Posted on 09/14/2005 9:55:19 AM PDT by Liberatio
Does anyone know about the Center for Media & Democracy?
A student in a class I am taking posted a link from their website in response to an end of class discussion about Walmart that poured on the the class discussion board. It is about how Walmart affects our lives and some students offered opinions.
This class is about things in our environment and how they affect us. The teacher is very balanced (refreshingly) for a college professor, he also believes there needs to be a balance of for example, capitalism and conservation. He wants us to think, which is in itself, unusual.
The link is below
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Wal-Mart_Stores
SourceWatch Priorities
The primary purpose of SourceWatch is documenting the activities of public relations firms and public relations professionals. Sourcewatch also includes specific case studies of deceptive PR campaigns, corporate PR campaigns, the activities of front groups, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts. We are also building profiles on public relations associations, specific criticisms of PR, common propaganda techniques, war propaganda and much, much more.
Some suggested reading for you along the lines of capitalism.
Milton & Rose Friedman - Free To Choose
Dixie Lee Ray - Trashing The Planet
George Gilder - Wealth & Poverty
Rush Limbaugh - The Way Things Ought To Be, &, See I Told You So
Jude Wanniski - The Way The World Works
Those are a real good start and are worth a semester of credits in the real world.
Take care,
http://www.prwatch.org/books
Books by the Center for Media and Democracy's Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber:
Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing is Turning America Into a One-Party State
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future
Mad Cow USA
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (also available now as an educational video)
I can see they are biased. "progressives". activists..yada yada.
All I had to do is put the name in Yahoo search..
yes, those are great reads. this class is a required class for the degree.
that's what i do. if i find something there i will check it. i prefer to shop at Sam's Club. i also find it a better shopping experience. most of the walmarts here in phoenix as trash riddled. not only inside but outside as well.
Dixie Lee Ray - Trashing The Planet
George Gilder - Wealth & Poverty
Rush Limbaugh - The Way Things Ought To Be, &, See I Told You So
Jude Wanniski - The Way The World Works
May I add Thomas Sowell - Basic Economics & Applied Economics?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1484392/posts
After the storm - The Five Steps of Crisis Management
If the prof is a left wing whacko, and I suspect he is from your post, then shut up and read the crap he makes you and then regurgitate the propaganda at the correct time. After you have received your grade, tell him he is so full of sh#t that his eyes are brown.
he is pleasant. i like how he handles some of the crack-pot students when they say stupid things. even more impressive is how some stupids will come back and refute with some sort of proof and he will back them up.
love the tag line
It's a generally "liberal" organization, with a special interest in media affairs. As long as you keep their “spin” mind, they are sometimes as interesting source of reporting on “media manipulation” by both corporations and governments. Not on my regular reading list, but sometimes cited by resources there.
That is a link to a pro-labor blog.
Walmart is incidental to the argument. This is simply a discusson of whether unions have any validity in today's post-industrial world.
Research the damage unions do to our world. The key points against unions are:
1)Free speech restrictions.
2) Limited production.
3) Limited freedom to work, or give. (Teachers unions restrict teacher's abilities to coach for instance.)
4)Political interference.
5)Forced membership dues.
6)Warring unions can drive businesses into bankruptcy (USAirways, Delta).
7) They encourage black-market labor (illegal immigrants)
8) They are elitist and set the agenda. (You can't become a teacher unless you allow yourself to be indoctrinated into liberal think-NY).
9) Union members answer to two bosses - their shop steward and their boss.
10) Unions encourage violence against non-union workers.
11) Unions work hand in hand with mafia type groups.
Hope this helps. Be sure to research each of these points above thoroughly before using them.
BTW, the thing I’d keep in mind as you study these things is that *everyone* is to some extent a prisoner of their dogma, and that a lot of things don’t neatly resolve along dogmatic limes.
An example might be comparative economics: there are lots of people in Europe who think our system is destructive of human well-being, and that we want out dogma to drag them down with us. There are lots of people here who feel the same about their systems.
In fact both systems work pretty well – they are just grounded in very different recent economic and political experience, and it seems to me quite likely that in fifty years both will still be evolving, and both will still be quite successful.
(This isn’t moral or economic “relativism”, BTW. There are lots of systems - for example all the types of highly centrally directed economies tried so far, and almost certainly all the modern attempts along “Islamic” lines – that clearly don’t work neatly as well as either the Properterian-capitalist or the social-democratic models, while the long-term performance of some others - such as the various state-capitalist models in Asia - is still an open question).
The trick is to grasp the general underlying principles of economic and social systems – to understand why those that have failed dramatically have done so – while understanding that no system is likely either optimal or stable in it’s “pure” or “ideal" from, if for no other reason that than humans are constantly learning to “game” economic and political systems just as they do all others, and that finding solutions to emerging problems requires awareness of our own ideological blinders and a pragmatic willingness to examine alternatives.
Give them this article:
FEMA vs. Wal-Mart
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1484260/posts
Sowell just wrote that article I posted above - FEMA vs Walmart. Good one.
i did get this response from the student about what i told at the top of the post.
begin
sourcewatch and the center for media&democracy balance the scales against the propaganda produced by walmart's pr team, such as this site:
http://walmartfacts.com/
refuted point for point here:
http://factchecker.purpleocean.org/
i agree that taken by itself it has a specific bias, but, there is no source that does not have a certain political opinion or bias. show me a source that has an entirely objective position. the center for media&democracy offers an alternate source of information. the facts stated on sourcewatch are factual and well supported, not the usual doublespeak you will find in a pr campaign.
end
i may just tell him to consider the source and do his own homework. i am tired of doing it for other people.
Yes the key to an easy pass: I am a parrot I repeat what you say.
The key to integrity and a tough pass, stand up for what you know to be true and have the facts to back it up.
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