Confusion! (Part 1)

Coming back from a short trip along with four other friends yesterday (writing for this blog started on 7/8/13 and was completed a week later), we were listening to the news of the airplane that crashed upon landing in San Francisco airport on CNN, Fareed Zakaria’ s news analysis program. Zakaria had three guests to discuss the events in Egypt, plane crash in San Francisco airport, and the fate of Edward Snowden, in addition to some CNN reporters. It was interesting that his three guests said the same thing about each of those subjects, as if each was repeating the previous speaker’s analysis, just in different verbiages. They ended up saying what Zakaria concluded, and what we can hear from government officials regarding all three subjects. There was not much to explain about the plane crash, what we were mostly interested to learn about. However, the other two subjects; “lack of experience in democracy in Egypt” and “Snowden aiding the enemy” were not anything short of the news we could get from Fox and other media, mostly the mouthpiece of the US government. In his memoire published in 2010, Jimmy Carter discloses his notes of his presidential period of late 1970s. One complaint that is continually repeated throughout this book is the conflict the media had with his administration, and the media’s polarization of his policies. He states that at the beginning of his term, Washington Post published a document about Jordan’s King Hussein, and his relationship with the CIA disclosing Hussein’s monthly stipend from the US secret service. It is interesting to see the 180 degrees turn of the media coverage during these thirty something years, to an opposite direction. The main reason may be monopolization of the media, and allegiance of the media moguls to status quo.