I've been doing some thinking about the media and how--with a little imagination and not much effort--we might be able to circumvent the Rightwing Scream Machine.
Follow me. I think I've concocted a plan...
Are you a cable subscriber? Would you dearly love to kick Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Rupert Murdoch where it hurts? (No...not THERE.) Well, here's something you can try: Call up your local cable provider and ask if they have a package that does NOT include Faux News. When they ask why--and they WILL ask!--explain to them (in as much length as you care to) that you are put off by the right-wing bias and positively offended by the outright hate speech from that singularly unfair and unbalanced cable channel. Tell them politely, but in no uncertain terms, that you refuse to subsidize propaganda any longer. Then hang up. If you are NOT a cable consumer, you can also slip in the rant while explaining that you're shopping for the best deal for your money.
I'm not prepared to bet the farm, but I doubt that they will be able to accomodate such a request. One of the reasons that Murdoch remains a billionaire is massive distribution of his ersatz news...and the resultant advertising revenues. I believe that Faux News, along with their retarded sports channel, is included in very nearly every available cable--and satellite!--package offered to the public. That's a LOT of folks who have access to rightwad sophistry...and whether they watch and buy into it is entirely secondary to the fact that some portion of their monthly cable payment SUPPORTS it!
Now just one single, solitary telephone call will be promptly ignored. Count on it. They deal with individual morons and nutjobs all day, every day. But if you tell your friends to do the same thing and they tell THEIR friends...ah-ha! Remember that these are the LOCAL providers we're talking about here; their sole function is to get as many people signed up for their product as possible. (I cancelled my cable service six or eight years ago when TNT stopped running new Babylon Five episodes and I still get their junk mail in my mailbox every couple of months. I HATE television with a seething passion...but that's a post for another time.) The loyalties of the "little guy" local providers are more with the humble paying customers in their immediate area than with the big media mega-conglomerates; YOU'RE their bread and butter...not Viacom. Murdoch's News Corp. cuts multi-million dollar distribution deals many miles from where you buy your cable service.
You won't even have to actually cancel in order for them to get the message that their content is somehow repellant to you. Just put the bee in their bonnet that Faux News might become an expensive liability and who knows where it could lead? The flying monkeys of the far right--Hello, Brent Bozell!--have been utilizing the numbers of their ignorant mass of snake-handlers as a Sword of Damocles successfully for years now; there's no reason we can't do the same...especially when progressives ARE in the
majority!
It's high time we started realizing the extent of our economic power and voting with our wallets in a language that's universally understood. At the very least, you may wind up no longer being coerced into funding an odious aspect of the GOP's mighty wurlitzer. Wouldn't THAT be great?
All the REAL revolutions start small...
Originally posted at Conceptual Guerilla's Strategy & Tactics