The Aerie

The News is Really Most Sincerely Dead

Not for the first time, I copy a comment from a discussion thread as a blog post. In this case it's not MERELY laziness, but also the fact that I've posted this comment over and over again and I thought it was about time I consolidated it here on my own blog to refer back to later.

The issue is that I repeatedly read posts complaining that the news "isn't doing its job" or somesuch nonsense. Some "respectable" news agency (that is to say, nobody expects anything of Fox) posts some biased and/or incorrect information, and everybody screams Oh How Could They Do That!?

The problem is, the news is NOT the news. How do I know this? Simple: if the news were the news, then whenever someone made an egregious factual error, or when a news reporter editorialized or slanted a report, they would suffer a consequence. They do not suffer a consequence, in fact the most egregious broadcasters are often the most successful, therefore the news is not the news, Q.E.D.

Due to the abandonment of anti-trust legislation, and the infiltration and overthrow of the FCC by representatives of the broadcast industry, news, and in fact all the media, has become pure statist, corporatist propaganda. The news is not the news: the news is now the communications division of the parent corporation which owns it.

Modern multinational corporations are replacing the State as the primary institution of governance. They buy and control the media, they buy and control the Congress, and they empty the public coffers of the old governmental system into their own banks through fraud, anticompetitive practices, and as we saw in late 2008, simply by purchasing the legislation to make it happen.

The media is the marketing division of the corporations, the news is the communications division, and Congress is the political arm. These organizations are largely free of taxation and regulation, they are usually controlled by a few wealthy and powerful individuals from the same socioeconomic class that owns every other multinational corporation, and their primary activity is converting natural resources into wealth in their pockets as fast as they possibly can. They are immortal, amoral, answerable to no one, antidemocratic, and extremely conservative. They pander to the population with token and modest social liberalism while maintaining an autocratic economic conservatism. And they play race off against class to keep the lowest classes fighting each other, and attention off the abuses of their own class. They are usually able to get a good portion of the lowest classes to fight their battles for them, even if the lowest classes end up working against their own best interests.

This is the world of the 21st century. It’s about time we faced it clearly and honestly. It’s about time we stopped wringing our hands and bemoaning the fact that “the news” just doesn’t measure up to the news of our grandpappy’s day. There IS no news, there is ONLY propaganda designed to control the population, and with that mission in mind, it’s not a problem for the chyron editor to label a disgraced Republican as a Democrat (http://tinyurl.com/n6jc82 for one example of many). He or she will not be punished, and will in fact likely be rewarded.

The news is dead. Representative democracy is dead. And yes, civilization IS on the verge of collapse, because the multinational corporations care much more about quarterly profits than they do about what will happen to Europe when Greenland melts.

Posted by Albatross at January 6, 2010 8:55 PM | TrackBack