roundtable: Re: OP-ED ON TV - PUBLIC

roundtable: Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC

Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC

Jeff Briggs (jbriggs@capital.edu)
Mon, 2 Jan 1995 05:02:47 +0500 

Date: Mon, 2 Jan 1995 05:02:47 +0500
From: jbriggs@capital.edu (Jeff Briggs)
Message-Id: <9501021002.AA05647@athena.capital.edu>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: OP-ED ON TV / PUBLIC


Brilliantly expressed by Greg Boozell ("Corporate media must maintain 
a veil of objectivity in order to effectively propagandize viewers" - 
"While supposedly neutral, journalistic 'objectivity' is itself an 
ideological position used to dismiss any notions of bias in order to 
protect the interests of the elites who fund the media.")

     This is the central point that is the fundamental concept 
underlying this discussion group: is this true or not? I believe it 
most certainly is, and it is a profound and permanent danger to any 
approaches to true democracy in the United States. While all known 
societies are run by elites, it seems the elite in the US have 
effectively prevented their presence from being acknowledged by the 
majority of the people.

     The evidence is overwhelming. Read "Beyond Hypocracy - Decoding 
the News in an Age of Propaganda" by Edward S. Herman - the most 
effective presentation of the mountains of evidence available that 
I know of. 

     Why is the downed American pilot in North Korea top news for 2 
weeks? Is this the most important event in the world during that time?

     Analyze any network newscast after videotaping it - including the 
commercials - which break up the continuity every few minutes with a 
deliberation that we take for granted, but which is really a continual 
and unremitting series of corporate propaganda which has predictable 
effects on the American pysche.

     Is this really the best we can do as a nation with our most 
effective comminucation medium? There is no issue more pressing that 
whether our mass media will ever be freed from the sophisticated, 
seductive, and very effective control that is currently exercised over 
it by an invisable few. 

     These ideas are inherently radical, in the tradition of Thomas 
Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as Locke, Rousseau, and numerous 
others whose heritage accounts for what freedoms we still retain.

     But the changes in technology have enabled a concentration in 
the control over information that many writers in this group have 
commented on, and as any despot from Augustus to Henry the VIII to 
Queen Elizabeth to Hitler has known, control of what information is 
sent is the most effective means of political control.

     The worst aspect of this problem is that this debate does not 
exist on the media in question, or if it does, only in the most 
peripheral manner, and without a full airing of the implications.

     A simple question that most people do not seem to want to ask
lurks behind this discussion: how can this situation be changed? 
Conventional wisdom says it is impossible, because the forces arrayed 
to protect the staus quo are the most powerful in the world - 
financially, strategically, and militarally.

     We don't have the vocabulary to discuss this, because the media
have insinuated the idea that they are representative of what the 
people want and think, rather than being the manipulators and purveyors 
that they are. And there are still too many generally well-informed 
and educated people who have not made all the connections yet.

     And finally - as Herman points out - any ideas critical of the 
current (effectively invisable) ownership of the mass media will be 
mocked, trivialized, labelled, denigrated, and attacked relentlessly 
by the mindless whores (in the literal sense of the word) who eagerly
serve their interests -Dole, Gingrich, and their Republican cohorts;
most (but not all) of the Democrats; every single media editorialist
(Buchanan, Limberger, Will, etc.) and think tank rep; and millions of
Americans eager to sell out their own interests -due to a lack of
information, and a lack of practice at reasoning along these lines.

     Lest you think this is cynicism - it is not. It is simply asking
this question: are all projections into the future necesarally 
Orwellian, or is there any real possibility that the collective 
intelligence of the human race will ever assert itself?                  

     Without a dramatic restructuring of the American media, based on 
the novel concept that they use the public airwaves (and cable and 
fiberoptic networks) in the public, not just their interests, any such 
hope does seem to be merely an infinitessimal and immediately forgotten 
change in current on the Internet in early 1995.

Jeffrey Briggs
jbriggs@capital.edu

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