roundtable: Re: Back to the Future Robber Baron Days

roundtable: Re: Back to the Future Robber Baron Days

Re: Back to the Future Robber Baron Days

Jeff Briggs (jbriggs@capital.edu)
Tue, 3 Jan 1995 03:48:02 +0500 

Date: Tue, 3 Jan 1995 03:48:02 +0500
From: jbriggs@capital.edu (Jeff Briggs)
Message-Id: <9501030848.AA06923@athena.capital.edu>
To: roundtable@cni.org
Subject: Re: Back to the Future Robber Baron Days


Blarney re additional sniping making "our side look more cantankerous". 

If you are looking at Gingrich as an individual, rather than as a 
potent representative of business interests whose task is to continue 
the Reagan agenda (and Nixon and Bush and Ford) of subverting what 
elements of democracy and free speech remain to the interests of the 
media-industrial complex (a debateable but as yet pungeant phrase), 
then you have not yet grasped the enormity of what is happening, and 
how, and why, in the United States. 

     Why be so defensive? We may not agree on exact details or issues, 
but there is no question that the gatekeepers of the corporate media 
(including Murdoch) are becoming ever more effective at controlling 
the flow of "news", as well as what topics may or may not be discussed, 
as well as what opions the audience is left with the impression are 
"moderate' and "right". 

     The appearance of personal ethics or lack thereof in Gingrich
or Dole or any of the army of intellectual and media "epigoni" (in
Edward S. Herman's brilliant analysis of what is happening to America
"Beyond Hypocracy") of the political and economic elite who dominate
both the affairs and the minds of the American people is irrelevant - 
mere public relations -ie. biased manipulation of appearances to 
mislead or distarct attention from the real interests at hand.

     Why does G. want to do away with PBS? So there will not be even
the flickering embers of a critical light cast upon the activities
of his clients. 

     No matter what twisting of logic and rhetoric, there is no way 
that the Republican party (and unfortunately most of the Democratic
party) can by any stretch be said to be representing any vital interests
of the mass of American voters, tax-payers, middle class, or citizens.

     This is a critical time. With a few strokes of the pen we may
have neither PBS (whatever its merits, two of which are certainly
Frontline and POV), nor public access, which Time Warner tried to
gut several years ago. Get rid of NPR and the country is essentially 
left with 100% corporate media (with the exception of small circulation 
magazines of quality), whose interests and that of the people of this 
country do not by any means coincide.

     So let's forget about how we appear to a ruthless, relentless,
and powerful opposition, and compromise less, rather than more, with
what we may regard to be the truth.

Jeff Briggs
jbriggs2capital.edu

[CNI Home Page]