2) So the problem is that corporate media is politically streamlined? Yes, I absolutely think so. In Switzerland we have an interesting weekly magazine called 'Weltwoche', which allows rather extreme opinion pieces of all political sides to appear unedited. I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
Hilaire Belloc in 1918 wrote a wonderful critique of corporate newspapers where he pointed out that their real customers are advertisers, and that in many cases, the cross-ownership of media by other corporations, as well as cross-board memberships meant that the corporate press would necessarily adopt positions friendly to the largest corporations. His book "The Free Press" (although very right wing) is worth reading. It totally anticipates Chomsky's critiques as well.
> I enjoyed that a lot, until the selection of articles began to appear biased to the right. I think the idea is still great - give me unfiltered opinions and analysis, instead just filter by the 'intellectual depth' if you will. It'd be black coffee in magazine form.
It is a good reason to have a robust blogosphere and read blogs you might otherwise disagree with as well as those who you agree with.
I agree - I haven't really found good resources on general topic blogs however. Collections such as TrueReddit or DepthHub often start out well, but as time goes on, quality goes down. It seems like there is some kind of sedimentation force going on when people can up-/downvote.
Huh. Reference? Perhaps it's because I just don't know enough conservative folks, but I've never heard of a mainstream socially conservative anti-capitalist dialogue.
If what you say is true, either I have a pretty huge hole in my political knowledge (that or we're just using 'socially conservative' or 'capitalist' to mean different things.) Especially if it's the former, I'd like to close that hole.
Care to point them out?
A lot of it boils down to the critiques of market capitalism by Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton and how these have largely continued within the conservative Catholic movement, as well as parts of the Orthodox and conservative Protestant communities as well.
I am a Heathen and I worship Odin, Thorr, and Freyr. Chesterton can be a bit arrogant when it comes to religion sometimes, but the reasons for his arrogance are often interesting to ponder even when one does not share the same religion.
"According to distributists, property ownership is a fundamental right and the means of production should be spread as widely as possible rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or of accomplished individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). Distributism therefore advocates a society marked by widespread property ownership and, according to co-operative economist Race Mathews, maintains that such a system is key to bringing about a just social order.
Distributism has often been described in opposition to both socialism and capitalism, which distributists see as equally flawed and exploitative."
One of the big problems of course is the fact that while outsiders can see dynamics of and sometimes critique cultures, such critiques are necessarily incomplete (well all critiques are necessarily incomplete but outsider ones are especially likely to be).
But on your final question, I think one of the big issues is that the corporate media insists on pushing everything into narratives the corporations can understand. For example, in the US I tend to associate with people from a wide variety of backgrounds politically (and talk politics, as taboo as that is) and one thing I have noticed is that while the media tends to see social conservatives as the "sex police" the social conservative movement is the largest movement in the US which questions the desirability of Capitalism on an economic level (and the critiques are really interesting), but that doesn't work for corporations, so....
So here you have a corporate media organization engaging in difficult cross-cultural criticism. While it is an interesting article, it says as much about Western corporations as it does about Japan.