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requirement of the law since 1928.
Today as a result of the abolishment of that doctrine, six giant multi-national corporations now control all 14,000 radio stations in our country, almost all 6,000 TV stations and 80 percent of our newspapers, all of our billboards and now most of the Internet information services, so you have six guys who are dictating what Americans have as information and what we see as news.
The news departments have become corporate profit centers, they no longer have any obligation to benefit the public interests, their only obligation is to their shareholders and they fulfill that obligation by increasing viewer ship. How do you do that? Not by reporting the news that we need to hear in to make rational decisions in our democracy but rather by entertaining us, by appealing to the prurient interests that all of us have in the reptilian core of our brain for sex and celebrity gossip -- [applause]. So they give us Laci Peterson and Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant and we're today the best entertained and the least informed people on the face of the earth and this is a real threat to American democracy.
If you look at the PIPA Report and I've known this for many, many years because I do 40 speeches a year in red states Republican audiences and there is no difference. When people hear this message and what this White House is doing and the Gingrich Congress, there is no difference between the way Republicans react and the Democrats react except the Republicans come up afterwards and say, "Why haven't we ever heard of this before? I say to them, "It's because you're watching Fox News and listening to Rush."
And 80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don't know what's going on [applause].
I don't know if any of you saw the PIPA Report which came out after the last election but it confirmed everything and this is kind of a digression but this whole talk has turned into a digression. The PIPA Report was done by the University of Maryland and it showed that there is no--you know all these Saturday morning gas bags, the political pundits you see on TV talking about the moral difference and the ideological difference between red states and blue states.
There is no difference.
The only difference is there is a huge informational deficit in the red states and I've known this for a long time reaction I get people and the PIPA Report confirmed that by going and asking people who voted for Bush and who voted for Kerry about their knowledge of current events. What they found that of the people that voted for Bush had the same ideology, the same basic values, they were just misinformed. 70 percent said that they believed that Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center, 70 percent believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, 64 percent believed that President Bush strongly supported the Kyoto Protocol and strong labor and environmental standards in our foreign treaties and on and on.
When PIPA went back and asked them what they believed, there was almost no difference between what the Republicans and Democrats believed where America should be headed. The problem was a huge information deficit because the news media in this country is letting down American democracy and democracy cannot survive long without a vigorous news media.
I'll give you an example. As I said a gigantic diminution in quality of life that has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President's environmental policy that Americans mainly don't know about. I'm just going to focus on one industry which is coal burning power plants.
I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in America's cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primary by bad air, by ozone and particulates and we know that the principle source of those materials in our atmosphere are 1,100 coal burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It's been illegal for 17 years. President Clinton's administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants but that's an industry that donated $48 million to this president during the 2000 cycle and have given $58 million since.
One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs in protest. These weren't Democrats, these were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration.
A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in American history before where a presidential candidate accepts money, contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment and then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achieves office.
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