NEW YORK, March 9, 2005 -- Sound the alarm! America, the land of the free, is now under attack, not by Al Qaeda, not by Iraqi "insurgents," not by an enemy confronted on foreign soil; not even by one that homeland security could ever stop. It is an insidious, invisible assailant, more hidden than a terrorist cell. It is one that invades virtually every American household on a daily basis without leaving a trace of its deceitful, dangerous nature. Its whores, draped in dignified apparel, sit in front of the American flag, speaking with an air of genuineness and concern for public welfare, while all along, their statements are empty rhetoric, politically motivated, aimed at distracting, misinforming, programming, and keeping Americans ignorant, all for the narrowest of self-interest based on pathological obsession with the bottom line.

The dangerous enemy of which I speak is a handful of colossal corporations that control the media -- such as General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Disney, and Time-Warner. The messengers of these monolithic media conglomerates are their model employees like Tim Russert, Chris Matthews, Lou Dobbs, and Brit Hume, who have sold their journalistic souls to keep themselves on the air. General Electric wants a military contract to sell its jet engines to fight a war in Iraq. And it expects its corporate media division, NBC, and its front men like Chris Matthews, to help.

While the cardinal rule of media ethics has always been to avoid conflict of interest, the corporate media feeds on it. Their bottom line drives their "news." What passes as such is just what the highest bidder decrees, which is often the U.S. government. What Americans see and hear is therefore largely a paid political announcement. Lockstep journalism inside an intricate politico-corporate media web of quid pro quo, favor trading, and conflict of interest has turned our Fourth Estate into a docile lapdog of government.

You don't have to look at the blatant examples of "fake news" such as Armstrong Williams or Jeff Gannon (AKA Jim Guckert) or the contrived, infrequent press conferences the White House stages to see this. Even the New York Times has become an important trader in this media deception. After keeping up the pretense of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was no longer profitable, the New York Times printed an editorial note confessing its tendency to accept the word of official government sources about WMDs without carefully investigating them. Like a child caught with its hand in the cookie jar, it "came clean" -- a cheap, self-serving form of repentance buried in an editor's note instead of transparently plastered on its own front page. But what it didn't admit was its own corporate pressures to tread lightly on the government. The Times Corporation was, in fact, a major lobbyist before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), seeking further deregulation of media ownership. Far from being the watchful media eye on government, keeping the public up to speed on corruption in the Bush administration, it was trading favors with it.

And why did so many Americans believe there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden? Association psychology worked like a charm when Bush mentioned these names in the same breath. But the media did nothing to dispel the myth. Worse, it helped to propagate it by repeating official government sources -- like Cheney -- instead of doing its own investigative reporting. It was more "cost effective" to parrot official sources than to spend money to probe and investigate.

When CNN, "The most trusted name in news" presented the story of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, it reported that Bush was "concerned" about the abuses, not that he said he was concerned. If the abuses were ordered from the top, he would have surely been concerned, but primarily about protecting his own hide; but the press didn't look into that.

When Bush's back bulged with a cylindrical receiver-looking appearance, as caught in a photo taken by a Fox News photographer during the first presidential debate, the NY Times dismissed the story with a simple quotation from a Bush Campaign official denying any credibility. Again there was no follow up. Yet there was a vivid picture displaying the curious bulge along with an extended discussion on Salon.com. And, after the election, when a Berkeley study emerged with credible evidence that the exit polls could not have been so far off, the Times along with the rest of the mainstream media followed suit in dismissing the possibility of election fraud. In contrast, when the Ukraine, came up with such skewed election results, the election was declared invalid and a new one was conducted.

When Haiti's President Aristide phoned Maxine Waters and others and claimed that he did not resign but was instead kidnapped by the US and French forces, the media played it down. The New York Times buried the story on page 10 only to dismiss the allegations with an official White House rejection of the claim as "complete nonsense." Brit Hume on Fox, in his usual fashion, parroted back Colin Powell's comments, saying "he wasn't kidnapped… he went on the plane willingly, and that's the truth." And the rest is history.

Examples of media soft peddling government can be multiplied ad nauseam. There can be just one conclusion: the corporate media is succeeding in keeping Americans uninformed, and worse, misinformed. Censorship, government propaganda, parroting of official government sources, and media manipulation have replaced careful investigative reporting as the norm.

And things continue to worsen as the government finds ways (some more subtle than others) to relax media ownership rules to let fewer and fewer media giants control more and more markets. This trend toward government deregulation of corporate media ownership violates Constitutional safeguards on diversity, public interest and the capacity to self-govern. The popular rebuttal that we now have more stations so, therefore, more diversity, is a glaring fallacy. When these bountiful stations have but a few owners, a few very wealthy ones, it's not hard to see what side of the political divide they'll land on.

There is, of course, the Internet, the last bastion of free speech. When there is chatter on the Net, it's often hard for the mainstream media to ignore it. But corporate media presence on the Net is expanding and there is now a threat looming to the free access architecture of the Internet itself. Corporate media has increasingly been successful at controlling the cables that carry information. As more and more Americans switch from dial up modems to high-speed cable connections, they will inevitably be restricted to one ISP provider -- Comcast, Adelphia, or some other large corporation. The problem is that whoever controls the conduit can control the content. Unless corporate media is stopped, this last bastion of democracy will also topple.

So, the question is how to stop these dangerous, degenerative, media trends.

Currently, there is a burgeoning grass roots movement against media consolidation. Even the NRA has joined forces with NOW to oppose deregulation. Media activist organizations like the Free Press have organized grass roots campaigns resulting in literally millions of letters sent to Congress protesting deregulation, and over 700,000 letters were sent to the FCC.

Michael Powell has now resigned as chair of the FCC. He had been unwilling to listen to this growing public outcry against deregulation of the corporate media. As this movement builds there is a future opportunity for the FCC to heed the word, and stop this degenerative, media metastasis that is devouring free speech in the U.S.

So Americans need to fight back. The air waves are public property, not the private property of these corporate monsters. To slay these mighty dragons we need to stop patronizing them. Like Freddie Kruger, they can only exist as long as we stay tuned. They need us to survive, but we no longer need them.

The Internet is still a place to go to find out things about America and about the world. We can go on line to read the Guardian in London instead of the New York Times, and we can shut off CNN and go to Salon.com or MotherJones.com. We can shut off Chris Matthews and the other media whores and check out Znet or BuzzFlash. or Mediachannel.org. There is a "Media Reform Information Center" you can also visit to get a useful list of enlightened media outlets. BuzzFlash also publishes a list on their website. The corporate media is not transparent, but there are organizations like the Free Press and Common Cause that have taken on the cause of exposing the mainstream corporate media for the charlatans that they really are.

So long as the Internet remains a democratic forum, we need to avail ourselves of these resources. But our time is limited as corporate media in collusion with the most powerful, secretive government in U.S. history increases its control over information. This formidable enemy would like nothing better than to keep Americans ignorant and gullible. It is urgent that we arm ourselves with information. This is the proverbially stake through the heart of totalitarianism. Without a free press, that's just where we're heading! Unite, Americans, we have nothing to lose but our (corporate) chains!

-- Elliot D. Cohen is a media ethicist and author of many books and articles on the media and other areas of applied ethics. His most recent book on the dangers of corporate media is News Incorporated: Corporate Media Ownership and Its Threat to Democracy (Prometheus Books, March 2005).