A friend sent along a few political cartoons. More propaganda, I mused. A few days laterI came across a Bill Moyers interview with Marty Kaplan, director of USC's Norman Lear Center and an entertainment industry veteran.The Moyers interview vindicated, point by point, my rant below responding to the many ways propaganda continues to influence all our lives. I replied…

From my perspective political rivalry is staged, it is a cheap carnival show designed to keep just about everyone distracted, and thereby allowing lobbyist the freedom to pimp their wares which is a very old story dating back to the Greeks.

In the 20’s Propaganda was made respectable by renaming it Public Relations, Manufacturing Consent, which the Nazis took to new levels. The Machiavellian Play Book was rewritten in the 50’s with television. Again in the 80’s by dismantling the Fairness Doctrine intentionally blurring the lines between news and propaganda which was the intent of the entire talk radio – talk-TV boom. See Jerry Mander, the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, published in the 70’s and still the most insightful view of how television in the hands of corporate-political power (and they are the same, Benito Mussolini called corporate-government Fascism) will use media to manufacture consent.

We are all being manipulated every day by joining the staged carnival distraction we call popular politics, which is not the real politics, the real politics is the use of power to control populations and resources. The people, regardless of which side of the farce-fence they cheer have little to say about much of anything - by design. So we belly up to the bar and spout off our induced republican-democrat bull which does absolutely nothing – except prevent us from gathering the energy and insight needed to create a completely different approach, which the Occupy movement is actively pursuing and why there is a continued media blackout of anything real. This is the reason the circus continues to grow more and more outrageous, because the whole show is designed to keep us all as stupid as possible.

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Your Media Sanity Kit, because media literacy isn’t enough.

Watch the Moyer interview – twice, then read and study the transcript.

Read Robert F. Kennedy’s talk in New York on the critical importance of investigative journalism and the survival of democracy.

Read our interview with Jerry Mander, Author of The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and other important works.

Read the Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.

Don’t watch corporate media. Even if it looks like news it is not.

Stay informed. Find independent information sources. Ask questions. Don’t believe everything you think.