Leslie Griffith makes a good point: What we call the “mainstream” media is anything but. She’s not quibbling about semantics, but rather trying to impress upon readers the importance of accurately naming forces that have a direct effect on our welfare:

… We have been sold words that lack any real meaning. The “Main Stream” no longer speaks for Main Street, it speaks for Wall Street. But we buy into the lie when we buy into those words.

We must be more critical of what we see. For example, how many times did we see “reporters” like Brian Williams standing next to our Gulf Coast as the British Petroleum disaster unfolded? What did he tell us in the first days of that ecological disaster? “These are the smartest and most responsible oil workers on the planet.” He gushed, just like the poison spilling into the Gulf… And then there’s Andrea Mitchell. She sleeps with and is married to Alan Greenspan, the man who helped get us in this economic debacle. Mitchell has her own “Main Stream” broadcast. She is sold as “middle of the road.” But, of course, she delivers “Corporate-Government” controlled news…

The “Main Stream” now works for the same power brokers who seem to ignore the fact that we all breathe the same air, eat the same food, drink from the same water faucets and swim in the same sea…

The thought of anyone sleeping with Alan Greenspan makes me queasy, especially right after dinner, but the reality of Greenspan’s wife having a prominent job in TV news has always seemed downright sickening. Even worse is the reality of talking heads such as Williams being introduced on talk shows — Jon Stewart’s faux-news show, for example — as if they were experts on what’s going on in the world.

Griffith is right — the mainstream is we the people, not the entities dishing out the news that fits the interests of the wealthy and powerful. These entities don’t represent us. It makes more sense to think of TV network news, NPR and the major dailies in terms of corporations, and to call them the corporate media.