Geode00,
I am precluded from responding to you on the FADG thread, but you did publish there an interesting view about the mainstream media that I'd like to debate you on.
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Message 21440915
To: stockman_scott who wrote (164596) 6/22/2005 4:16:45 PM
From: geode00 Read Replies (2) of 164640
Geode: "The corporate media doesn't want to deal with the DSM because it means admitting to themselves and, more importantly, to the public that they WERE DUPED while being stupid and lazy."
RGD: I would submit to you that there is an alternative explanation that fits the fact case much better. As you are probably familiar, the CIA and other intel agencies began infiltrating the U.S. media establishment in a big way in the 1950s. This was dubbed Operation Mockingbird. By the 1970s, a minor scandal erupted over the disclosure that well over 300 key individuals were employed in the American corporate media who had direct or indirect ties to the government's spy apparatus. The CIA was so proud of their propaganda operation that the dubbed it "The Mighty Wurlitzer". CIA Director Stansfield Turner, tinyurl.com, even submitted anonymous resumes to the Senator Frank Church Commission which was looking into agency abuses of that era.
So what is the point of refreshing your memory about past attempts to subvert the news? I would submit to you a counter hypothesis to explain the peculiar reaction of the corporate media to the Downing Street Memo revelations. I would suggest that it was not an act of incompetence that had most of the MSM reporting breathlessly on WMDs, and Saddam Hussein's imminent plans for attack on the U.S. and the UK. Quite the contrary. I will suggest, and I can provide proof if needed, that the MSM was an active agent of propaganda and disinformation, acting more-or-less as the Ministry of Information for the Bush Administration in the runup to war with Iraq in March, 2003.
The evidence seems inrefutable to me. The drums of war that were being beaten by Bush, Cheney and Rice among others before the war became a giant echo chamber in the MSM. Any reasonable dissent was censored. TV news outlets, all of them including PBS-NPR, skewed their coverage to the point that there were probably 3 or 4 proponents of war for every mild and purposefully obscure oppponent of the war allowed any air time. In the newspapers and major magazines, the same sort of ratio applied. We saw a tremendous amount of sheer regurgitation of the Bush Crime Family's lies, cant and innuendo by the completely obsequious White House press corps. We saw blatant disinformation campaigns, such as Judith Miller's at the NY Times, go completely unchallenged at these corporate outposts of the Establishment.
Face it, corporate America lusted for war, and it did everything it could to propagandize and disinform the American public that it could.
This was no mere matter of incompetence on the part of the media. This was, and remains, active willful compliance and cooperation in a posture of illegal foreign aggression, ruthless and reckless deceit and complete contempt for the processes of democratic society.
Geode00: "- Their first whining point is that they, being professionals, knew all about everything outlined in the DSM BEFORE the DSM even came out.
- Their second main whining point is that they're tired of amateur readers and amateur bloggers pointing out quite correctly that the 'professionals' are ignorant and lazy and not doing their jobs well."
RGD: The media's response has a certain similarity to the obfuscations offered by the Wizard of Oz, wouldn't you say. :)
One of the most annoying aspects of the elites is their supercilious attitude that "we are the experts and you little people should just trust us." History simply shows this to be a vile arrogance that cannot be tolerated if a real democracy is to be preserved in America. Fortunately for this great nation, dissent is not going out of style any time soon. And although the media may attempt to riducule the growing dissent to failed policy as "amateurish", nonetheless dissent will continue to grow and the failure of the Bush Crime Family's schemes becomes increasingly apparent to a growing number of victims of Bush's heartless and greedy policies.
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Geode00: "Just as CongressPeople know that these are the best jobs they will ever have and the most important they will ever be, professional journalists will hit back at anything that threatens their cushy world.
For goodness sakes, how many times can the WashPost say: you're right, we didn't get it but we're sorta sorry.
The corporate press is losing its grip on the news and it knows it. It's gone so far into infotainment that its 'news' doesn't appear altogether that credible any longer."
In this regard, I would very much recommend a re-reading of Orwell's "1984" for an excellent analysis of the methods being applied by the media to the body politic. In essence, and in a very chilling premonition of things to come, Orwell concluded that a Big Brother media has it within its power to infantilize the great bulk of the population to such and extent and with such malice aforethought that what could happen would be that the audience of 2050 could be so coarsened, prevented from using vocabulary and steered to pure emotional responses that this audience would be intellectually incapable of even understanding what passed for normal political discussion one hundred years earlier, i.e. 1950.
What Orwell predicted, and what Fox News is perfecting, is disinformation and infotainment as a means of mind control that would/will make dissent impossible. In this new world, those who would have the temerity to dissent from the dishonest policies of a criminal government will unfortunately be met by vacuousness and blank stares from an American public who will know everything that there is to know about Desperate Housewives and who know absolutely nothing about the lives of desperate Iraqi women and children. |
