My kids are vaccinated, I’m vaccinated. In general, I don’t have a problem with vaccines.
I do have a problem with injecting my kids, myself, or anyone else with a levels of a known neurotoxin that the government itself has deemed much higher than safe, especially when other alternatives are widely available.

My issue with the vast majority of news outlets these days isn’t that they are run by corporations; after all, they’ve always been businesses. My problem isn’t with the free market either. If you create value, I think you deserve to be compensated for it fairly, and if you get filthy rich, all the better.

My problem is with the extreme concentration in media ownership and all of the associated conflicts of interest that have arisen as a result. These conflicts stifle competition instead of encouraging it.

Before you write me off as a bitter skeptic, though, you should know that I think the antidote for much of this is a vibrant, unfiltered blogosphere. The free exchange of ideas we’re witnesses thanks to social media is spurring communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation, and giving people a much more enlightened sense of the world around them.

Long time not talk. Glad to see you’re still banging out the words.

Jim Dempsey

However, I will disagree with your comments on vaccinations. There has been no studies showing that thiomersal harmed any children. As you note, thiomersal was phased out – mostly because of the loud protests from groups that claimed it was responsible for triggering autism. Yet, since thiomersal was phased out, autism rates have continued to climb.

Study after study have shown no connection between thiomersal and autism or vaccinations and autism.

We can live in a world of paranoia and not believe in anything – or in anyone. But that isn’t a world I want to live in. I trust our government and what they report (with a healthy skepticism we should all have when getting new information).

Are they always right? Of course not. But then again neither are the New York Times, Washington Post and the Economist.

My opinion is that there are usually many more sides than one to every story, and that the biggest threats to unbiased journalism aren’t bloggers or fringe movements, but the nearly complete control of mainstream media outlets by huge corporations. These conglomerates have their myriad tentacles dipping into diverse business enterprises and doling out millions in cash to Washington lobbyists. If that’s not a set-up for a conflict of interest, I don’t know what is.

Ben Bagdikian warned of the danger of concentrated media ownership more than two decades ago, and since corporate media ownership has grown even more condensed. In 1983 when Bagdkian’s book “The Media Monopoly” was written, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. By 2004, the number had dwindled to six.

To cite one example of corporate media activism, the “Birther” story is one that has been pushed almost exclusively by Fox News, which is to the Republican Party what Pravda was to the USSR. Fox’s motive isn’t to provide balance by but to damage the president politically. News Corporation has close ties with corporate interests that stand to benefit if Obama is weakened.

NBC News is owned by General Electric, which is not only one the nation’s largest arms manufacturers but derives half of its revenues from financial services. Are we to honestly believe that NBC News will be aggressive in its pursuit of graft, corruption or wrongdoing on the part of the mega-billion defense or financial sectors and the government officials who regulate them?

Am I talking about censorship? No. I’m talking about self-censorship and groupthink. Why piss off your boss’s boss’s boss when it’s likely to cause you nothing but grief? Be a team player for God’s sake. The “corporate culture” likes it that way.

On health care legislation, there are many perspectives and many stories to be told, several of them quite ugly regardless of lawmakers’ political affiliations. Many citizens on both the right and the left were passionately against the broad health reform proposals, but few were passionately supportive. The Republicans have always been more adept than Democrats at framing issues in words and phrases that support their convictions. Referring to the federal estate tax a “death tax” is another example of the Republicans using terminology to their advantage.

On vaccination, government data has conflicted often enough and corporate conflicts of interest have been demonstrated frequently enough that a reasonable person may deem it unwise to take government information as gospel on anything. If there is any one thing that makes me concerned about the state of journalism in the US, it is the near-universal tendency on the part of the media to report government-supplied information as fact, often without attribution. Better to placate lawmakers and have media market ownership rules relaxed than be aggressive and see valuable connections with legislators and regulators dry up.

Vaccines are a multi-billion dollar business that spent millions of dollars successfully lobbying federal lawmakers to make pharmaceutical companies immune from vaccine-related malpractice lawsuits. Vaccines are heavily marketed, with tens of millions spent annually on television spots that have peddled vaccines for everything for Lyme disease to HPV (a venereal disease) for pubescent girls. In the case of the Lyme and HPV vaccines, recipients have complained of side effects ranging from arthritis to blood clots.

They may have been a fringe movement, but it certainly wasn’t unreasonable for concerned parents to start complaining a decade ago about the use of mercury (thiomersal) as a low-cost vaccine preservative, especially as the per capita number of childhood vaccinations increased 300 percent over twenty years. Until just a few years ago, if you added up the amount of mercury contained in all of the vaccines injected in your child’s body, you realized that the amount vastly exceeded the level of mercury exposure the EPA itself deemed safe.

Thiomersal has been pretty much phased out on a voluntary basis by the drug companies, not because of government regulators or hard-hitting journalism, but because of sustained grassroots activism.

Until just a few years ago, pharmaceutical companies, doctors and government advisors recommended that healthy, post-menopausal women take prescription estrogen supplements. This recommendation was reversed after sound studies concluded that far from being beneficial to human health, estrogen supplements actually put women’s health at risk. This reversal occurred after tens of millions of women took the drug and after drug companies made tens of billions of dollars in profit on them.

No wonder so many reasonable people are so skeptical. Nearly always, news stories are more complex and multi-faceted than they are presented, with hidden agendas an ulterior profit motives typically left unmentioned. The main message for investigative reporters working for corporate media entities seems to be this: follow the money, as long as it doesn’t lead back to us, our corporate interests or our associates. Better yet, why not see how John and Kate and Tiger are faring. More eyeballs, less controversy, what’s not to love.