Media Consolidation, Sensational News and Mercury Health Risks

What's happened since then is you now have six companies, six large multinationals that control every radio station in America and, and all of the television stations in America, and 80% of the newspapers.

The, um, the television news departments have become corporate profit centers.

They no longer have an obligation to benefit the American public.

So their only obligation is to their shareholders.

How do they satisfy that obligation? By expanding viewership so they can sell more ad, ad space.

How do you expand viewership? Why, you do that by appealing to the prurient interest that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip.

So they give us Laci Peterson- That's what people like to hear.

... Laci Peterson, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson, and lots and lots of terror alerts, because that gets viewership as well.

But they're not telling us the real news that is affecting people in this country.

The fact that today, one out of every six American women now has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, kidney disease