Reply #65: The reasons are so entwined with the American creation myth that... [View All]

[warren pease]

...people literally go temporarily crazy -- which is to say, experience severe cognitive dissonance to the point of going nearly catatonic -- when confronted with verifiable facts that chip away at their entire concept of what it means to be an American.

This happens when talk turns to stolen elections, 9/11 truth, lies re Afghanistan, Iraq and now Iran, fucking torture if you can believe that's even a topic in an allegedly advanced country in the 21st century, killing habeas corpus and six of the first 10 amendments. People just assume the three-monkey position and refuse to see, hear or touch this evil heresy.

So where do they get these neuroses and why are alternative explanations for obviously ambiguous (charitably) events so horrifying? Parents, school, work, corporate culture, mortgages, debt, turning conservative because they think that's the best way to protect their kids from the harsh world... All kinds of ways, but even in that group, there's one source of world-class stupidity that's made toadying to authority an art form, fraudulent reporting the standard and practices disinformation by omission every single day. Yup, it's the star of all star fuckers...

Even though they're easy targets, US mass media is right at the top of the list of malevolent influences that have done such a fantastic job of getting Americans to accept life in a parallel universe based on delusion and advertising.

Almost single handedly, they've taken old Bill Casey's vision of a completely controlled society and applied to the task their usual enthusiasm for fucking over the American people. As Casey said at his first staff meeting as CIA director in 1981, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

American mass media lost the thread of the story decades ago and are now only qualified to dish pop culture infotainment masquerading as useful knowledge; report breathlessly on the latest D-class celebrity screw-up; and act as stenographers and cheerleaders for the latest batch of official Bush administration lies.

Among other insanities, this explains why John Stossel is a network star while Bill Moyers is on PBS. Not that PBS is necessarily exempt from mass media criticism; as long as there's Gwen Ifill around to do the Bushean suck-up, PBS will always have a fond place in the loathsome hearts of the Bush administration's media orthodoxy police.

I think that's a very short and inadequate answer to the OP's question. There are tons of books on the subject of nationalism and how to get people to identify with myths and symbolism while carefully avoiding fact-checking the underlying stories. But for a thorough and very readable analysis of how we've been betrayed by mass media, I'd suggest picking up Rob McChesney's "The Problem with the Media: US Communications Politics in the 21st Century."

The book is a highly critical dissection of the indispensable role US mass media played, and continues to play, by providing the narrative that justifies destroying the formerly thriving American middle-class in the name of corporate values and the good of the oligarchy. Not content to create consensus for rewarding the rich simply for being rich, they even get the middle class screwees to blame themselves for the intentional, systematic screwing they're getting from every single allegedly respectable American institution.

After all, one man's financial crisis is another's buying opportunity. And in a society that functions as a zero sum game, that kind of predatory behavior is all part of the great American engine of free enterprise and the Spencerian form of social Darwinism that tells us the rich are rich because they're superior beings and us mere peasants have no right to demonize the rich for their innate wonderfulness.

The message is, "Forget it. They won, you lost. And it's all your fault because you weren't born with the right set of tools or a better set of parents. Meanwhile, please fuck off and die as quickly as possible. Your country thanks you."

So yeah, I'm a huge fan of corporate media and the various Raygun-Bushean FCC policies (and don't let Clinton slide for that 1996 Telecom Act) that have reduced to six the number of conglomerates that control about 85 percent of everything Americans see on TV, hear on radio, or read in newspapers and magazines.

They've managed to take a country that actually made a free press part of its constitution, and turned it into a modern journalistic version of the USSR, where Pravda and Tass were known liars and nobody took anything they said remotely seriously.

Fortunately, it seems M$M is finally starting to experience a widespread loss of credibility. Unfortunately, the basic American chowder-head isn't capable of separating news from infotainment, so Paris and Brittany scandals carry the same weight as multiple counts of high treason committed by all high-ranking members of the Bush administration.

Scary, isn't it?


wp