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- Path: sparky!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wupost!mont!pencil.cs.missouri.edu!daemon
- From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
- Subject: Today's Quote...
- Message-ID: <1993Jan5.093514.8552@mont.cs.missouri.edu>
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- Date: Tue, 5 Jan 1993 09:35:14 GMT
- Approved: map@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
- Lines: 52
-
-
- From Chapter 16 (the Media) in Sexton's _The War on Labor and the Left_:
-
- Public opinion is a treasured power resource in the conflict
- between capital and labor. It can make or break strikes, elect
- candidates, influence labor legislation, and affect union growth.
- Public opinion is perhaps most responsive to the real life
- experiences of people, their jobs and concerns, and what they
- witness with their own senses. But beyond the range of personal
- experience is the larger world with which people have little
- face-to-face contact. To learn about this world, they must rely
- almost wholly on news media, which are far from being the the
- voices of impartiality they claim to be.
-
- "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one," Liebling
- wrote, and no group on the American labor-left now owns a
- mass-distribution daily newspaper. Socialist and labor dailies
- expired long ago, and although other leftist publication are
- extant, none remain that can present and interpret the news as it
- happens and disseminate it to a mass audience. Some critics say
- that labor-left publications are just as partisan as conservatives
- ones, but that is just the point. Partisanship is to be expected
- in labor-left publications, just as it is in the corporate-owned
- mass media. This apparent symmetry does not balance the scales of
- media justice, of course, since the resources and reach of the two
- are incomparably different.
-
- In the absence of a labor-left voice and strongly contrasting
- viewpoint on issues, the bland facade of media impartiality and
- their subtle biases are often mistaken for nopartisanship...
-
- "The reactionaries," John Dewey said early in the century, "are in
- possession of force, in not only the army and police, but in the
- press and the school" although it may seem strange to speak of the
- press and schools as possessing force, it is undeniable that their
- ability to influence (even "brainwash") the people they inform can
- be as potent in its effect as armed force.
-
- ******************************************************************
- From:
- ******************************************************************
-
- _The War on Labor and the Left.
- Understanding America's Unique Conservatism_
- By Professor Patricia Cayo Sexton
- Westview Press -- Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford
- ISBN 0-8133-1062-8 ///\\\ ISBN 0-8133-1063-6 (pbk)
-
-
- ##################################################################
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