Corporate Media Bias

The way that journalism in the USA portrays Neo-Liberalism leads me to believe a majority of Americans might be hoodwinked into believing that’s the way life is supposed to be. Liberalism and Political Economic Liberalism or Neo-Liberalism, are only related by the word liberal and only the word. Liberalism is a way in which people are involved in a society where free speech, equal opportunities, and human rights and dignity are common place. The USA was built on these kinds of principles and President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal used Libertarian concepts to help the country come back from the Depression that crippled the USA. In the news today, being called a liberal in some instances can be a derogatory term, especially on the Fox News Channel which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Neo-liberalism, which can be categorized as a form of economic liberalism, is the distinction of free market principles based on entrepreneurial endeavors to maximize capital for enhanced profit. It is a privatization of trade with the might of the military as a buffer zone to let the wheels roll without damaging product and stifling labor reforms (CorpWatch: What is Neo-Liberalism). On paper, the theory of Neo-Liberalism sounds promising and worthwhile; it is survival of the fittest. On the other end of the spectrum, the exploiting part of the equation, you have humans as commodities working with low paying wages and inhumane working conditions brought about by the Neo-Liberals looking for profit over the welfare of the common citizen. Another way of looking at this is through a website called “Global Issues- A Primer on Neoliberalism”. It states the following:

“Liberalism” can refer to political, economic, or even religious ideas. In the U.S. political liberalism has been a strategy to prevent social conflict. It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Right wing. Economic liberalism is different. Conservative politicians who say they hate “liberals” — meaning the political type — have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism (Global Issues).

One of the problems of Neo-Liberalism is that it doesn’t take into consideration that poverty is born through the use and implementation of capitalistic Neo-Liberalism. Another glaring issue present today and decades before, is the function of class and race in the day to day of everyday society about which mainstream journalism misinforms or skirts matters to the public. Removing public works in lieu of liberalization of trade, and the lack of regulation of businesses, privatization of government run programs and other Neo-Liberal changes releases the corporate identities to run rampant over the labor force. They view human capital as numbers on a spread sheet rather than real people with real lives, just trying to make ends meet and having more difficulty doing it as time moves on. The real issue raised here is the way the mainstream news media glosses over the way poverty exists, and has no proper, concrete ways to address the problem in a social and meaningful method which is needed to eradicate or at least lessen poverty. The disparity of rich to poor is widening at an alarming rate that reminds me of the Old Robber Barons of the industrial age using the backs of the people to enrich themselves. The World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization says something about this:

The gap between rich and poor countries has widened, as has the divide between rich and poor within some nations. In sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, for example, more people lived in poverty at the end of the 1990s than at the beginning of that decade. Despite the creation of fantastic wealth, half of the world’s workers and their families, or about 3 billion people, live below the $2-a-day poverty line (World Commission, 2004).

All the talk on the news about how Wall Street is struggling while CEOs make millions per year leads me...