Our society is sick because people have no idea what's going on and they make terrible choices. It's easy to blame the American public for this, but it's not all their fault. Partly their fault, to be sure, but not completely their fault. The root cause is media concentration, or the fact that most of what we hear and read is controlled by very few people in this country.
Freedom of the press only applies to those who own one. If you own the newspaper, you own the truth, whatever it is. The truth is so malleable these days that if you say something enough, it becomes true. And then those truths determine the course of our lives for the foreseeable future.
Case in point: when Al Gore ran against George W. Bush in 2000, the media developed a storyline for the campaign that went something like this: Bush is the rich man's son and the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with. Gore, on the other hand, is a know-it-all and a meglomanic who thinks he invented the Internet. It was widely agreed upon by the people who agree upon these sort of things that Gore lost the debates in 2000 for speaking too loudly, for sighing into the microphone and then for trying to hard to be soft-spoken and thoughtful. Issues were not discussed in 2000, and a year later we got slammed on September 11.
But the storyline on Gore was bullshit. It comes as a shock when I tell people this, but Gore never said he'd invented the Internet. It was an urban legend and a distortion of what he actually told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in saying that as a Congressman he helped raise money for Internet research in its formative years. Some asshole decided that Gore really said that he'd invented the Internet, and the media decided that it was funny that he "said" this. The razor-thin election in 2000 no doubt turned, in part, on the public's disgust with Gore's s0-called delusional statements, and the media certainly fueled that negative public image. So as Bin Ladin was plotting against us that year, 20-20 hindsight makes it crystal clear that the campaign in 2000 was a charade and a waste of time as none of the candidates talked about terrorism and what the United States should do about it.
Had the 2000 campaign focused on real issues, and had the public taken seriously the things that truly matter, there is no question in my mind that Bush would not have been elected that year. Had Bush been forced to talk about the issues in a serious way -- instead of asking him to regurgitate the sound bites that his advisors fed him -- he would have been laughed off the public stage like a high school student who showed up for a Math final thinking it was an English final. All that Bush has done since the 2000 election is to destroy the country and take apart everything we stand for brick by brick.
One reason for this, as I said, is the American people did not know what they were doing. But the American people did not have the information, either. That's were the media comes in. The media in this country is wasting their broadcasting licenses and their printing presses. You can thank the New York Times for giving us the Iraq war, brought upon in part by Judith Miller's dishonest reporting about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. The Times later apologized for Miller's propaganda which influenced other media outlets to take seriously the blatent lies of the Bush administration. That extensive apology is here (pain in the ass registration required). You can also thank the New York Times for giving Bush the 2004 election as the paper until after the election sat on that explosive relevation that the Bush administration was blatently ignoring the law in wiretapping phones without a search warrant.
As negligent as the Times has been, that paper is as good as it gets. But it publishes a lot of shit. The Sunday Times has so many sections (news, arts, sports, style, etc.) that I risk getting a hernia each Sunday when I haul the paper into the house. And it's so heavy that I risk throwing out my back when I bend over to pick up the Sunday Times at the end of my driveway. I rummage through the paper looking for the good stuff and chuck the style and travel sections over my shoulder like a kid on Christmas morning who's been given a dictionary.
The media monopoly is real. That's the title of a landmark book by media critic Ben Bagdikian. As the title suggests, Bagdikian writes about the consolidation of media ownership and how the few gatekeepers control everything that we know. But what's really interesting and upsetting about this book is that it's been updated six times since 1983. That year, Bagdikian reported that most media in this country was controlled by about 20 corporations. Now that number is down to six companies. That's right, six companies! Below is a good summary of what's happening:
In 1983, 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the U.S. At the time, Ben Bagdikian was called "alarmist" for pointing this out in his book, The Media Monopoly. In his 4th edition, published in 1992, he wrote "in the U.S., fewer than two dozen of these extraordinary creatures own and operate 90% of the mass media" -- controlling almost all of America's newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations, books, records, movies, videos, wire services and photo agencies. He predicted then that eventually this number would fall to about half a dozen companies. This was greeted with skepticism at the time. When the 6th edition of The Media Monopoly was published in 2000, the number had fallen to six. Since then, there have been more mergers and the scope has expanded to include new media like the Internet market.
So what's happening is less news and more infotainment. Paris Hilton has 90 percent name recognition in this country. But how many people know about the Downing Street Memos? Paris Hilton's antics have no impact on our daily lives. But people are dead because they send their sons to war without finding out about the Downing Street Memos, the smoking gun documents that confirm that Bush was full of shit when he said war was a last resort and that he was trying in good faith to uncover WMD's.
There is no overriding solution to the media monopoly. We will still read the paper and know that it's giving us half the story, if at all. But one solution is to rely on alternative media, organized and written by people who want to get the truth out or at least provide context. These people do not live in mansions or drive BMW's. Nor do they take fancy vacations. But they do try to enlighten others in the belief that if they say "holy shit" in reading something important, it's quite likely that others will have the same reaction, and if enough people say "holy shit" than a man-child like George W. Bush will not take the White House in another razor-thin election.
Planet Waves is one of the best independent media outlets around. It operates on a shoestring and it certainly doesn't pay me for writing this blog. It does not run the annoying advertisements that make reading the paper and watching TV such a chore. But Eric Francis and his crew have to pay bills and eat and occasionally run to the corner store to buy toilet paper and soap. The talented people who run Planet Waves could be earning the big bucks in selling out to work for the corporate media, but that would mean sanitized articles and killed stories about the real world and what's happening around us.
What has Planet Waves given us? Eric's tireless reporting about PCB contamination at a SUNY campus in upstate New York may finally bear some fruit as the current student body is taking an interest and organizing on the issue. For this reason alone, Planet Waves deserves your support. Subscribe to Planet Waves Weekly or, at least, send Planet Waves whatever you can afford, from a few dollars to the money you were going to tip the pizza guy this week, or even more than that. Send what you can so you can subscribe to Planet Waves Weekly.
I will say this with utmost confidence: if Eric Francis was editing the New York Times, there would be no Iraq war, we would be well on our way to dealing with global warming, corporate giants would be forced to clean up their toxic pollution (or risk going to jail) and George W. Bush would be coaching Little League in Crawford, Texas. Doesn't a guy who could do all those things for us deserve some of your money? Huh?
