Blogger JayaPrakash Telangana has posted (Japes, 10/21/08) a Free Press Action Fund call to “make sure media help us spot and overcome national crises, instead of distracting us with celebrities and trivia.” Free Press‘s Martin Kaplan and Norman Lear ask us to “just thinkâ┚¬Ã‚¦”:
If mainstream media spent as much time covering the events that produced the economic meltdown as they spent on pop culture and horserace politics, we might have avoided this financial crisis altogether. That’s why most Americans didn’t see this mess coming, and why most don’t understand the $700 billion plan that is supposed to rescue us…. Consider:
- In early 2007, when the story broke about the mortgage crisis at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the media were busy flooding the airwaves with stories about Anna Nicole Smith‘s death and Paris Hilton‘s trip to jail.
- In 2008, when SEC Chair Christopher Cox told the Senate Banking Committee that the SEC required no additional funding for oversight of credit rating agencies–the same agencies that determine ratings for mortgages and other loans–the media were cooing over Brad and Angelina‘s newborn twins.
The Action Fund names “fighting for diverse media ownership” and “against media consolidation” as just two examples of its efforts “to fix the problems that have turned a once-proud news media into a tabloid circus.”
Now, as godawful as corpress infotainment is, it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with not covering (or outright lying) about what’s important, does it?
That happens because it’s in the ruling class’ (Oh dear … Marxist term. I’ll never be published in the Nation now.) interest to do so. The Fourth Estate likes them estates, and all the other goodies that go with being part of the elite.
The mindnumbingness serves to cut down on the number of folks who might question their control … that’s where its value lies. It doesn’t crowd out real news … it just fills the hole already dug for it.
And when was the corpress ever “proud”? Just because a turd smells better freshly exited than after a few days floating in the toilet, that doesn’t mean you’d want to have anything to do with it at either juncture, does it?
Sorry for the visuals conjured up by that analogy or metaphor or whatever the hell you call it … but the fact that the corporate media may have been somewhat less criminally-inclined in the past than today doesn’t mean that it was ever fulfilling its democratic function … and I don’t care how many times Watergate and My Lai are brought up.
What about all the other Watergates and My Lais that didn’t make the headlines?
End of rant.