Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
Stephan: This is the latest on the major trend concerning the American media. Not a happy story. A democracy requires a healthy functional objective media to be healthy itself. The trend seems to be moving against this.
Click through to see the excellent clarifying graphs.
Overview
In 2012, a continued erosion of news reporting resources converged with growing opportunities for those in politics, government agencies, companies and others to take their messages directly to the public.
Signs of the shrinking reporting power are documented throughout this year’s report. Estimates for newspaper newsroom cutbacks in 2012 put the industry down 30% since its peak in 2000 and below 40,000 full-time professional employees for the first time since 1978. In local TV, our special content report reveals, sports, weather and traffic now account on average for 40% of the content produced on the newscasts studied while story lengths shrink. On CNN, the cable channel that has branded itself around deep reporting, produced story packages were cut nearly in half from 2007 to 2012. Across the three cable channels, coverage of live events during the day, which often require a crew and correspondent, fell 30% from 2007 to 2012 while interview segments, which tend to take fewer resources and can be scheduled in advance, were up 31%. Time magazine, the only major print news weekly left standing, cut roughly 5% of its staff in early 2013 as a part of broader company layoffs. And in African-American news media, the […]
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Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR, - The Guardian (U.K.)/Raw Story
Stephan: Little by little the truth comes out about the war criminals that were leading the U.S. and the U.K. and the endless lies they told that resulted in both countries becoming embroiled in two wars, representing perhaps the worst geopolitical decisions in several centuries.
Fresh evidence is revealed today about how MI6 and the CIA were told through secret channels by Saddam Hussein’s foreign minister and his head of intelligence that Iraq had no active weapons of mass destruction.
Tony Blair told parliament before the war that intelligence showed Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programme was ‘active
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Tuesday, March 19th, 2013
ADAM LEE, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: This report helps explain the intense pressure the Theocratic Right is attempting to exert on the Congress to breach the Church/State firewall the Founders went to such effort to put in place. This is a movement whose purpose is to assure that a dwindling minority can exercise power disproportionate to its numbers.
Sometime last year, the US quietly passed a milestone demographers had long been predicting: for the first time in its history, this country is no longer majority Protestant [3]. Fewer than 50 percent of Americans now identify as Protestant Christians of any denomination.
This change has come on surprisingly recently, and from a historical perspective, with breathtaking speed. As recently as 1993, almost two-thirds of Americans identified as Protestants [4], a number that had remained stable for the several preceding decades. But sometime in the 1990s, the ground started to shift, and it’s been sliding ever since. Whether it’s the ‘mainline’ Protestant denominations like Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans or Presbyterians, or the independent evangelical, charismatic and fundamentalist sects, the decline is happening across the board. The rise of so-called megachurches [5], like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in California or Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill in Seattle, represents not growth, but consolidation.
What’s happening to these vanishing Protestants? For the most part, they’re not converting to any other religion, but rather are walking away from religion entirely. They’re becoming ‘nones [6],’ as the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life puts it. It seems likely that this is the same secularizing trend being observed in […]
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CAROL MORELLO, - The Washington Post
Stephan: Here we see another unconsidered aspect of the crushing of the middle class trend. This is what happens when a nation places profit above wellness.
The tendency of young adults to put off marriage has taken a harsh toll on Americans without college degrees, according to a new study by a group of family researchers.
The study, titled Knot Yet, belies the mythology popularized on shows such as ‘Girls,
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BRAD MOON, InvestorPlace Contributor - Investor Place
Stephan: Here is the latest on the 3-D trend. And, once again, technology has outstripped the structure of the law.
Remember what it was like when consumers could open Napster and then download any song they wanted
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