Missing Context: Capitalism
I have been a faithful reader and subscriber for several years. I appreciate your careful analysis of corporate media distortions, standing their upside down coverage on its feet.
But recently I’ve concluded that you are guilty of some of the same distortions for which you criticize the mainstream media—an absence of context. You have rightly criticized the MSM for covering bizarre
weather without mentioning global climate change (“Weather—Without Climate,” 12/13). By the same token, your analysis of reporting on social and economic problems fails to address their foundation. Capitalism and the capitalist form of ownership are at the ground in which most of these problems are rooted.
The prevailing order rests on a system of ownership in which the owners take the product of “their” workers’ labor and sell it for a profit, while paying the workers the lowest wage possible. These enterprises dump waste into the environment, knowing the government will clean it up at public expense. Then they stand in the way of any comprehensive healthcare system to look after the many people whose health is devastated by these practices—such as mental disorders caused by stress, or pollution-caused cancers, etc. Having their government do, or not do, these things of course enhances the owners’ profits.
Much of the coverage you criticize involves people being treated unjustly by large commercial or government structures. You’re always on the right side in these conflicts, but you usually fail to point out how these clashes grow out of a fundamentally unjust system. Upside-down coverage serves an upside-down world.
This destructive system needs to be superseded, but this cannot be done without clarity and understanding of the people. No doubt most media coverage serves to prevent this kind of basic understanding from emerging in the public mind. Publications like yours are well-equipped to provide insight on this fundamental matter.
Exploitation, of course, is not new. Societies up until now have been class societies in which the dominant classes lived off the labor of those who had to work. What is different today is that almost the whole population is exploited this way. Occupy Wall Street captured this with its chants about the 99 percent and the 1 percent. OWS also gave a brief glimpse into how a new order might appear.
In this spirit I ask you to consider how you might provide broader context to your readers and supporters. Like OWS, you might experience a rapid growth in popularity.
No, this is not a letter asking to cancel. On the contrary, I eagerly look forward to how your creative staff will respond to this challenge, a challenge we all face.
Paul Bermanzohn
Rosendale, N.Y.
