- title card: CBS News killed the story on the basis of a denial by Governor Jeb Bush, who was the TARGET of the allegations.
- Narrator: Starting with Ronald Reagan, the Holy Grail of "de-regulation" has been sold to the public; and the news media has largely ignored its disastrous results.
- Mark Lloyd: Once the Reagan administration was done, there were more rules. But they called it "de-regulation." It's, err, almost an Orwellian use of language: You create new rules, but the rules change, they benefit industry now, and you call it "de-regulation," because people *like* de-regulation, like fewer rules.
- opening title card: "They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality... and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening." - Georg Orwell, "1984"
- [first lines]
- Author: We falsely think of our country as a democracy, when it has evolved into a media-o-cracy, where a media which is supposed to *check* political abuse is part of political abuse.
- Author, Professor, New York University: These commercial entities now vie with the government for authority over our lives. They are not a healthy counterweight to government; they are as big as or bigger than government, and they work closely with government.
- Founder of the Center for Public Integrity: The most powerful special interest in Washington today is the media.
- Founder of the Center for Public Integrity: In the 60s, three of four Americans trusted the government; today it's one in four.
- Michael Moore: When they're going to dig us up, hundreds of years from now, they are not going to understand us.
- [laughter]
- Michael Moore: No, seriously! We're making a huge mistake filming and videotaping us, 'cause we're leaving behind a record of ourselves.
- Michael Moore: The top 1%, they control 90% of the wealth, and the two major political parties do the bidding for them. And the other 99% *have no* political party representing them, and *no* representation in Congress.
- Narrator: [and title card] A CNN/Gallop Poll conducted in March 2003, found that 51% of the American people thought Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the Sept. 11th attack.
- Narrator: Why did they think that?
- Narrator: For the 2004 elections, the major networks hired Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International to conduct exit polls. Throughout election day, those polls suggested that John Kerry would win the popular vote by 3%. The official vote count showed Bush winning by two and a half percent, a discrepancy of 5.5% or 8 million votes. The main stream news media dismissed these polls, - but in a fit of irony used the Ukrainian exit polls as a basis to call that election into question.
- title card: "Something is definitely wrong... we're talking about the free world here" - John Zogby, Pollster