If anyone said we were in the radio business, it wouldn't be someone from our company. We're not in the business of providing news and information. We're not in the business of providing well-researched music. We're simply in the business of selling our customers products. (Clear Channel CEO Lowry Mays)

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. (Voltaire)

Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the State has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied. (Arthur Miller, American playwright)

The majority watches, reads and listens to almost nothing but sanitized, militarized, state-controlled propaganda since the beginning of the attack on Iraq. A lot clearly needs to be done to wrest the media from the corporatocracy which now effectively runs (certainly manipulates the minds, priorities and affinities of a huge number of citizens) the US and UK. Both Media Monitors Network and The Memory Hole as well as Take Back the Media and Adbusters are working in this area. Also important is the Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) group, which has dozens of action Alerts on the occupation of Iraq. The MediaChannel site has an excellent set of resources including a revealing guide to the concentration of the media in few hands and a chart detailing worldwide media ownership. Another powerful and growing movement advocating the kind of healthy mass media we would need for a healthy democracy is the mediareform.net project of Free Press: it, too, has Action alerts, including – crucially – ones on the impending semi-secret moves by the by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to concentrate more media in fewer hands under the guise of 'deregulation'.

MoveON has a 'MediaCorps' program: volunteers undertake to respond (usually takes about ten minutes) to one media Action alert a day. Another strategy gaining strength is boycotts of companies who advertise with the major propaganda sources (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, MSNBC and Clear Channel, which is threatening to expand to Europe soon). Hit them where it hurts!