John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JOHN SCALES AVERY IN RUSSIA INSIDER
"The Importance of Alternative Media
"The Roman emperors gave their people bread and circuses to numb them into political inactivity. The modern mass media seem to be playing a similar role."
Overall, a good piece. I like the Huxley-Orwell comparison.
Neil Postman was, of course, an eloquent and interesting social critic.
But I do think our situation is a little darker and less susceptible to change and improvement than the author seems to think.
"...today there is an urgent need to make public opinion aware of the serious problems facing civilization, and the steps that are needed to solve these problems."
While I recognize the importance of that statement, I think it misses something. That "something" has to do with who it is that has an urgent need.
Certainly, it is not the power establishment. They have in fact single-handedly created what we see.
And part of that establishment is the mainline press. It is not a "fourth estate" as the press used to like calling itself in the United States.
It is not a “tribune of the people,” a reference to an ancient Roman office privileged with rights to speak out, an office the old names of some newspapers try to recall.
And, in truth, it is no longer dedicated to the kind of journalistic ideals we would have heard from an I.F. Stone and as I’m sure some journalism schools are still feeding their naïve and optimistic students.
No, American mainline journalism is a corporate entity, much consolidated over the years by mergers and take-overs.
And the economics of many aspects of this corporate entity reflect hard realities of changing technology. Most do not any longer do anything that could be honestly called “investigative reporting,” and most no longer even have staff assigned all over as foreign correspondents.
Those activities are just too costly even if we found some publication or broadcaster willing in spirit to undertake them.
There are no signs that major publishers and broadcasters today are even willing in spirit. They have to be extremely careful about their balance sheets and survival. They would not even think of offending an important corporation, something which could cause additional economic difficulties.
And they have to be extremely careful about government. After all, it is government agencies which shape many aspects of their corporate life, as, for example, whether they will be able to do a merger or take-over. It is also government sources which quietly hand-out leaks and tips for valuable stories. If you aren’t cooperative with government, you will simply be left out in the future and immediately rendered non-competitive vis-à-vis your peers.
There is also the intense nonsense in the United States over patriotism and supporting the country in its wars (not one of which has anything to do with defense). You could be branded almost as a a traitor in today’s America for printing or broadcasting the wrong words, and that would have extremely grave consequences for your audience, for you advertisers, and for your relationship with government.
So, I see no possibility of America’s press now ever rising to the challenges the author outlines.
We actually aren’t in quite an Orwell or a Huxley world but in something much stranger than either of them.
For quite a while, too, in America, citizens have not been referred to as citizens, with the obligations that name entails, by politicians, but as “consumers,” reflecting the immense influence of corporations in America, or as “the middle class,” whatever that may mean, although it is always treated as something important that no one wants to be left out of.
Even people working at Walmart or McDonald’s want be regarded as “middle class” in America, and America’s generous politicians oblige them, the honorific being one of the few things ever bestowed on the people.
America has ended the “working class” through some social and economic miracle. Even referring to it today can get you labelled as an advocate of class warfare or worse, a commie.
No, it is a greatly changed environment, one with no room for the principles of classical journalism, although everyone will continue to make appeals to those, aware of the “resonance” of such appeals, but they mean no more than the often-heard appeals to some of the Bill of Rights, every article of which has been violated by modern American governments.
America lives in an environment where the Department of “Defense” is continuously engaged in aggression or threatening people. Not a single war or action in the post-WWII period has remotely had anything to do with defense.
It also lives in an environment in which the CIA, the NSA, and FBI give the lie daily to ideas of rights and privacy and even decency, and they are only three of America’s current seventeen national security agencies.
Both the Pentagon and the security establishment literally crowd out spending on anything new or beneficial to average Americans. Their budgets are vast and grow like metastasizing cancer. And the last thing such immensely powerful agencies want is interference from the press. The bigger such agencies are, the more the humiliation piled on anyone daring to investigate or attack them.
Indeed, the greater America’s imperial drives are in the world – the very jobs of the Pentagon and CIA - the greater are the numbers and extent of dark operations and dark programs and things labelled “national security.” There is no room for journalism there, except in a kind of superficial re-assuring role and in the role of “getting the message out there.” “Getting the message out there” used to be called propaganda or disinformation, but not anymore in America, unless they are speaking of Russian journalism.
It is what America’s mainline press does 24-hours a day. The only exception is in the case of harmless local news or business news or travel news or events where journalism can still be done.
Just think about it. How easily even several top-notch journalists, given the assignment and the needed resources, could have discovered the truth of the Syrian War or the truth of the Iraq War or Libya or the collapse of Ukraine. But it never happened, and it won’t in a world shaped as ours is.
Yes, some independent journalists have done reporting, but they have no resources, they have their efforts made difficult by government, whose spokespeople even contradict them, and the general public mostly never reads their stuff. They have no big outlets for their product. The general public wants, just as at the grocery store, national brand names, not Brand X. So, independents cannot even reach the audience they should.
The system works perfectly for supporting the dark plans of a determined power establishment while leaving a semblance of press influence.
But that influence is as illusory as America’s national elections where each citizen gets to vote for a candidate who will change nothing important. Democrat or Republican, you get wars, dark operations, a privileged establishment, bloated security agencies and the Pentagon all working with the wealthy individuals and corporations which the establishment serves and protects.
No other outcome is realistically possible. And just so for America’s press and mainline journalism. I think no other outcome than what we see is possible. Since they are part of that same establishment.
