Corporate Media as a Toxic Dispersant

Corporate Media as a Toxic Dispersant
Leslie Savan
May 28, 2010



Ever since learning that BP had decided to douse the Gulf of Mexico with “dispersants”—that is, toxic chemicals that break down oil slicks, making them less noticeable on the surface but even more deadly to the sea life below--I thought, This sounds familiar.

In fact, it sounds like a good metaphor for how the mass media function in our culture. All too often, the corporate media are the dispersant that makes the gush of oily corporate and political malfeasance—George Bush stealing the 2000 election, say, or lying us into the Iraq war--less noticeable on the surface. Though in the long run, vastly more toxic to our democracy.

snip//

The job of a media dispersant isn’t always to deflect blame; sometimes it is to keep a myth going despite all evidence to the contrary. We’ve been hearing a lot about the purported “enthusiasm gap” between R’s and D’s: Republican voters, this notion goes, are much more energized about their candidates this year than the Democrats are, and that will surely spell Waterloo for the libs. But as John Nichols pointed out, in the four largest May 18 primaries, “The Republican side was where the turnout dropped off.” Most notably, in the Kentucky Senate primaries, Rand Paul actually got fewer votes than the losing Democrat.

But the media has been doing its best to keep news of Democratic strength far below the surface—it would muddy up the myth of the GOP’s big-daddy dominance and its inevitable resurgence after a brief hiatus from power. Which is analogous to what many pundits see in Obama's waning approval ratings: Most ignore that much of the wane is from the dissatisfied left, leaving the desired impression that the right is getting bigger and angrier--and that’s the side to stick with, boy, if you know what's good for you.

Of course, the news media don’t have to willfully lie, exaggerate, or ignore reality in order to let companies like BP and Halliburton get away with murder. Celebrity and lifestyle news is, and long has been, the dispersant added to hard news to make it palatable, to give it less of a greasy, ink-stained taste of what’s really happening.

And in the largest sense, the news media itself is being dispersed, treated by corporations as if it were an oil slick best dissolved into smaller, less concentrated droplets that can be sunk out of sight. Sometimes literally, as when BP CEO Tony Hayward snapped at a cameraman, “Hey, get outta there! Get outta there!” when he stepped over a boom to film clean-up efforts on a Louisiana beach this week.

more...

http://www.thenation.com/blog/corporate-media-toxic-dispersant-0

Gets It. Corporate mediawhores have been a Toxic Despersant on America.

Bookmarked & Rec. Thanks, babylonsister~

kicked enough.:hi:

too late for me to rec ;(