Anti-Union Propaganda on Major TV Networks

By TRB

The three major television networks - I won't include Fox because I don't consider their content as "news" - ABC, NBC and CBS as you might expect of most mega-corporations, are firmly on the Governor's side in his attempt to break the union in Wisconsin. It is hard to imagine that right here in the United States, a government body wants to make it illegal for certain people to meet, engage in free speech and organize. But that is what is happening in Wisconsin

The worst of it is that two corrupt billionaire brothers named Koch are literally paying certain state government officials to squash the unions. You will barely hear that fact mentioned on any of the major television networks, although that, in a journalistic sense, is the most important fact in this story. It could turn out that there are criminal indictments of some of these politicians who have taken the Koch money.

The other fact the networks barely mention is that the striking workers have already accepted the proposed cuts in their health care and have agreed to pay more toward their pensions. So it is no longer a money issue. The collective bargaining that Governor Walker wants to get rid of is non-financial collective bargaining. In other words, the unions can't use collective bargaining to attempt to receive salary increases.

We know, thanks to reports in the New Yorker Magazine and other media outlets that the infamous Koch brothers, a pair of brother billionaires, who are regularly fined by the EPA for polluting the environment are literally paying cash to destroy the unions.

This cash payment routine goes back a year when the Supreme Court ruled that money was the same as free speech - meaning anybody with enough money can purchase a politician. The banks immediately went shopping, along with the health insurance companies. They filled the campaign chests of most every politician in the land. Now politicians don't work for the people in this representative democracy; they work for the banks or investment firms or drug companies. With that one ruling the Supreme Court of the United States destroyed our democracy.

This was very quickly proved when bank-owned politicians like Barack Obama began to work for them instead of for us.This shameful Supreme Court ruling also made it possible for people like the Koch brothers to pay politicians to do whatever it is they want. The people on this Supreme Court who voted that money and free speech are the same, will not be forgotten. Within the right set of circumstances they could find themselves in prison. Their ruling was a criminal one.

The Attorney General, Eric Holder has to investigate these exchanges of money that have taken place in Wisconsin between the Koch brothers and the governor and other parties to make sure no laws were broken. Will he do it? So far, as an AG, he has been one of the worst in history, even lower than Nixon's Mitchell. Obama's lawman can look a crime right in the eye and see nothing.

Making things worse, U.S. major news networks have been rolling out fresh anti-union propaganda on a daily basis. Virtually the only news people covering this strike with any objectivity have been Dylan Ratigan and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

Yesterday, CBS news person Cynthia Bowers provided television viewers with nearly three minutes of anti-union propaganda on the 6:30 pm CBS News. Bowers somehow forgot to mention that the union has already agreed to the financial cuts requested by Governor Walker. She failed to mention the known fact that this anti-union action is almost paid-in-full by the anti-union Koch brothers and that many politicians in Wisconsin have benefited financially from the Koch brothers for their anti-union vote. These are not facts that should be overlooked in any news story on this strike. Yet Bowers failed to mention them.

She is either a mediocre journalist or someone who is purposely looking the other way. In fact, her theme for the story seemed to be 'times are changing and the unions might be a thing of the past." Any journalist, knowing the facts of this story, would agree that her "news report" was a disgrace to the profession.

Unfortunately the other networks are just as bad or worse. If anything was proved yesterday, it was not that the unions are on the way out, but that the three major network news organizations are already gone. They have become little more than propaganda arms of the mega-corporations that own them. And as everybody knows, corporations do not like unions - especially union strikes.

It is no longer news. It is corporate indoctrination.