Santa Cruz Media Summit: Live this weekend Jan. 25-27
T R U T H * E M E R G E N C Y, 24.01.2008 16:36
Following posted by a Rogue IMC volunteer as a service for independent media here in Southern Oregon...
http://truthemergency.pnn.com/4641-front-page
Update by Peter Phillips and David Kubiak
Many economists now doubt that government measures can prevent a
major recession given the severe slump in the housing market, the
subprime mortgage crisis, growing unemployment, declining consumer
spending, and record high oil prices. Even harder times for working
people are undoubtedly at hand, yet mainstream corporate media
continues to lavish more attention on the Super Bowl and celebrity
misadventures than measures to protect Americans from grave personal
economic harm. We are spun, mislead, propagandized and amused to
death by our media conglomerates and as a result the US has become
the best entertained and least informed society in the world.
* Peter Phillips *
There is a literal truth emergency in the United States, not only
regarding distant wars, torture camps, and doctored intelligence, but
also around issues that most intimately impact our lives at home. For
example, few Americans know that there has been a thirty-five year
decline in real wages for most workers in the country, while the top
10% now enjoy unparalleled wealth with strikingly low tax burdens.
George Seldes once said, “Journalism's job is not impartial
'balanced' reporting. Journalism's job is to tell the people what is
really going on.” Michael Moore’s top-grossing movie Sicko is one
example of telling the people what is really going on. Health care
activists know that US health insurance is an extremely large and
obscenely lucrative industry with the top nine companies "earning"
$93 billion in profits in 2006 alone. The health-care industry
represents the country's third-largest economic sector, trailing only
energy and retail among the 1,000 largest US firms.
Nevertheless, 16%of Americans still have no health insurance
whatsoever and that number will not soon decline, as insurance costs
continue to rise two to three times faster than inflation. The
consequences are immediate and tragic. Unpaid medical bills are now
the number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the country, and the
Institute of Medicine estimates that nearly eighteen thousand
Americans die prematurely each year because they lack coverage and
access to adequate care.
US private health care services differ markedly from other
industrialized countries where single payer systems provide everyone
with medical care as a basic human right. Unfortunately, objective
media coverage and comparisons of single-payer public health care
with our current profit-driven corporate system are almost non-
existent at this time. To protect their bloated bottom lines, private
insurance companies and HMOs invest heavily in lobbyists and
corporate-friendly political candidates that promote their
"indispensable" role in any future health care reforms. Besides
their insider political influence, these firms deploy massive
advertising budgets to discourage media investigations of the
economic interests shaping our health policies today
Tens of thousands of American engaged in various social justice
issues constantly witness how corporate media marginalize, denigrate
or simply ignore their concerns. Activist groups working on issues
like 9/11 truth, election fraud, impeachment, war propaganda, civil
liberties/torture, and many corporate-caused environmental crises
have been systematically excluded from mainstream news and the
national conversation leading to a genuine truth emergency in the
country as a whole.
Now, however, a growing number of activists are finally saying
"enough!" and joining forces to address this truth emergency by
developing new journalistic systems and practices of their own. They
are working to reveal the common corporate denominators behind the
diverse crises we face and to develop networks of trustworthy news
sources that tell the people what is really going on. These
activists know we need a journalism that moves beyond forensic
inquiries into particular crimes and atrocities, and exposes wider
patterns of corruption, propaganda and illicit political control to
rouse the nation to reject a malignant corporate status quo.
This Truth Emergency Movement is holding its first national strategy
summit in Santa Cruz, California Jan. 25-27, 2008. Organizers are
gathering key media constituencies to devise coherent decentralized
models for distribution of suppressed news, synergistic truth-
telling, and collaborative strategies to disclose, legitimize and
popularize deeper historical narratives on power and inequality in
the US. In sum this truth movement is seeking to discover in this
moment of Constitutional crisis, ecological peril and widening war,
ways in which top investigative journalists, whistleblowers and
independent media activists can transform the way Americans perceive
and defend their world.
You can join us on line with comments and responses at: http://truthemergency.pnn.com/4641-front-page
Peter Phillips is a professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University
and director of Project Censored, a media research organization.
David Kubiak taught mass media and memetics for 10 years at
Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan and is the former executive
director of 911truth.org. For information on the Truth Emergency
movement see: http://truthemergency.us/
