Issues to Think About
The European Union
What is Freemasonry?
History of Freemasonry
'Masons in the Church
The 34 Steps
Global Freemasonry
Freemasonry in Ireland
Is Legislation Good?
Caesar's Due
Ethics in Business
Pharmaceutical Industry
Banking
Media Controlling Us?
Television
Games & Movies
Journalism
Advertising
The Internet
Let's Ban Christmas!
Send in Your Thoughts
Your Thoughts on Issues

Back in the 80s a Board colleague lifted my heart with a decision he and his family had made. This man is a doctor, married with a large family and in early Spring of 1987 he and his family agreed to 'give up televion' for Lent. He told us that they had never spent such a joyfyl and happy time as those seven weeks. They did loads of family stuff, debated all sorts of issues, pulled out their bikes and enjoyed God's beautiful countryside, read books galore, prayed together as a family and found that after the first day of 'withdrawal' life was so much better for them. News was provided by the main coverage on radio once a day and of course by good and respected daily newspapers.

For many years I've watched the effect that television has had on my family, and I'm just as much to blame myself. Our fifth child, when he was just 4 years of age, watched a video that his much older brothers had hired out - The Terminator! Of course I wasn't supervising what he was watching and he was intelligent enough to pop the video into the machine. The result - a few days later he got a sharp knife from the kitchen and slashed the back of our settee into shreds!

He's now 17 and as reasonably well adjusted as any hormonal teenage lad can be at that age!

I've always said that TV is having a detrimental effect on us all but it wasn't until my first trip to Medugorje that I realised I was not alone in my thinking. I picked up a book called "I SEE  FAR" that gave some very good insights into the physiological and psychological effects coming into our minds and brains from TV. A book well worth reading for anyone interested and can be bought from Caritas of Birmingham, Sterrett, Alabama, 35147, USA. $15 should cover the cost plus P&P.

Television over the past twenty years has desensitised us to pornography, sexual depravity, faithless marriages and adultry, murder and violence, satanism and the occult, white collar and street crime, profanity, promiscuity etc. Chat shows have gone way beyond what I consider educational or good viewing, all to raise the ratings regardless of the content.

Radio, although not quite as offensive as TV, can be just as harmful and what worries me is the type of music being pumped into the brains of our young people. Much of the music is satanic and our kids play their stuff loudly and repetatively so that the lyrics of the 'songs' are bombarding their fertile minds. They wear earplugs from walkman radios, cassettes and cd players, all blocking out conversation and blasting minds with rubbish.

Magazines have devalued women and placed in the minds of our young girls the idea of 'perfection' of body. They propogate wrong values about sexuality, relationships, parenthood, child rearing, respect for others and laws, self-interest etc.

Newspapers screech headlines covering all of the above in order to sell more. Fair and balanced reporting has been overtaken with sensationalism. Unbalanced and unfair financial reporting has destroyed good businesses with the loss of thousands of jobs. Journalists cover stories guaranteed to make headlines neglecting to give fair and balanced reporting of isues comparing like with like. (Here I refer to child abuse cases - there are many, many times more cases of fathers or relatives and people in positions of authority abusing children than there are those of church ministers, yet the newspaper focus heavily on the clergy.)

The Internet has become a vehicle for pornography, child pornography, bestiality, broken marriages, satanism - all that is evil in this world.

Advertising is selling sex! Where is the logic in promoting mobile phones, domestic products, in fact any marketable good today by using sexual innuendo or blatant sexual images? We are allowing the God-given gift of married love to be so devalued it is no wonder our young people are growing up with few or no moral values!

It is time we stood up as responsible adults and parents and cried - NO MORE! We have such a powerful lobby within our own capability - boycott companies that feel they need to use these effects in their advertising. It's time we tried to get back on the straight track! A good exercise would be to take note of every advertisement and see how many revert to sexual images and overtones to sell their products. We, as consumers, have allowed things to get way out of hand by our silence and acquiecence.

Why is there such an influence exerted by the media? Because they are controlled by those who would push an anti-Christian, anti-God agenda. Look at some of the quotes below and see what the so called 'Free Press' feed us:

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
Richard Salent, former president, CBS News

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of 
discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now 
more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national 
auto-determination practiced in past centuries." 
David Rockefeller, Baden-Baden, Germany 1991

"We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."
Katherine Graham, Washington Post publisher and CFR member.

"You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say."
President Bill Clinton

"There is no such thing as an independent press in America, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print.

I am paid $150.00 a week for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours, my occupation would be gone.

The business of the New York journalist is to destroy truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon; to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools and vessels for rich men behind the scenes. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton, editor of the New York Tribune.

"We are going to impose our agenda on the coverage by dealing with issues and subjects that we choose to deal with." 
Richard M. Cohen, Senior Producer of CBS political news.

"We in the press like to say we're honest brokers of information and it's just not true. The press does have an agenda."
Bernard Goldberg, as quoted by Harry Stein in the June 13-19, 1992 TV Guide.

“All truth goes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Then it is violently opposed. Finally it is accepted as self-evident.”
Schoepenhouer

“In war, the truth must be guarded by a bodyguard of lies.”
Winston Churchill

“Tell a lie loud enough and long enough and people will believe it.”
Adolf Hitler

“Conditioning will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves”
Dostoevsky – The Brothers Karamazov