Posted: Apr 13, 2012 3:03 am
Jakov wrote:(1) Yes, the internet is overtaking other kinds of media. (And I think that's a good thing.) But this has absolutely nothing to do with the hypothesis that print, radio and television are compromised by market forces.
For (2), of course its true that just one advertiser cannot change much on its own, but the entire group of them have similar interests of lower taxes, fewer environmental restraints, less public exposure to scandals and higher profits. There's the whole wealth of evidence in my other thread and the Manufacturing Consent book that shows big business indeed has the power to do all these things.
(1) Your initial statement (that Jeffersonian-marxist concurred with) was that people in America "have almost no other source of information than the corporate-controlled media". My statements regarding the internet are showing that "almost no other source of information" is untrue; my statements regarding (2) are questioning the validity of the "corporate-controlled" portion of your statement.
(2) There's some overlap among businesses, but you overstate its significance. In general, firms want an easier time running their business. Not all firms are engaged with the environment to the extent that they'd prefer fewer environmental regulations though (and indeed, some may prefer more stringent environmental regulations to drive up entry costs, or to promote that firm's alternative technology that relates to the environment, etc); to firms engaged seriously with R&D, better business-related laws would be lower barriers to immigration, not less stringent environmental regulations; not all scandals take the same form, what is a scandal for ExxonMobil isn't going to be a scandal for Amazon.