If we don't get to the heart of the fact that there was long ago a coup in this country,

a silent coup, where corporations took total control of the process of selecting the leaders in this country,

then nothing's going to change.

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Now, welcome to the award-winning BestOfLeft podcast with clips today from We Are Here,

on the media, counter spin, Democracy Now, the Tom Martin program, and a clip from the documentary All Governments Lie.

Let me ask you this. What's wrong with American journalism?

That's a big question.

Yeah, it is, huh?

How many days do you have?

Well, yeah, I guess...

Well, let me put it this way. I think this film basically establishes or follows on with the thesis in that wonderful book written by Nome Chomsky and Professor Edward Hermann.

jointly authored, even though people kind of forget about Hermann, because Chomsky is such a superstar, but the book is called Manufacturing Consent.

That is, as Glenn Greenwald says in our film, that manufacturing consent is kind of like the Rosetta Stone for understanding the mainstream media and what's wrong with it.

So the thesis of manufacturing consent, if I can sum it up, which is difficult to get down to one sentence, but...

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, it's basically...

I would say the thesis is that the mainstream corporate media in the United States function as a tacit propaganda arm for powerful government and corporate elites.

And, you know, it doesn't mean that the journalists working within those institutions, like the New York Times, consider themselves working for a propaganda arm, but that's just kind of the way it works out.

And it is a self-selecting process where the journalists working in the mainstream media to get ahead, they know there are certain stories and certain attitudes and behaviors and orthodoxies that they need to accept.

...