Reply #12: Excellent work. [View All]

It is neither possible nor desirable to boycott the corporate media out of existence. I certainly agree with H20 Man's suggestion that the progressive community should not just throw up our hands in frustration at how the News Business operates in the 21st Century.

There was never a "golden age" of fearless, truthful journalism.

The paradigm that I grew up with (born 1953) is gone -- it was a cold war consensus that accepted the two party system as just about perfect; that communism was the embodiment of evil; that "Civil Rights" was a plausible issue with two sides; that "our" foreign policy was based on both morality and common sense.

These baseline assumptions also included a wholesale endorsement of the Social Contract expressed by the New Deal -- and this former point of media consensus had the effect of marginalizing the Far Right Wing of the day. The John Birch Society was dismissed as a cult of kooks, for example.

One of the central tenets of this now defunct media world view allowed Woodward and Bernstein to challenge the Bush Administration -- we had a two party system that was run by generally honorable people. To ferret out dishonesty and criminality was, by definition, news.

All of this drove the far right wing batty for decades. This frustration created the myth of the "Liberal Media" -- most dramatically expressed by the highest ranking felon in modern American history, Spiro Agnew.


It is pretty easy to demonstrate that these animating assumptions behind the Cold War Media World View are no more "true" than the current paradigm that considers the "War on Terror" a legitimate intellectual and historical basis for public policy.

No, today we just have a different set of lies, but these lies are intended to work differently than the previous set of lies.


As citizens in (up to now) a democratic republic, we have to come to terms with the reality that "the news" is a product manufactured by corporations which have both a motivation and a ready means of slanting the news for their own political objectives. Personally, I cringe every time I read another DU (or other lefty forum) post that complains about how the media is not doing its "job" or, worse, fumes away into despair because "the media" will never change.

As always, progressive politics is a frontal assualt on the power of money.


What changed between 1974 when Nixon was driven out of the White House and 1999 when the GOP failed to drive Clinton out of office was that nature of the Money Interest changed. Instead of the Cold War, Smokestack America News Industry of the New Deal Social Contract era, the Gingrich/Bush2 GOP and the Post Telecommunications Act Media are both creatures of the New Money -- the faction that was affirmatively marginalized by the Old Money, Two-Party system.

This new paradigm has reversed the marginalization -- whereas resistance to the New Deal and atavistic Xenophopia were once defined as kookery, now anybody who dares to suggest the the New Deal was a very good thing and that its legacy is worth preserving and even expanding is now Officially a Joke.


Being mad at this state of affairs is not a strategy for subverting it.




Personally, I think the most important project by far is to spread the message that the corporate media is lying to you. That was the starting point for the Right's ascendency. We need to institutionalize alternative information dissemination and create a self confident new paradigm that puts the Corporate Lies into proper perspective.

Capitalism is infinitely malleable. When the Non-Wingnut majority succeeds in creating a credible network of information distribution, you will see that Roger Ailes will no longer be able to define the news in America, and all the current assumptions behind editorial decisions will morph into something different again.

It seems like a huge project only because it requires that upwards of 100 million people change their view of what "the media" is.

When you realize that there was no such thing as "the media" a scant 40 or 50 years ago, and you realize that the Right Wing successfully did exactly this over the last 20 years, it is actually much easier to accomplish than most people today assume.