Apr 09
19
Baaaaa. Vs Twitter
Every so often I come across someone unique. Someone who
cares enough about their community or country enough to actually get off their
lazy backside and do something.
Sheep usually don’t do very much. They graze and follow each
other.
As a New Zealander, I used to get a lot of ribbing from Aussies
and I have heard almost every Kiwi Sheep joke ever told.
In the last decade I have noted the declining quantum of
sheep jokes. Sheep have become big business. If you are a sheep farmer in an
area with good rainfall, then the depression hasn’t yet hit. And if there was a good feed,
then you have a bumper crop of spring lambs.
Sheep are quite a profitable farming choice. Whether you are
a New Zealand sheep farmer or a Government, you ensure that your sheep are well
fed, watered, and housed and in turn, the sheep ensure that you can fleece them
many times a year and when they reach their maturity they can be fleeced one
more time as they march off to the abattoir for the little they have left to
donate to the GDP, either their meat for consumption or estates for probate,
tax and distribution.
To ensure that the sheep are well maintained, farmers employ
shepherds and guard dogs.
Governments employ the media as entertainer guard dogs.
Mary Jones is not a sheep. Somehow she escaped the present
world “Animal Farm”
media enhanced existence and tells a rather compelling story via an inelegant
page full of very large pictures – but at least she is “having a go” and the
tale that she tells is that;
Journalism has lost its integrity, with today’s media networks
more interested in maintaining advertising generating ratings than truthful
reporting of events.
Mary quotes John Swinton, former Chief of Staff for the New
York Times from a speech he is said to have given at the New York Press Club in
1953:
“There is no such thing at this date of the world's
history in America
as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who
dare write your honest opinion and if you did you know beforehand that it would
never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of
the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for
similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest
opinions, would be out in the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my
honest opinion to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours my
occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth,
to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to
sell this country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it.
“What folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools of
vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull our
strings and we dance.
Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all
property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
Mary quotes quite a few other people [Here] well worth
reading, if only to remind us about past events that, well, were not quite
concluded.
She talks about big business gobbling up the independent
News sources, Talk-back radio stations, ensuring that only “Appropriate News”
is aired.
Thank-you Mary for standing up; I do hope you’re on Twitter
because until Twitter is bought by News Limited, it may be the last bastion of
getting the message out fast, to everyone, uncensored.
Of course the way to ensure that the Mary’s of the world
arn’t failing in their attempts to be heard is to start a blog of your own and
twitter all your friends every time you write a blog article about something
important. Something, that is portrayed differently, in the “approved
appropriate news sources”.
Tweet today – and stop being a sheep.
Stand up be counted, and make a difference.
And turn of that stupid TV – it is brainwashing you into
being a sheep. Baaaaa baaaaa baaaaaa Which way to the abattoir? Baaa baaa
baaaaa
References
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdochs War on Journalism
http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s1214230.htm
ED2K
ß
Not an enticement to download – merely a reporting of its popularity on the P2P
networks.
Truth in Journalism
http://thegreenman.net.au/mt/archives/000728.html
For Truth in Journalism
http://www.theamericancause.org/pattruthinjournalism.htm