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There is a huge gap between the corporate media and the public, it has been there at least 20 years, and it is as wide as the gap between the people on an unemployment line, and a gaggle of worthless rich people frolicking on a yacht. As a matter of fact, that is exactly the difference. I agree with many people on this thread that this has all been brought about because corporations--by way of their media and their increasing takeover of what used to be public school systems, and colleges and universities--want people to be stupid, selfish, to only think about buying things, and to not even think that governments are things worth having. If people are frighteningly ignorant and stupid, it is all the media's fault and intent, because this situation never existed before.
As soon as that bastard Reagan started changing media-ownership laws, anti-trust regulations, the percentage of network TV content that had to be made by independant producers (lowering it), and all other things needed to set this thing up for their people, the entire media consolidated down to its present shape of a very small, extremist/corporate/anti-democratic-government group that now not only does not serve the public good, but treats the open workings of our whole society as its enemy. News coverage was never treated the same way again. The old commonsensical "news reporter's" attitude of documenting the most important news stories for the general audience, so we would know roughly what was going on in the world and be educated, is gone. Now, everything is propaganda and mind-control straight from the advertiser's corporate boardroom. Nothing is even explained from the basics anymore--it was all just "that robbery we told you about," or "the popular diet drug," or of course, "the nuclear option." I don't know how people are supposed to be educated on current events, when they are deliberately not explained from the fundamentals, but only this "insider short-hand" is ever used. Who the hell would ever be able to guess what is now going on in Congress if all you ever heard was "nuclear option," and didn't even know what "filibuster" meant? I believe this is a tactic to bore people away from the issues by portraying them as incoherent, by using jargon and never describing. "News" stories do not have (visual) establishing shots anymore, only extreme, annoying close-ups, and running around like an asshole with the camera. Shots are taken of the same thing from four or five angles or ranges--moneysaver. Nowadays, everything is slant, and the whole "story" may be that "Democrats are being obstructionist," blah blah. Stories are so completely made up of slogans and spin, with no intelligent description, that I would be shocked if anyone ended up being intelligent after all that. They are trying to kill the overall perspective that you need to think with.
Just to take a couple of current examples of how the media tells everything, think about the "Newsweek" Quran story, and a story on the "Supreme Court" deciding that wineries can sell wine by shipping directly, over state lines (vote was 5-4; gee, what does that remind you of?--all the time now). The first story, that interrogators at Guantanamo prison were flushing a Quran down the toilet, had already been verified by many witnesses and several news organizations before the "Newsweek" story--as, yet again, only Keith Olbermann is reporting--yet suddenly, this magazine can be made to pretend that the story was "wrong," after some contacts by Republican, Inc., as a few brave people have been saying for years now. This administration pressures and pressures journalists until they can't stand it anymore, and cave. Then it is presented as "Newsweek was wrong" on the "news," and they ALL go along with it. This is why I do not blame people necessarily for being ignorant after media contact--how can you not be ignorant, when they knowingly lie? The second story was the trivial-seeming (and this is how they want you to think of it, and fall asleep) wine story: every single media corporation, every single time, cheered it as "choice," "oh, how fun," "we like wine," endless brainless shit. It was only further marketing and the killing of laws, and therefore favorable to them. As you may not have heard, though, the threat is that minors, because they will not have to purchase it face to face, can buy wine now with no age check. This can become yet another terrible problem, but as always, the media cheers and sells, and you never even notice through all this blandness that they are ruthlessly killing all of our legal rights and protections.
No matter how people complain that they want real news and are sick of fluff, the pimps cannot change it, because the whole point to them is to make us totally trivialized, stupid, consuming buyers of products--no citizens, no society, no education. I don't even know how the corporate media, after all of its propaganda, censoring, slant, cutting the budgets of its own news departments, and endless product promotion pretending to be news, can hypocritically pretend to be "shocked" that people who pay attention to this crap are ignorant. Suggestions on this thread that we need to revive Civics classes at school are right to the core of the problem--it would return people to the basic knowledge of what our country, our government is, how it works, why it is so great and why we want to keep every checking-and-balancing part of it, and of course, where threats sometimes come from. The problem is, the threat is here.
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