Media In The Winter Of Our "Disremorse" Tom Paine.com

[hangloose]

It's the beginning of a long, cold winter: four more years of extreme ideological zeal in the White House and a sense of disconnect among the people. But there's another problem, says media expert Normon Solomon. It's the lack of national remorse and regret about the events surrounding us. And a complacent media that refuses to ask tough questions just exacerbates it. So the children in poverty at home and the thousands dying in Iraq just don't seem to faze us anymore.

<snip>

Today, in the real world of the United States—in this closely and fiercely divided country—large numbers of people see President George W. Bush as despicable. But the tenor of daily reporting does little to incorporate such assessments into the mix of media coverage. And the conciliatory noises coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill are misleading; they don’t reflect the hostility that persists at the grassroots.

<snip>

With two federal branches under the control of those zealots, the final arbiter of the third branch—the Supreme Court—is now under severe threat of wink-and-nod judicial fundamentalism. More than ever, in this context, journalism is a thin yet vital reed. Protection of civil liberties and abortion rights is at imminent risk. Yet the news media keep giving enormous deference to the United States' bastions of consolidated economic and electoral power.

Absent from daily news coverage is remorse.

So the major media outlets of the United States are entering this winter in a resolute state of “disremorse”—about 180 degrees from any sense of national apology or expressed regret. In the aftermath of a 51 percent victory for the Rove-Cheney-Bush regime on Election Day, the breast-beating and halo-preening exercises have intensified. And while a cast of characters—Ashcroft, Powell, Ridge, etc.—heads toward the exits, virtually interchangeable players step into their roles.

<snip>


The nerve-blocking anesthetics of mass media impede the flow of feeling in unauthorized directions. Cause and effect are disconnected, so that it seems unavoidable and natural for children to live in poverty across town or for U.S. troops to be killing and dying in Iraq. Right now, it’s a struggle to disrupt the numbing media chatter about miscalculations and mistakes—to insist on acknowledgment of moral culpability. America’s winter of disremorse is not about nature, it’s about a lack of nurture for what remains frozen: our capacity to innovate and cooperate sufficiently to stop the “leaders” who destroy life in our names.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/media_in_the_winter_of_our_disremorse.php