Joseph Gordon-Levitt: CNN, MSNBC Are Like 'Bullshit Entertainment,' Media Ignores Corporate Evil

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Any news about Joseph Gordon-Levitt automatically qualifies as entertainment news. Unfortunately, as far as he's concerned, the major news media handles news about politics and world affairs in the same manner it handles red-carpet and tabloid headlines.

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The politically minded star of the upcoming NYC bike-messenger thriller Premium Rush took dead aim at cable news networks in a new interview with Playboy, likening CNN and MSNBC to "bullshit entertainment shows."

"Every time I sit down and watch television news, I think, 'This is show business,' " he told the magazine. "That’s what I do. I say, go on the Internet and find news from all over the world through the BBC, the Pacifica stations, newspapers, people’s blogs and tweets. It’s so funny when people say Fox is bad. Sure Fox is bad, but I don’t think CNN and MSNBC are really any better."

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Gordon-Levitt, while a major star since his youth, long has been concerned with alternative means of production and communication. He runs an independent film and record label, Hit Record, which uses submissions from the Internet to create collective works and showed vast interest in the Occupy Wall Street movement when it began in fall 2011. He spent time filming the Zuccotti Park area as The Dark Knight Rises filmed there in the fall and told Playboy that the major media's portrait of the movement doesn't really match what he saw.

"What I’ve seen on TV focuses on the superficial stuff," he said. "It’s a pretty simple notion: People who have lots of money --people in corporations who have tons of money -- are malevolently manipulating the system to keep their money. And the rest of the world suffers for it. You could show a trillion examples of how Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, Walmart and Monsanto are clearly fucking over everybody, but CNN, Fox and MSNBC are owned by Fortune 500 companies, so they never show any of it."

Speaking with The Huffington Post last November, he recalled his own version of events in downtown Manhattan.

"I had a lot of long conversations with all sorts of people -- kids, older people, some cops -- I talked to some people who look really rebellious, I talked to some people who were wearing a suit," Gordon-Levitt said. "I talked to all sorts of people, and everyone's just feeling really positive and optimistic. They look around and they see people who are on the same page, and they're not going to just sit around and say, 'Oh, there's nothing I can do,' and it's reassuring, it's exciting."