Okay. Thanks for explaining. It's difficult carrying on a conversation in "type" rather than face to face.

And thank YOU, Orchid. It's nice finding a friend!

Actually, I'm very very afraid for our country these days. I say this as a grandmother of 5. Their USA is starting to look very different from the one that I grew up loving. What I love about this country is that we can discuss issues and make decisions ...but I think that has all been eroding right before our eyes.

I'm a professor of media and other communication topics so I study this stuff all the time. (and by the way, I got my Ph.D. when I turned 50, after having raised 4 kids). I'm actually planning to develop media literacy programs in the community because I'm so concerned about this. I'm currently teaching a course on propaganda in the college where I teach. To prepare for this course, I've read about 60 books since summer 2007 on various topics, including law (decisions about the 1st Amendment and corporations as persons), the use of opinion polls, lobbying, censorship, media history, the concept of the public and the public sphere, etc. etc. All in all what I've learned is more dire than I'd anticipated.

Because space is limited, I'd like to boil it down to the problem and the solution.

1. The problem is that Corporations control ALL the media (radio, TV, books, recording companies, movie companies, textbooks, magazines, billboards...and the same companies own amusement parks, baseball teams, movie theaters etc.). There are 5-6 of them TOTAL in the world that own most of this. Corporations are huge businesses. They're interested in profit, particularly on the stock market. They're impersonal. They do not care about you or me. They want laws (all over the world) that help them keep their power, and they want to get rid of laws that threaten it. They treat democrats and republicans the same and lobby them equally. And starting in the years after the 14th amendment was passed the Supreme Court (I think it was in the 1880s) interpreted that law as applying to Corporations. So they have free speech like you and I do. Think about that. The Walt Disney corporation has the right to free speech. And they own ABC. (By the way, what network do you own?)

2. Corporations prefer that we, the public, be passive. They want us to buy things, but they don't really want us to act as citizens because citizens think and act and make laws to control and contain them. The solution: We the public need to recognize our collective power. We need to hold these corporations accountable.

Lots of other issues are secondary, like what do journalists do, and what party the individual journalists belong to, and what their particular feelings and opinions are. They aren't the enemy. Essentially, journalists are on our side.

There's great difficulty finding real, decent, true information. It shouldn't be so hard, but it is. But the "other party" isn't out to get you. The corporate world is (and spend a lot of time trying to buy politicians). Look around you and start asking yourself what the world looks like, and what it could look like: Big ugly big box stores everywhere, cheap goods from China, Americans out of work. How can little neighborhoods fight against development when a huge corporation comes to town?

And this is not me being anti-business, not at all.

Some of the other corporations to worry about are oil and arms manufacturers. Go back and read history. Look at oil in the 19th century, the "Spanish American War" created by the Hearst news media. Look at WWI and how a country of pacifist-isolationists (i.e., the US) who didn't want to enter into a war with Europe ended up sending so many young men to be slaughtered.(WWI was horrific -- men were used as cannon fodder).

Dwight D. Eisenhower said "Beware the military- industrial -Congressional complex." (The Congressional part is often omitted).