How free is the western political debate

Freedom of expression: How free is the western political debate?
The coming Olympic Games in Beijing and the Typhoon in Burma have brought the spotlight of the western media to the issue of the freedom of speech in totalitarian regimes like China and Burma.
Burma have receive massive critic for its complete lack of freedom for expression.

Burma has a totalitarian regime with no political ideology except to keep the elite of military leaders in power. In a totalitarian society your individual opinion does not count. If your individual opinion differs from that of the ruling regime, they can just lock you up in jail or make you "disappear". But in a western democratic society, how free are we really? Are we so free minded as we like to believe?

Here in our western hemisphere we have access to Hundreds of TV and Radio channels, newspapers and internet sites. We should be well equipped to keep us up to date with the breaking news just a click away. The broad collection of news channels should provide us with"unbiased" and objective news. But there are black clouds on the bright blue sky.

The marked economy, which we all are part of, have also, consumed the news industry. The much praised competition has led to monopolization of the media world and greatly narrowing the stream of news and expressions. The marked thinking has led to the establishment of "Media Empires" owned by multinational corporations or "Media Moguls" The owners usually implement their own policies into their newspapers, TV and Radio stations, publishers and internet sites.

The capitalist control over media is portrayed with great realism in Orson Welles film "Citizen Kane" from 1941. In the film, we follow the raise of Charles Foster Kane's media empire. He actively edits the stories so they fit with his own version of the world. The film itself actually became a victim of the capitalist controlled media. Randolph Hearts, which the film was loosely based on, forbade all of his media empire to even mention the film (the ban lasted for 30 years).

The massive control over the media is on a collision course with some of the very principles of journalism, to bring the facts, to tell the truth.

In a western, democratic and free society, a regime can't arrest people for "disagreeing". In a free society it's important to control the public opinion, to control the public mind. It has become a large business to produce propaganda to control the opinions of the public. It's known as "Public Relations" and is a billion dollar industry. The citizen is bombarded with waves upon waves of Fabricated, twisted and censored news and stories. We are told what is "right" and what is "wrong", the system is complex and for the common hard to detect. The media empires political policies are economical neo-liberal and pro free marked, and they also want to keep the power away from the masses. The media is played major role in preserving the parliamentary system constructed by James Madison and the other "founding fathers".

The main function of the parliamentary system, according to Madison "The primary reasonability of government is to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority". Madison, who was a smart man, realized that this would be a serious problem if a democratic system where established, if people have the right to vote "people would pretty soon call for redistribution of property and for a tax on property rights". He was worried about what he called "A leveling spirit" among the people. "The leveling spirit" is the idea of a more equal distribution of wealth and property. If the growing class of dispossessed would be able to vote, he understood that he and the wealthy upper-class would be in trouble. It would be hard to defend the minority of the opulent against the majority which, in Madison's view was the government was all about. He therefore designed the constitutional system that was intended to prevent that danger. The system as he designed it was intended to keep the power in the hands of the wealthy, "the more capable set of men". He also said that it is important to keep the majority fragmented and fractionalized.

If we look at the American election campaign coverage this year you can see that they create large and consuming debates about topics that in reality are less important to the public.
The coverage of the democratic nomination process has been enormous, but is Clinton and Obama really so different? If you look on their real political priorities you can find that they are surprisingly similar, in contrast to the circus that has been made about them. The US media have blown up small issues like tax cuts (for the rich) and effectively excluded all Americas poor. They also contribute to the fragmentation of the majority into "camps" like the "Clinton camp" and the "McCain" camp".

One of the most important tools of a totalitarian regime is "the outer enemy", today known as terrorism and militant Islamism. The media effectively urges the people to focus on "Americanism" and "Patriotism", to stand together against this treat, even if it cost them the right of privacy and basic civil rights.

The system that shows in the US today is comparable to the propaganda driven totalitarian system in George Orwell's book 1984. The totalitarian regime of "Oceania" the country controls it population trough scaring them with an outer enemy. The real existents of the outer treats are dubious and the government never releases any real information about it. The picture of the outer enemy is also changing the enemy has to be changed out to keep the effect.

During the Cold war, the Soviet Union was the main enemy and made the basis for large quantities of propaganda. It escalated to its peak in the McCarty era where thousands of Americans where accused for being soviet spies, communists or other forms of "anti-American". When the Soviet Union collapsed the regime in Washington needed a new outer enemy, they found it in the "Axes of evil" and "terrorism".

The first Act in the "war on terror" was to invade Afghanistan, as they claimed, to free the Afghan people from the Taliban regime. The irony of it all is that militant Islam in the form of Taliban was built up basically with American founding. The American Intelligence - CIA reason behind this was to master plan a defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan as an important part of American cold war against Soviet. And The US succeeded: The Soviet fell, but the Taliban could not see any reason for not grabbing the power it was fed by the support of the US. So the Taliban seized power, chose to cooperate with Al-Qaida and the rest we know.

So are we really so free after all?

A statistic: In North America there are: 7 major movie studios and more than 1,800 daily newspapers, 11,000 magazines, 11,000 radio stations, 2,000 TV stations, 2,500 book publishers. 23 corporations own and control over 50% of the business in each medium. In some cases they have a virtual monopoly.