Thom Hartmann: And John Cornyn, Republican paranoia has reached a new high. This is tragic. The Texas Senator, the White House has said, has pointed out that there are a lot of lies out there. I’ve been promoting this website for a week, I want to promote it again. Please, 'please' is part of the url, be sure to include the word 'please', PleaseCutTheCrap.com. PleaseCutTheCrap.com is a great website that takes apart some of the Republican lies, basically, that are being circulated in email.

So anyhow, John Cornyn says, and the White House put up this thing saying, you know, there are some lies being circulated, if you know of any, let us know and we’ll put them up on our website. And they’ve been, you know, debunking lies ever since the Obama campaign, you know, 'he’s a Muslim' and all that kind of stuff. And so they’ve always been the business of debunking lies. Well the Republicans are now saying, and you will hear this on right-wing hate radio today, I guarantee you. “Obama has an enemies list. He is compiling an enemies list.” Uh no, I'm sorry, that ain’t the case. And the Obama Administration has come out and said, that ain’t the case. But none the less you cant stop these guys from just plain old flat out lying.

And finally in the news, and this leads right into our guest and our topic for this hour, the, while Rachel Maddow on her MSNBC program has done a spectacular job, with Keith Olbermann, an admirable job, of pointing out that these, that the teabagger movement is, I’ve been saying on this program from, you know, day one. The teabagger movement was an astro turf movement even at the very start. And it was dress rehearsal for what’s going on right now.

If you wonder why was it that months ago big corporations were paying astro turf group, PR firms in Washington DC to put together these tea party groups for no apparent reason other than to be ridiculed in the media, now you know why. They were getting their shock troops organized, they were getting people on the ground, they were building the email and telephone lists, they were building the network so that they could say to a phone bank, “Okay, call these three hundred people and let them know in their district, the congressman is going to be at so and so.” They were getting all that stuff ready and now they’re implementing. And, you know, this is just absolutely bizarre. But what’s even more bizarre is that the American media is not pointing this out. The American media is referring to these guys, in some cases, some of the leaders, some of the people that are actually from Dick Armey’s group, Freedom Works or some of his subsidiary groups. The people who are organizing this, they’re referring to them as conservative activists, when in fact they are corporate shills who are, and they’re not pointing out the astro turf nature of this. And I think that this is frankly a crime against democracy.

Which raises the larger issue of how do we bring back news in the United States? I worked in news, in the early 70s, for seven years. I worked in a newsroom at WITL in Lansing, Michigan, did the news every day, I was a reporter for a while, I was the inside guy to the anchorman as it were, in radio for most of that seven years, for about five of it. And I can tell you, news in the 1970s was a completely different thing than it is today. And the reason why was because the radio station that I worked at, just like, there was a TV station I worked at as well. I wasn’t in front of the camera but I worked at WJMTV. They both knew that if they wanted to get their license renewed, every year with the FCC, they had to prove that they were performing a community service, that they were serving their community. And the way that they proved that was not running PSA’s, although they did that. The way they proved that was by having a strong, vibrant, actually money-losing, but truth-telling news department. And as a news reporter at WITL, I knew that if I even had lunch with one of the sales guys or was caught talking with them in the hall, I could be fired. That’s how seriously they took it.

And between the end of the Fairness Doctrine in ’78 and in ’87 and Clinton signing the Telecommunications Act in ’96, that wall was broken down and I remember sadly when in ’97, when CBS announced that they were basically closing their news division and folding it in under the vice president of entertainment programming who now runs their news division, and uh, you know, I thought that’s gotta be a knife into the heart of Walter Cronkite, he’s gotta feel terrible about that.

So, Troy Schneider is on the line with us. He’s the director of Media and Communications at the New America Foundation. A non partisan think tank. Usually we have on here these kind of hard righties, but Troy is a little more down the middle guy. NewAmerica.net is the website. Troy, welcome to the show first of all.

Troy Schneider: Hi Thom, thanks for having me.

Thom Hartmann: Thank you. Dan Rather, very recently, has come out and said we need to appoint a commission. He said that the, uh, he’s talking about the Cardin Bill which lets news organizations turn themselves into non-profits. But he said we need a federal commission to look into this. I think we just need to bring back the FCC laws that require network broadcasters, or require local stations, and then the network broadcasters will provide it, to program in the public interest. What say you about how we solve this problem of news becoming infotainment and fundamentally deceptive?

Troy Schneider: Well I think there are, we need to do a lot of things, there’s no one silver bullet. I’m not sure I agree with Dan Rather that a commission is going to fix it, but I do agree with two things that he said. One is that good coverage is at risk and you just talked about that a little bit. There are some things, some types of news that are being done very well right now, but there are areas, war coverage for example, that only well funded news organizations can do. And then things like state house coverage, that just, no one seems to want to do, there’s not the business interest to get good coverage down there. Those need to be addressed, they’re in the public interest. And he also made a point of saying he wasn’t just about propping up old media, but also figuring out how to help new media innovate and fill those gaps, and it’s not an either or. I tend to agree on that. Um, I think the fairness doctrine could help a lot with pushing for the, you know, for that mandate for broadcasters and you know, maybe strengthen those requirements. But it’s gonna take more than that, because it’s not just the attitudes and the infotainment side, it’s also the business model behind the media that has just changed so dramatically in the last several years.

Thom Hartmann: Well and part of that is part of consolidation. Which means bring back the Sherman Anti-Trust Act or at least apply it to broadcasters. I think we should be applying it to companies, to every company in America, frankly. And you know, break up the corporations.

Troy Schneider: There’s something to be said for the, you know, we don’t have the diversity in news that we did even ten years ago, much less ten or twenty. And that’s a real problem, both for the diversity viewpoints and also for the business model. If one big company gets into trouble, that can take down media outlets in 30 or 40 different cities.

Thom Hartmann: On the Fairness Doctrine, I don’t want anybody from the government saying, 'oh, you’re a liberal so we have to have a conservative', that kind of thing. But the provision which is the straw man fairness doctrine, that the conservatives are all hysterical about, the real fairness doctrine issue was, 'are you programming in the public interest?' and you do that by programming news. And that’s frankly where, at least a starting point.

Troy Schneider: It’s one of the important starting points, I agree.

Thom Hartmann: Troy Schneider. He is with NewAmerica.net. You can check out the New American Foundation over there. Troy, thanks for dropping by.

Troy Schneider: You bet.

Thom Hartmann: Good talking with you.

Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.