Eye on the media: Squandering the cultural space

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PATRICE GREANVILLE

Lying by omission is as bad as lying by commission.

Media celebs, like this trio on CBS This Morning—Miss Superficiality Norah O’Donnell, political courtier Charlie Rose, and Gayle King—never stop singing the praises to our “warriors” or being respectful to the political hack du jour. For weeks now they have been obsessing about David Letterman’s departure (at last!) while the story about CIA torture, and Obama’s fabrications about Osama’s death goes begging for attention. Quite typical, we must say.

<span style="color: #3366ff;">Squandering and polluting the cultural/informational space should be a crime, a felony, punished severely. What is the cultural space you may ask? It’s simply the precious, limited time mass media have to reach millions upon millions of people every day, 24/7. If you doubt how precious a single minute is on, say, CBS, NBC or CNN or even a quarter of a page on the New York Times in terms of social effect, think about the fact that many critics of the system, social change activists, often have to go to great extremes, invest thousands of man-hours, to capture just a few seconds of such privilege. And such coverage is often a double-edged sword: the “journalist” reporting the story may actually use the space to badmouth or trivialize the whole thing.

The mainstream media messages are mental toxins injected every day, around the clock, to deform and thwart our ability to think for ourselves. This regime reflects the plutocracy’s interests, and that means: play up the distractions, the banalities, the imbecilities, and the lies; always foster the wrong values, and bury the truths and things of real importance to self-governance. It’s a simple formula. Any “career” journalist can follow it. American journalists are very good at it, maybe the best in the world.

So, here’s my question:

If you were a producer working for one of the networks, what would you “see” as the more important story?

• Letterman ends his run at CBS
or
• Obama and the CIA/Pentagon lied about Osama and torture.

Well, to  any red-blooded American…that’s a no brainer! Letterman, of course!

That’s why while the media pundits concentrate fire on Seymour Hersh for uncovering mighty unsavory things about the empire, lies that would embarrass Obama and delegitimate the system, and which they should be busily investigating, others in the media apparatus support the cause by simply ignoring the whole story. This is why we get carpet bombed by a triviality. A nonstop chorus for weeks now of Hosannahs for a mediocre comic’s retirement from a coveted job—David Letterman—something which in a sober republic should have deserved maybe 4 inches in a newspaper and 2 minute mention on a regular newscast. OK, let’s be clear: I never liked the morning shows or the late night shows, all of which I have long regarded as uniquely American concoctions to waste precious mass communications time and further depress the already appallingly poor understanding of world realities (including the US itself) that Americans have.

With media like this it’s a miracle we are not already in a full-blown fascist dictatorship. Or maybe we are. Just that I haven’t looked carefully enough.

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