cold?
37:03I have a question.
37:05Okay. I'm sure you do have a question.
37:09The whole idea in Washington is to marginalize people who go against the consensus and they do it very well. You don't get invited to the party.
37:17For me to blame the reporters is to miss the point. You have to blame the owners.
37:26These are the people who are responsible for the conduct of the people who work for them.
37:31It is my belief that wars really are started by the mainstream media.
37:46It is my belief that the press getting too close to big government, actually we are talking about a sort of interbreeding or intermeshing between the structures of the mainstream media and this structure of the military intelligence complex.
38:03The impact is that we've got all of these innocent people in Iraq that have died. We've got thousands of American soldiers and British soldiers that have died. They died for a lie that was so easily uncovered, but it wasn't allowed in the biggest news outlets.
38:24These private corporations are making profit off the killing. They push for more war. It builds their audiences. They limit the discussion about whether war should continue.
38:40They bring you the general versus the colonel or the pro-war Republican versus the pro-war Democrat. And they have these extremely limited debates. When most people are outside of that spectrum, most people are against war.
38:55The rapid consolidation of media across broadcast, also into film, book publishing, created a series of
39:25And there's a situation where instead of having the democratic media system that the founders anticipated, with thousands of different owners of small weekly newspapers, you no longer had Tom Paine. You had Rupert Murdoch.
39:38Rupert, is there any agenda that you want to shape? For example, take the war. You having a global media enterprise. Have you shaped that agenda at all in terms of how the war is viewed?
39:54No, I didn't think so. I mean, you tried. Tried in what way? Well, we basically supported our papers. I would say supported the Bush policy.
40:11News Corp. News Corp. and others have eaten out nearly every single independently managed newspaper within the United States. That is something that is quite dangerous in putting its business interests and its political interests over the top of all that.
40:28In order to prevent media monopolies, the Federal Communications Commission was charged with regulating the media.
40:35The most important job the FCC has is looking out for regular citizens and making sure that whatever media policy is made, that it's the best for the public and the best for democracy.
40:47How are you? I'm available for questions.
40:54So, Colin Powell leads the drumbeat for war. And his son, Michael Powell, was attempting to lead the war against diversity of voices at home.
41:04Once in office, Powell waged war against the last remaining rules on media ownership.
41:13Here is this agency that very few people knew about. And they were trying to push through regulations that said, in a town, the newspaper, radio and television could be owned by one person, by a media mogul, someone like Rupert Murdoch.
41:29This is what people feared the most, that all the content for TV, radio and the newspaper coming out of one shot. A one size fits all, one newsroom community.
41:43There was almost no public scrutiny until Michael Powell called network coverage of the Iraq war thrilling.
41:50There were these millions of people, and they hear that the FCC guy is calling the coverage thrilling while he's trying to obliterate the last remaining rules.
41:59And it just tapped into this anger that people were feeling about the war.
42:05Despite millions of people protesting against the FCC, Michael Powell didn't get the message.
42:11Even when people did say, hey FCC, we're the public, we don't want you to do this, the FCC turned around and did exactly what those megacorporations wanted it to do in the first place.
42:28With victory at hand, the media giants publicly expressed their gratitude.
42:33And it was pretty stunning. The head of Viacom is Sumner Redstone. He repeatedly said, having a Republican in the White House is better for my company and I vote Viacom. And for that reason, I endorse Bush's election.
42:52These large conglomerate companies, they contribute to political campaigns. They expect to get something for their money, deciding on their own and for their own purposes.
43:01The news we see and hear.
43:04The only reliable, durable, and perpetual guarantor of independence is profit. Thank you.
43:31Every aspect of our lives, from what we buy, what is sold to us, who produces it, all those things are connected.
43:40It's not only a monopoly of wealth, it's a monopoly of information as well.
43:45In 2007, with the FCC reviewing its media ownership rules, the public came forward.
44:04Millions of people wrote to Congress, wrote to the FCC, emailed, spoke out at forums. You'd have a forum of a thousand people, this was unheard of, saying no.
44:18One media mogul can't own the radio, television and newspaper in a city.
44:23Here was an example where the public had intervened and gums something up.
44:30Under new chairman Kevin Martin, the FCC announced public hearings on media ownership in cities across the U.S.
44:38We are some of the most entertaining people on the planet, but we don't know a lot about what's going on in the world because of the way our COVID is.
44:45We get struck.
44:47400 is controlled in the 6% of Portland's media markets. That is not perverse. It is not competitive.
44:54Look around. We are concerned citizens. We're trying to believe that we matter. Don't make fools of us.
45:03And I beg the FCC to help us.
45:06You can switch from channel to channel and see the same thing.
45:10It's very clear that this country has become prophets over people.
45:15Despite overwhelming public opinion against more consolidation, Kevin Martin sided with the media conglomerates and removed the cross ownership ban.
45:26What Kevin Martin did was demonstrate his absolute thorough going contempt for doing his job and representing the public interest.
45:36Embracing entirely the interest of wealthy corporate benefactors, period. Pure and simple.
45:45I think the people that own the media would be much happier if we were a nation of mindless consumers rather than a nation of informed active citizens.
46:10I think the people that own the media would be much happier.
46:13I think the people that own the media would be much happier.
46:14I think the people that own the media would be much happier.
46:15To seize this moment, we have to ensure free and full exchange of information.
46:33That starts with an open internet.
46:35I will take a backseat to no one in my commitment to network neutrality.
46:42Because once providers start...
46:44It's simple, it's net neutrality, it's non-discrimination, and it's a basic principle that politicians pay lip service to it.
46:53That if these same players like AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner are able to take over the internet through lax public policy, that we'll lose even the internet.
47:02Despite his election promises, President Obama has brought in new internet pricing rules, going against the principles of a free and open internet.
47:12It is by making publishing cheap that permits many more people to become publishers, that permits many more different voices.
47:24That's where the internet has really excelled.
47:26WikiLeaks has published a lot of information about war, about militaries, how they behave, intelligence organisations.
47:33And that information often comes as a surprise to the public.
47:37It's because the public has been lied to.
47:39Come on, fire!
47:40We have moved the envelope to what is acceptable for people to publish.
47:47Should the United States do something to stop Mr. Assange?
47:51We're looking at that right now.
47:53Mr. McConnell says he's a high-tech terrorist.
47:55Others say this is akin to the Pentagon Papers.
47:57I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.
48:02The greatest fight we have had in bringing the First Amendment to the world was in bringing the First Amendment to the United States.
48:14This guy's a traitor, a treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States.
48:19Will the internet remain free?
48:21Or will a few companies be able to control and monetize it?
48:24That's the debate of the era.
48:27We have to stop, recognize that our media is in crisis, and ask ourselves, what is the media that we want?
48:38We want more information, access to more information. We have fewer people who control the information.
48:45We can't allow this country to go down for the count because some guys on Wall Street can't make money producing garbage news.
48:51The media is that kind of issue where if we want it to be better, we have to fight for it.
48:58These are the critical battles we face right now in the United States and, frankly, in countries around the world.
49:05How we respond to this moment will be every bit as definitional as how the founders responded to their moment.
49:15This is really about having a conversation about what kind of decisions we want made in our name.
49:25That's really what will save us, is when we really know what's going on, not filtered through the lens or the microphone of a corporation.
49:34Or simply what's uOt pulling from the company to do?
49:49But there's no way to fix things, and you can make the decisions, or tell me what's getting done.
49:57I want the belief that they want that...
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