Noam Chomsky and his antics. Though personally I liked Nim Chimpsky better.

Is antics really the appropriate word to use there? I don't know, I wanted a creative title. Not that that even really counts. Well, I was gone on friday and therefor saw very little of this film compared to how much I could have had I been present. What I did see was admittedly incredibly boring and hard to follow. Maybe thats just because I was tired. I did get an argument out of the droning of this video, though. The media is in total control of the amount of information, and type of information, presented to the general public. They decide what to print, they decide with what bias to write it. And they can, as the ones who give us all the information they have the power to do what they want, to take out certain facts, to set the tone of the article, to present highly unimportant details as huge news and to hide the things that really matter. The question, or one of as there are many, is should they  be allowed to do this? Do they even realize what they're doing, and the results of their writings?
I found this article (below) about tactics the media uses to make a story more interesting than it actually is. So, maybe the media knows exactly what they're doing when they choose what they think the American public needs to know. Here are the points I found:

• False Novelty: Making something look like news when, in fact, it has been known for a long time.  
• False Urgency- creating a sense that things are happening quickly or developing, to add drama. 
• Exaggerated Risk- reporting on a very unlikely danger without giving the chances that it will actually happen (which, I would assume, are usually fairly low. the odds of someone getting struck by lightning are actually higher than a lot of things people consider to be terrifying and altogether possible events.)
• Skipping over details: leaving things out that (no matter their relevence) may make the story less exciting to read.
• Naming news: giving titles or nicknames to make the news read more like an action story or movie.

And thats not even mentioning the bias that all media reporters write with. Its unavoidable, I know. But it's there.

This was all gotten from: http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/educational/handouts/global_development/beyond_media_h3.cfm

If anyone felt the need to look at examples or check my paraphrasing for accuracy :)

Anyway, all of this relates back to what Noam Chomsky (though I really like the monkey, Nim Chimsky, much better. He's a lot cuter :) ) was saying in the documentary. He made the point that the media controls our knowledge, and they do. The examples given in the film of Cambodia and East Timore (if I spelled that correctly at all) were completely valid and frankly terrifying. That the media could have such knowledge and willingly keep it from the American public was astounding. The New York Times, I think it was, paraphrased an article from the London Times. They took it down to probably a third of the information given in the London print, and as an affect we Americans were once again ill-informed. We don't know what could have been done if we'd had all the facts; we don't even know if anything would have been done at all; but isn't it within our rights to figure that out for ourselves? Not to have the media determine it for us? Imagine if the coverage of 9.11 had been less. Already there are things that are sure to have been left out of the media that are known about those attacks. If we had been given even less information, who knows what would have happened. Would we have accepted our ignorance and moved on? I don't think so. Personally the idea of not knowing who was behind it, or what the plans were, or any other information that would have been left out is terrifying. Noam Chomsky and his very attractive glasses were right in saying the media controls what we know. And I think that is wrong. On so very many levels.