The corporate media's "coverage" of protest activities can be very disheartening for activists, but these are just a few of the reasons that they will never tell our side.

- The corporate media should NEVER be expected to report fairly, or even at all, on events or ideas that threaten it's existence: All corporate media rely solely on revenue from wealthy advertisers in order to operate. In order to justify the cost of (and to maximize revenue from) it's advertising slots, the corporate media requires a large audience of complacent consumers/materialists who are: lobotomized against any tendency toward critical thinking; over-worked due to the belief that pursuit of wealth, property and consumer goods will one day bring them happiness, fulfillment and prestige; without leisure time and therefore unable/unwilling to take the time to become informed through independent media sources; in a state of absolute denial about the effects of a consumerist lifestyle on the planet and on human health (physical and psychological).

These are just a couple of the DESIRED traits of all corporate media target audiences. When pressed, any representative of the corporate media will freely admit that the people they keep as customers have short attention spans, do not understand "hard news" and therefore turn the channel/station/page when presented with it. (This fact was constantly drilled into students' heads -- by professors and industry veterans -- at the university where I attended journalism school, before dropping out). When people tune out, ratings or circulation declines and advertising slots become less valuable. All corporate media censor news that negatively portrays its advertisers, and most do not deny that this practice occurs. Particularly gruesome cases of this have been documented thousands of times in independent press. The political candidates who "run the country" finance their multi-million dollar election campaigns through gifts from these same corporations. What we have in the US is in fact identical to what we point to in other countries as a "state-run media": one official viewpoint represented.

Don't spend too much time and energy begging the corporate media to tell our side of the story -- aside from a few isolated incidents, it will never happen. The promise of the internet is only one step toward rendering corporate media irrelevant and obsolete. In addition to preparing mass mobilizations like those since N30, we all need to return to our communities and continue to organize/network for widespread distribution of independent media via internet, print, indy/pirate radio, creative transformation of public space, public access TV, and so on. We can also do a great deal of good simply by talking to other people. There are probably thousands, if not millions, of young people getting involved whose familes may not yet understand this movement, but who know that their children are not terrorists. They will want to know why their kids are being harrassed and brutilized by police, smeared and ignored by the press, and why it has become a crime to care about anything at all, other than commuting to and from work in a car, working, driving in and out of parking spaces at shopping malls, shopping at shoping malls, complaining about the price of gasoline, and a very few other officially allowed activities.

Remember, the movement as it currently exists is still less than one year old! There has been tremendous progress in drawing attention to things previously unheard of in the corporate american media (WTO, trade "liberalisation", etc).

Thank you to everyone in L.A. this week.

For the better part of a decade I have been repeating this message, which has yet to be adequately digested and internalized by "the People" and their leadership groups. The mass media can be depended upon for one goal only, namely, to support the privileged capitalist class and the "Golden Rule" of investor politics. Moreover, by soliciting mass media play on movement actions the legitimacy of the mass media is enlarged and the movement itself, is acting out a game of self-destruction. Even by complaining about the lack of mass media coveage of movement actions, one endorses an expectation that does not exist.

Better that the movement leadership turn their backs altogether on the notion of mass media exposure of the movement point of view, and instead, establish a strict policy of continuing denunciation of the mass media, corporate propaganda system. What is imperative is that the deadly fiction of "free market" capitalism, itself, be supplanted by an ethic of democratic sustainability as I have suggested elsewhere, see e.g., Global Civilization: Disintegration & Rebirth, available online at URL: http://sunsite.utk.edu/FINS/Sustainable_Development/Fins-SD2-04.html

The expectation that capitalist institutions can be reformed by peaceful citizen protest, is poor strategy, without any historical basis. The only thing that capitalist instuitutions can be expected to do when confronted by citizen protest, is to shift their strategic goals without any change whatsover in the basic purposes of enslaving the citizenry-at-large. For example, instead of segregated schools and lunch counters, sweat shops and institutionalized poverty, we have the disintegration of community and family life, urban decay, an environmentally and culturally ravaged America, commodification of labor by Federal monetary policy, together with a violent war on minorities and activist leaders by state police and national intelligence agencies, coupled with the fast rising prison colonies of slave labor, to assure that "the people are kept in their place"!

Indeed, the "New Slave Masters" are just getting started. Just wait until you wake up to the new civil infrastructures now being planned with public funding, to assure capitalist dominion over social capital in addition to present controls over both intellectual capital and finance capital. And I know you will just explode with wonderment at the new survielance devices now coming to market, in which a person's own body cavities, which may be covertly entered by police agencies with the cooperation of your capitalist physician during routine surgical procedures, are taken over to house continuous digital signaling so that your every movement can be instantly tracked.

Don't forget that not only do the major media conglomerates give money to the republicrats, they also get 100's of millions of dollars in revenue from the sale of campaign ads to them. The fact that campaign advertising is a substantial amount of revenue for media conglomerates further adds to their incentive not to rock the boat. Of course they'll say how much money is spent on elections, what they won't say is how they are tainted by receiving their share. It makes me sick when major media outlets cover campain finance reform pretending not to have a stake while reform would potentially take a chunk out of their bottom line.