Reply #13: How long has this been going on?

[stillcool]

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/False_Hope.html

The Politics of News Media
from the book
False Hope
by Norman Solomon, 1994
The USA's major news media pose no threat to what the late writer Walter Karp called the fact of oligarchy. In the United States, he pointed out, "the fact of oligarchy is the most dreaded knowledge of all, and our news keeps that knowledge from us. By their subjugation of the press, the political powers in America have conferred on themselves the greatest of political blessings-Gyges' ring of invisibility. And they have left the American people more deeply baffled by their own country's politics than any people on earth. Our public realm lies steeped in twilight, and we call that twilight news."
Journalists are neither more nor less courageous than people in other professions; we can hardly expect corporate-paid reporters and pundits to make careers out of biting the hands that sign their paychecks. Those who pay the piper, as the saying goes, call the tune-not every note, but the overarching score-orchestration that may seem to be nowhere in particular because it is now almost everywhere, with an insistent drumbeat that after a while gets confused with the human heart. The political muzak keeps functioning as white noise, constant and familiar, with little variation, and loud enough to prevent us from hearing much of other sounds. To question the divine right of large corporations to occupy America's political throne is a lack of fealty that demands exclusion from the roundtables of mega-media discourse, where political "realities" are framed and re-framed every day.
For people on corporate payrolls, more than a little parental company discretion is advised. Mainstream journalists are cases in point: Criticisms of government-and disparagements of the public sector overall-are far more acceptable than condemnations of corporate power. Yet the facts are cold and hard. "It is beyond doubt that the -) large corporation has always governed, most importantly by deciding whether untold numbers of people will live or die, will be injured, or will sicken," _ comments Morton Mintz, who left the Washington Post in 1988 after twenty-nine years as a reporter there; his attitude was rare in the newsroom. Media professionals are almost uniformly unwilling to voice anything that smacks of a systemic critique of the private-industry juggernaut.
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Corporate control is not interference in the newsroom-if you own an institution you aren't interfering in it, you're running itOrwell anyone? The conditioned reflex of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought." The doublethink process "has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. "
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In contrast, evading the truth of corporate power over news media is a disorienting mental traffic pattern that keeps tromping a path of political confusion. False mappings of society immobilize us to the great extent that we trust public mythologies more than firsthand realities. Imagine if Rand McNally and its competitors issued maps that had little resemblance to actual streets and highways and terrain. To the extent that we believed those maps, we'd be unable to go much of anywhere; we wouldn't be able to plan our journeys, or meet up with other people; for that matter we wouldn't even really know where we were.
"The news" and punditry provide orientation- guiding the public's perception and navigation of the world. At various times, on various subjects, the media compass needle may actually be pointing south, north, east or west; it's no accident that conventional accounts of politics are disorienting, since they take citizens on detours every day-away from clarity about power: who wields it, how, and why. (Astute investors would never make the mistake of trying to get their bearings from the "A" sections of daily newspapers.) As informative compasses, the mass media indicate much more about how those in power want us to perceive and navigate the world than about how the world really is.
Popularized renderings of reality, however phony, supply us with shared illusions, suitable for complying with authorized itineraries, the requisite trips through never-never lands of public pretense. Privately, we struggle to make sense of our experiences; perhaps we can create some personal space so that our own perceptions and emotions have room to stretch. But the limits of privatized solutions are severe. Public spheres determine the very air we breathe and the social environments of our lives. The standard detours meander through imposing landscapes. Beyond the outer limits of customary responses, uncharted territory is "weird"-certainly not familiar from watching TV or reading daily papers. Following in the usual footsteps seems to be safer.
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Getting people to "love their servitude" is a tall order, but in America more modest conditioning has proved sufficient to make quiescence a common way of life. Within a pseudo-security state, the constant rush to desensitize has become a generic fix. To lives of quiet desperation, and to an ailing body politic, mass media are among the key institutions that administer anesthesia without surgery.
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