Keep on rockin' in the free world

(This is something I wrote in a comment on something else, but I'm going to put it here as its own post because it's important to say on its own):

If you follow mainstream media and politics (like, for example, if you read the Media Matters website) then you'll be familiar with the fact that we are turning into a nation with a controlled media. Plenty of news stories don't make it to the biggest news outlets, hosts who interview guests on TV talk shows are on a mission to illegitimately discredit the liberal/Democratic guests, the nationally televised presidential debates are rigged (so that the questions that get asked are stupid and focus on personal trivia about candidates that give people petty reasons to vote against Democrats instead of focusing on policy questions that will inform the public and let them see that voting for Democrats is in their best interest), talk show panels regularly get stacked with conservative guests instead of liberals and Democrats, etc. These are all standard practices of almost every nationally syndicated TV program with some news content (Keith Olbermann, 60 Minutes, and the Comedy Central comedies are the exceptions, but I believe they are all somewhat effected by the problem as well). So the mainstream media has very clearly been blackmailed, intimidated, bought off, or infiltrated (my guess if that there is a lot of conservative infiltration, and that the other factors (especially intimidation) are present to a smaller extent), and in that case it's not unlikely or unreasonable at all to think that The New Yorker printed a racist cover intending to hurt Barack.

Of course, the mainstream media does not report on the fact that its content (especially its news content) is currently right on the brink of the most prejudiced and biased that content can possibly be towards the right-wing point of view without everyone in the public openly realizing that we have a controlled media.