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...that I saw when I was a teenager, of white bigots turning fire hoses on black civil rights marchers in Alabama. I was born and raised in California, and had never been out of the state. This new medium, TV, which had only been around for about 10 years at that point (think about THAT!) had the incredible power to instantly connect me to that great movement, and to move me so deeply that, a couple of years later, I traveled to Alabama with other white students and volunteered with ML King's voting rights project in Alabama.
Now the TV news brings us bobble-headed idiots with pasted on smiles who think George Bush is president.
The corruption of our public airwaves for commercial purposes, and now for a relentless diet of carefully crafted and highly selective sound bites that serve the goals of the corporations, the rich and the rightwing fascists in the White House, and a parallel corruption that has occurred in the printed news monopolies (and of course in radio as well) is the number one reform item that we are going to have to see to, once we get back our right to vote.
Imagine a news service that takes the political life of our country seriously, that serves the purpose of equalizing the rich and the poor, and giving the poor and the disenfranchised a real voice in national affairs, that investigates government and corporate corruption, that helps keep our government honest, that calls a lie a lie, that shows real images of war if it occurs (it won't occur in that case, believe me), and that treats a garbage worker's life, or the life of a nursery school teacher, with the same reverence that it now treats the lives of the rich.
It must be almost unimaginable to those born more recently than I was. But I want to get at something even deeper here. The medium--the airwaves that right now bring us corporate and fascist selected news--COULD BE a powerful tool for creating democracy, and for unifying us, as a nation, to accomplish great things in the public interest. It is a powerful unifier. It unified me, a somewhat clueless, privileged, white California teeny bopper with black people 3,000 miles away whose lives had not much improved since the Civil War, and who were living with horrors, every day of their lives, that I could not even imagine.
Think of what this medium could do! Think how it could connect people together in common purpose, say, to end poverty, or to convert our country to alternative fuels, or to help us understand (I mean, really understand) what is going on in the Middle East, or South America, or India. We are so isolated and so culturally impoverished, here in the U.S. We are missing the greatest democracy movements the world has ever seen.
But that very unifying quality of TV has been twisted beyond recognition into a perverse, false, hideous weapon of propaganda and brainwashing, controlled by people who think nothing of the slaughter of 100,000 Iraqis, or of falsifying presidential election data right on our TV screens. They use our need for a collective consciousness, our need to feel part of our nation, against us.
I know smart, educated people who are aware that they were lied to, by the news monopolies, about Iraq WMDs, but who yet believe that these same news monopolies told them the truth about the election. Why? Because they NEED to feel plugged into the greater reality that is our nation, want to feel that they are a part of it, and are participating in it, in some way, by keeping up with "the news." "The news" thus infests their minds with falsehoods. They may even perceive some of those falsehoods, yet they return again and again to that polluted, toxic, deadly stream of images and chatter and believe the NEXT falsehood.
I guess I just remember REAL news on TV--democratic news, news that brought us together, that taught us something, that revealed something, and that truly reflected our identity as a people. I'm not the first to point out this vast change in the quality of TV news, from its earlier broadcast years. But I think it's important to point it out again.
What most people are getting is not news. And it is not in any way "the mainstream" (the "mainstream news media"/MSM--what a false acronym!). And what is occurring with this medium is more than a lockdown. It is the creation of an entire false reality in which facts, investigation, real people, and real things don't matter.
I also remember when the New York Times was real--our nation's "paper of record," the gold standard in journalism. What a corrupt, war profiteering, corporate ass-kissing rag it has become!
Although it plays to the educated--to people who read--like NPR, what it sells is no less an illusion, a totally manipulated reality, than the crap on TV.
You can't really call it a "lockdown," when the nation's paper of record shouts lie after warmongering lie from its headlines. It's not just that they didn't tell the truth, or avoided a news story, or blackholed some subject. It's that they created an alternative reality in which Colin Powell and George Bush WERE TELLING THE TRUTH. A 100% pack of lies was made to seem true.
Anyway, TIA, your point is a good one. This (the alternative reality news) didn't happen overnight. And it goes back to before 2000. I date the end of American journalism to Reagan and Iran-Contra. If ever a president deserved impeachment, it was him--for his illegal war on Nicaragua (after Congress had specifically forbidden it). If the press and the Democrats had done the right thing at that time, we wouldn't be in this horrible situation today, with out-of-control fascists running our government and driving our country right off a cliff.
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