There’s no way around it – Americans are tired of watching the news. A new report says that news consumption for local news, cable news, newspapers, and even online news has gone way down since just last year. Plus, the immigration debate is one that has been going on in America for decades with no end in sight because immigrants mean big money for corporations, and now the private prison industry is trying to cash in on America’s immigration problems. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: There’s no way around it. Americans are tired of watching the news. Boy, that is absolutely the truth. A new report says that news consumption for local news, cable news, newspapers, and even online news has gone way down just in the last year. Okay. Cutting, the old idea about cutting cables is come to true. I mean, it’s happening. People are cutting their cables at record level. They’re not watching traditional tv. They don’t tune into the nightly news. You’ve got an entire generation that if they get their news, they’re gonna get it online, you know, a show like this. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. And even that is actually declining right now from where it was last year. What really shocked me because there is this new poll out that says, across the board, media outlets are seeing fewer viewers, whether it’s traditional newspapers or your local news, cable news. It’s all going down.
Mike Papantonio: What are they watching? Because it’s not affecting the, the media’s still out. I mean, the online media continues to climb. Are are they watching Taylor Swift and Kelsey, or, I mean, I really wonder. I’d like to see it quantified.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. See that is what’s interesting because we’re not seeing a dip necessarily in online activity or in tv viewership overall.
Mike Papantonio: Just the news.
Farron Cousins: It’s just, well, when you think about it, because look, we do news every day. It is depressing and it is horrible on most days.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Most days I don’t want to do it.
Farron Cousins: So I can’t really fault people for saying, you know what, I can’t take this any more. So I, look, I get it. We all want to be there. But what shocked me the most was that even the older population, those are the news consumers, right? No. They’ve dropped.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. My my age. I mean, they’re, 60 and up are supposed to be the news folks, but.
Farron Cousins: Even they are abandoning the traditional news outlets. And that is bad news for newspapers. But again, this is a problem that the media brought upon itself. And, so it could be that people are sick of the news, but I think a bigger part of it, like we always talk about, is that they’re sick of watching the news, but not actually getting the news.
Mike Papantonio: Now, I want you to watch this story. Al Gore is out on the speaking circuit. You know what his pitch is? That by Americans not watching mainstream media, our democracy is being hurt. That is his pitch. You must watch the nightly news or democracy will be at risk. Well, basically he’s saying, you know, terrifying people not to watch propaganda or ideological propaganda, whether it’s Fox or MSNBC, you must watch ideological propaganda or democracy. Where the hell did that come from? But the point, good luck with that. Because according to this story, people aren’t watching the news. They’re not.
Farron Cousins: Does he own stock in Comcast? I mean, is there something.
Mike Papantonio: I have no idea.
Farron Cousins: Is he trying to become the next CNN president?
Mike Papantonio: But who in the hell says you gotta watch corporate media, mainstream corporate media or democracy is at risk? Tell me how many times you can turn on the corporate media news, and see stories like we report, or that the Lever reports, or any of these other folks report that we do. It’s not there. They don’t even talk about it. So, what a peculiar thing for.
Farron Cousins: I mean, if people wanna be informed, the Lever, the Intercept, Truth Out, those are three just really great outlets.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. They are. And outta that, I would say Lever. That would be my first pick.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Lever’s definitely.
Mike Papantonio: You can almost pick up, you can read the Lever regularly and know what’s going on in the world. And it’s stuff that you will never ever find on the nightly news because they tell, they go after corporation, the nightly news, they have to worry about advertisers. They can’t do it. The Lever doesn’t care about politics. They’re not Democrat, they’re not Republican. If the Democrats screw up the Lever talks about it. If Republicans screw up, Lever talks about it. So they’re indifferent, and that, it’s that Switzerland mentality that really allows them to be as good as they are. David Sirota started this, I think he was the founder of it, right?
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. Anyway, that’s the state of the media today.
Mike Papantonio: The immigration debate is one that’s been going on in America for decades with no end in sight and part of the reason that we never get any real solutions is because immigrants mean big money for corporations. I mean, massive money. Now they’re getting ready to make more money. Okay. You and I have talked about this so many times. It’s the essential, it’s the bottom line for immigration. Okay. We used to have corporations shipping jobs overseas. They’d ship ’em to China, India, they still do, but they’re running into some deep water there. Okay. Because finally those people are saying, hell no, I’m not gonna work for 50 cents an hour. I wanna be paid like you would pay folks in the US. So now the Chamber of Commerce and Associated Industry said, I know what we’ll do. We will just bring ’em over the border. Okay. So what, five, 6 million, 7 million people over the border. The numbers in here, I’ll take a look in just a minute, but it’s millions of people coming over the border to work for low wages and corporations that, as we’ve said before, they lose an arm, hell, just ship back to Nicaragua. It doesn’t make any difference, you know? They don’t have any kind of protection. Pick it up from there, would you.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. And so now a new industry says, hey, well, look, we see the automotive industry getting this. We see the factory farming industry. We want a piece of this. And of course, that industry is the private prison industry. Because most of these people who do come through and they go through the system legally, they still have to go through monitoring, GPS monitoring, for most of them that are released back into the United States pending their immigration hearings.
Mike Papantonio: The number, by the way, is 5.7 million. That the actual, that’s the number. So.
Farron Cousins: So we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of people per year that essentially get outfitted with these GPS monitoring devices. So the private prison industry, GEO Group, CoreCivic, they say, listen, we actually kind of own the companies that are doing this anyway.
Mike Papantonio: We’re in the money.
Farron Cousins: Well, they do own it. So they’re trying to lobby the administration to tell them, hey, why don’t you release even more people for the GPS monitoring? We’ve got all the devices here. We’re more than happy to monitor two.
Mike Papantonio: Ankle monitors.
Farron Cousins: 3 million people a year.
Mike Papantonio: We’re gonna give you a phone. You must have it on all because we wanna monitor. You have to have the ankle bracelets that we monitor you. And while your case is pending, this is what we’re gonna do. And they’re gonna make so much money doing this that they’re moving, I mean, first of all, the lobbying they’re doing to improve their possibilities of doing it, they’re spending millions.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. Just this year. Millions of dollars on lobbying for that.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. So they know how, what the payday is on this. So if you’re an immigrant and you came over here and you said, well, I want a better life, question is, well, do you mind doing it with an ankle bracelet, with an ankle monitor? Or do you mind us putting a chip in you so we know where you are all? That’s where it’ll come to. That’s really where it’ll come to.
Farron Cousins: And part of the other lobbying pitch for the private prison industry is, hey, not only give us the contracts, but that way, obviously we’re monitoring the devices. If they become unresponsive, well, we own the jail. We’ll just throw ’em in here.
Mike Papantonio: That’s right. That’s right.
Farron Cousins: So, they get double.
Mike Papantonio: They’ve done such a great job with prison, right? The prison, these are the same people. The prison people who have been doing private prisons, which has been a disaster, are now saying, well, maybe we didn’t get that right, but we can do this. We can do this. That’s kind of their pitch right now.
