Bill Moyers is right on the mark again! His article in In These Times entitled "Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column? Corporate media colludes with democracy’s demise." is telling it as it is. He starts with this story:
I heard this story a long time ago, growing up in Choctaw County in Oklahoma before my family moved to Texas. A tribal elder was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging within himself. He said, "It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: anger, envy, sorrow, greed, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority and ego. The other is the good wolf: joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith."
The boy took this in for a few minutes and then asked his grandfather, "Which wolf won?"
The old Cherokee replied simply, "The one I feed."
Democracy is that way. The wolf that wins is the one we feed. And in our society, media provides the fodder.
For more look below:
It would be a really enlightening exercise to go back through the diaries in Daily Kos and see what percentage of them deal with the failure if the media in some way. So what more could Moyers have to add? Depending on one's level of naivete one can look at the possibility of a successful Obama "revolution" in November in a number of ways. I'm one of those "hard core" believers in the idea of a Power Elite and Ruling Class that will not give up power. Therefore, if the blogosphere is seen by them to have made their holding on to power significantly more difficult, be sure they will mount a full scale attack against it. Moyers is no fool he recognizes that.
Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.
These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of "We, the people," but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.
Let’s look at what is happening with the Internet. This spring the cable giant Comcast tried to pack a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) hearing on network neutrality by hiring strangers off the street to ensure that advocates of net neutrality would not be able to get a seat in the hearing room.
SaveTheInternet.com — a bipartisan coalition — and its supporters helped expose the ruse. Soon after, there was a new hearing, this time without the gerrymandering seating by opponents of an open Internet.
This is but the tip of the iceberg in my estimation. If the controlled media begin to significantly loose their grip on the public mind, all hell will break loose. Knowledge is power. More than that false knowledge is even more powerful if the truth can be hidden. History can be seen as periods of darkness that were ended by some source of light. I have the strong feeling that we are at an historical instability right now. As a systems scientist, such destabilization of a system is an open ended situation. However, the likelihood that it will be naked power that settles where we will land at the end of this period is very high. Moyers reports:
Across the media landscape, the health of our democracy is imperiled. Buffeted by gale force winds of technological, political and demographic forces, without a truly free and independent press, this 250-year-old experiment in self-government will not make it. As journalism goes, so goes democracy.
Mergers and buyouts change both old and new media. They bring a frenzied focus on cost-cutting, while fattening the pockets of the new owners and their investors. The result: journalism is degraded through the layoffs and buyouts of legions of reporters and editors.
Yes, this is what is happening in conjunction with a lot else that is happening. Seen in context it is but one aspect of a myriad of things that are changing all ot the same time. That's what a systems instability is like. Just to mention a few of the obvious, the dollar crisis, the fuel cost crisis, the housing crisis, the health care crisis, the crisis our veterans are experienceing, etc. etc. Here is a bit more of the context of this mess of events:
We now know that a neoconservative is an arsonist who sets a house on fire and six years later boasts that no one can put it out. You couldn’t find a more revealing measure of the state of the dominant media today than the continuing ubiquitous presence on the air and in print of the very pundits and experts, self-selected message multipliers of a disastrous foreign policy, who got it all wrong in the first place. It just goes to show, when the bar is low enough, you can never be too wrong.
The dominant media remains in denial about their role in passing on the government’s unverified claims as facts. That’s the great danger. It’s not simply that they dominate the story we tell ourselves publicly every day. It’s that they don’t allow other alternative competing narratives to emerge, against which the people could measure the veracity of all the claims.
Now the dominant media is saying, "Well, we did ask. We did do our job by asking tough questions during the run-up to the war."
But I’ve been through the transcripts. And I’ll tell you, you will find very few tough questions. And if you come across them, you will discover that they were asked of the wrong people.
But Bill it is a systems problem. Where do you begin to break into it to fix it? These guys all knew their jobs were on the line. It is no secret to them that they need to find a new profession if what they want is to behave in a principled way. And guess what, if you quit on principle you cripple the organization right? Wrong! There is a line of people waiting to take your job. One of the results of the massive fragmentation and proliferation of media jobs is to make sure everyone is merely a replaceable part.
Moyers ends with a call to "us all", whoever that is, to "go tell it on the mountain"
From our websites and laptops, the street corners and coffeehouses, the delis and diners, the factory floors and the bookstores. On campus, at the mall, the synagogue, sanctuary and mosque, let’s tell it where we can, when we can and while we still can.
Democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their own.
Ummmmmmm, but that is the answer? Most of the people I know don't find me a person who is a good substitute for Fox. Who is going to be listening as we go tell it to the mountain? The blogs, for example, are quite safe unless they begin to change things significantly. We just lost FISA as another in a long series of significant losses. We are fighting a covert war in Iran right now. This is all information that is available. The public just goes on plodding along listening and watching as the lies and distortions are spewed out to them. When I try to talk about how upsetting this all is, their eyes glass over and I pick up the brain waves "Oh no there he goes again. He doesn't even watch Fox." I wonder why Moyers is so good at seeing the problem yet comes across, to me at least, as helpless to change the situation? Anyone have any ideas?
UPDATE: Thanks everyone for recognizing the gravity of this problem I am happy to be a messenger in this instance, but you all are helping this issue get seen as a really grave problem for all of us. thanks again!