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Posted on 10/18/2012 7:11:40 AM PDT by expat1000
A nation where governments are elected by the people is most vulnerable at the interface between the politicians and the people. The interface is where the people learn what the politicians stand for and where the politicians learn what the people want. The bigger a country gets, the harder it is to pick up on that consensus by stopping by a coffee shop or an auto repair store. That's where the Medicracy steps in to control the consensus.
The media is no longer informative, it is conformative. It is not interested in broadcasting events unless it can also script them. It does not want to know what you think, it wants to tell you what to think. The consensus is the voice of the people and the Mediacrats are cutting its throat, dumping its body in a back alley and turning democracy into their own puppet show.
Media bias was over decades ago. The media isn't biased anymore, it's a player, its goal is turn its Fourth Estate into a fourth branch of government, the one that squats below the three branches and blocks their access to the people and blocks the people's access to them. Under the Medicracy there will still be elections, they will even be mostly free, they just won't matter so long as its upper ranks determine the dialogue on both sides of the media wall.
The Medicracy isn't playing for peanuts anymore. It's not out to skew a few stories, it's out to take control of the country. In military empires, the military can act as a Praetorian Guard. In political empires, it's the people who control the political conversation who also control the succession.
In 2008, the Medicracy elevated an Illinois State Senator who had briefly showed up in the Federal Senate to the highest office in the land. They did it even though he had no skills for the job and no serious plan for fixing any of the country's problems. They did it to show that they could. They did it because they wanted to tell a compelling story and inflict radical change on a country that would have never voted for it, if it had not been lied and guilted into making the single worst decision in its entire history.
Propaganda is a powerful weapon and seizing control of the newspapers, radio and television stations is one of the first things that tyrants do. That wasn't supposed to be an issue in a country where anyone could open their own newspaper. But that changed with the transformation of journalism into the media. The media, plural, embraces multiple mediums, most of them expensive and requiring a license and often, government approval.
Two hundreds years ago, a few friends could open a printing press and take on the big behemoths and often did. Today the only place they can do that is on the internet. Radio and television are walled cities controlled by a small number of interlinked corporations that keep merging together. Their staffers come out of carefully controlled environments, where with the pyramid of indoctrination, political gurus pass down their wisdom to professors who program students with its doctrines, to create the Medicracy.
FOX News, for all its faults, is under constant attack by the Medicracy because it is independent of that same rigid coercion. Wrong or right, it represents a view that is fundamentally different from the same mind-numbing conformity to be found everywhere from the weekly news magazine in your dentist's office to the talking heads on your cable channel to the honeyed voices of the anchors giving you the news every 5, 10 or 50 minutes over the radio while you're driving to work.
The real crime of FOX News is not that it's especially right-wing, it isn't. It is far less conservative than CNN is liberal. But FOX News' existence, its patriotic color scheme and attempts at appealing to the heartland while putting a conservative spin on issues, forces viewers to notice how conformist and identical the rest of the media landscape. And that is what makes FOX News truly dangerous. Like a goat among the sheep, it makes you realize the sameness of their generic competitors who all cheer for the same team, shop at the same stores and dream of the day when everyone thinks like them.
They are the Mediacracy and they are the Ministry of Propaganda. They are the smirking people who got tired of telling you how many people died in an earthquake in Indonesia and decided to begin explaining to you why the earthquake is your fault because you don't ride a bike to work. These are the people who longer want to report on a shooting, but want to tell you that it's time for a firearms ban. They no longer want to report on Washington DC, unless they can control Washington DC.
The Memorandum of Understanding for the Town Hall debate was that the moderator would relay questions from the audience, but would not ask the candidates any questions or comment on what they say. Candy Crowley made it clear before the debate that she would not abide by those rules and liberal organizations piled on, deploying a petition against the silencing of Candy Crowley. And so Candy Crowley wasn't silenced, in true Mediacrat fashion, she silenced others.
The Mediacracy's insistence on being the third candidate at every debate, its outrage that anyone would expect it to be silent and let the actual candidates speak, reflects its power and arrogance. Its elites are not interested in the conversation except as a means of controlling its outcome. They are not here to let other people talk, except as vehicles for making their own points.
Candy Crowley, in true Mediacrat style, was not there to facilitate a conversation, but to tell us what to think. Unlike Obama or Romney, Crowley had no legitimate reason for being there. She was not a political candidate and had not passed any of the democratic tests that Obama and Romney had to be able to sit there. Her influence had no basis of any kind in the voice of the people. Instead she was there as a representative of the powerful and unelected Mediacracy which was determined to have its say. She was there to remind the pols that even in a Two Party system, the Third Estate acts as the third candidate, never running for office but always winning by controlling the conversation.
It is not in the public interest for the Mediacracy to have its say, no matter how often the Mediacrats trot out their public good routine. Power is either vested in democratic institutions or undemocratic ones and the media corporations and their talking heads are about as undemocratic an institution as can be conceivably imagined. And when Mediacrats try to control the outcome of a popular election, their actions are an attack by an undemocratic institution on a democratic institution.
Mediacrats fill the airwaves with rantings about corporate influence on politics. The 800 pound gorilla of corporate influence on politics is the media. Candy Crowley's employer, CNN, is owned by Time Warner, the second largest media conglomerate on the planet. Not the country, the planet. The only media conglomerate bigger than it is the one that owns ABC News. But the Mediacrats never report on their own influence, never turn the camera back into the studio while warning about the danger of corporate lobbyists. But the corporate lobbyists sitting in the CNN studio don't just to a few politicians in a closed room, they do their best to dictate the outcome of elections.
Businesses turn to lobbyists when the times are bad. The media is losing the public, so they are turning from being mere media into Mediacracy. Media is subject to the whims of the viewing public, but Mediacracy subjects the public to its whims. And they are dreaming of a country under the enlightened rule of the Mediacrats. One nation under a thousand channels all serving the interests of a dying media state.
The media, with its expensive equipment and its licenses, is confronting an era when everything is being reduced to a single medium, print, voice and visuals falling into the internet singularity and leaving them with some expensive equipment, exclusive rights to broadcast on frequencies that no one watches anymore and the ability to print millions of papers, when they can hardly move a tenth of them. And like all imploding tyrannies, they are confronting the crisis by grasping for power. They know that they will either be a Medicracy or they will be nothing.
The greatest challenge to the integrity of our democracy may be the coup of the media corporations. Information is the lifeblood of a free society and the consolidation of information outlets in the hands of a small and powerful elite with no ethics and no boundaries is leading us down the road to a virtual tyranny that will maintain the illusory workings of a democratic society without any of the substance. The old institutions of elections are becoming a charade, a formal routine where the outcome is determined by the employees of a handful of major media corporations that present the public with the inevitable result. And America is falling into the hands of the Government-Media Complex.
The Mediacracy has directed all its efforts into hijacking the public dialogue, turning elections into a cheap sideshow accompanied by sneering commentary. It has insisted on being the third candidate in every election and turned its corporate shills into the pretend voice of the people. It has stomped all over the traditions of this country, its independent institutions and its freedoms with thousand dollar shoes while wrapping itself in any available flag. And it cannot be allowed to get away with it.
A free society does not only become unfree at the point of a gun. It becomes unfree when its mechanisms of freedom are jammed, when the institutions that are meant to provide power to the people are taken over by unelected forces and twisted into the apparatus of a new tyranny. When undemocratic institutions seize control of democratic institutions then democracy dies, strangled by men and women who keep on smiling while they tighten their grip.
America can be a Democracy or a Mediacracy. It cannot and will not be both. And the only way to preserve democracy is to challenge the Mediacrats and force them out of the public space that they have usurped and back into the private sphere of their financial interests where they belong. Daniel Greenfield is a New York City based writer and blogger and a Shillman Journalism Fellow of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The media has crossed the line. It is no longer merely manipulative, it has been completely compromised by politics. Most of the main stream media has become the house organ of the Communist Party.
It also has a lot to do with people having a stake in the future of thier country..worker bees against user bees. we have too many user bees voting for the lazy mans free stuff ticket..when nothing is ever free.
Mark me on.
Candy Crowley's employer, CNN, is owned by Time Warner, the second largest media conglomerate on the planet. Not the country, the planet. The only media conglomerate bigger than it is the one that owns ABC News.
Interesting.
>>Mark me on.
OK - you got it.
I think the only way you are going to get the media to be a little more honest (I think there will always be one bias because the news is reported by people with opinions, agendas, and bias themselves; it’s just an extension of them) is to hit them where it hurts; in the pocketbook; advertising. It may require boycotts of some sort or other methods that we might become aware of through ex-employees or principals. Determine all the ways that they make their money then find methods that cut it off and let them be aware it is because of biased reporting, pushing political agendas, and ideaologies they are pushing that are harmful to the American public.
There are other methods I can think of but since big media worships at the altar of big money I think that’s ^tge bestway to get their attention .
I think the only way you are going to get the media to be a little more honest (I think there will always be one bias because the news is reported by people with opinions, agendas, and bias themselves; it’s just an extension of them) is to hit them where it hurts; in the pocketbook; advertising. It may require boycotts of some sort or other methods that we might become aware of through ex-employees or principals. Determine all the ways that they make their money then find methods that cut it off and let them be aware it is because of biased reporting, pushing political agendas, and ideaologies they are pushing that are harmful to the American public.
There are other methods I can think of but since big media worships at the altar of big money I think that’s the bestway to get their attention .
I think the only way you are going to get the media to be a little more honest (I think there will always be one bias because the news is reported by people with opinions, agendas, and bias themselves; it’s just an extension of them) is to hit them where it hurts; in the pocketbook; advertising. It may require boycotts of some sort or other methods that we might become aware of through ex-employees or principals. Determine all the ways that they make their money then find methods that cut it off and let them be aware it is because of biased reporting, pushing political agendas, and ideaologies they are pushing that are harmful to the American public.
There are other methods I can think of but since big media worships at the altar of big money I think that’s the bestway to get their attention.
Frankly, I do not know how they can be touched. An effective way to work around them must be found.
The current day media makes me think of this. So many do not see/do not want to see - what is behind those smiles.
Good example.
The media creates a false reality as in the movie the Matrix.
They leave out any story that doesn’t conform to this false world. We are living in the matrix. We are living in the false world created by the media.
The media don’t report any story that doesn’t advance socialism/democrats , Obama , or their world view.
Most people including democrats are programmed robots of the media. I and many other conservatives have broken out of the matrix to see the real reality.
The media, after all, is largely represented by those who either because of a personal bias, lack of confidence or lack of intelligence, never really challenged the Marxist/Fabian/Jacobin type of influences in Academia. Many of those talking heads, or sloganists with key boards, in the Media, are simply the graduated "sheep" from Academia.
To understand the poison being promoted, Myths & Myth Makers In American "Higher" Education.
William Flax
It is no wonder that the government wants to expand its tentacles to the Internet, as this is a place they have not found a way to control.
We see this in the current election where conservatives were marginalized and dismissed through the technique of character assassination of any who dared to express other than "moderate", i.e. liberal, viewpoints on a number of topics, including globalization of trade, internationalization of foreign policy decision-making, abortion, gay rights, women's "issues" that somehow did not include conservative woman candidacy, the concerted vilification of the Tea Party movement; the list is long and depressing. Media control of the primary process has enabled a sort of framing through which the institutional ideology of corporate media cannot lose. That conservatives are relegated to voting for Mr. Romney as the only means of unseating the most destructive administration since Buchanan's is not only an illustration of this process, it's the culmination.
They'll take Romney - they won't like it, because 0bama is so completely a media creature that one wonders if he isn't going to start flopping around looking for oxygen when the spotlight is withdrawn - but they'll take Romney as a consolation prize because he owes them. There is no more perfect definition of political power than this ability to frame all the issues within a single candidate, and that of the media is very close to perfection in this regard.
It isn't new. All that is new is the pervasiveness brought about by modern mass communication, in particular television, a medium that must make Josef Goebbels' shade green with envy. But there was Leni Riefenstahl for him in the days when cinema could make this claim - how far that medium has fallen is illustrated by her counterpart Michael Moore these degraded days. There was the press in the days of William Randolph Hearst, a true corporate robber baron who felt and acted above the law. Carnegie and Rockefeller never maneuvered their nation into a war; Hearst did.
And so none of this is really new. The danger for the nation is twofold: that this sort of usurpation carries with it no accountability on the part of the usurpers and that it leads to the sort of denial of reality that led the German people to believe they were winning the war as the Red Army tanks were encircling Berlin. Would today's media deny an existential threat to the country in pursuit of power and ideology? They already do, in the form of immigration policy, Iran's "right" to nuclear weapons, and a bizarre conviction that countries that have spent three decades in a low-grade shooting war against us may be talked around or bribed into alliance. And the President they've given us appears shocked that rock-star political spectaculars and a phony Nobel Prize haven't resulted in the utopia he desires. Recasting the mess we're in as that utopia is, fortunately, beyond the capacities of even today's media but they're doing their best.
The real problem is that success in this arena tends to breed success, and gaming the Presidency has to be regarded as very high success indeed. Failure in the form of the election of Mr. Romney is not complete failure for the reasons detailed above. The ratchet continues to tighten.
Greenfield is right on the money again. I still remember the press conference where the media decided to take down the first President Bush. A reporter asked a stupid question and President Bush basically called him an idiot. You could just see the jaws tighten in the press corps. President Bush went from a 92% public approval to losing the election. The press was going to teach the politicians a lesson. There’s the old saying that, “You should never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel.” Well, it’s fewer and fewer barrels.
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