Recently the phrase "zombie banks" has become well-known. These are bankrupt institutions backed up by someone else's money. Well, its time to apply the same meme to the right wing propaganda machine's agitprop. They are "zombie talking points" - bankrupt arguments backed up by someone else's money and corporate power.
Increasingly, the incessant lying and spinning of the corporate media is becoming the most important problem this country has to face. Yes, the economy is a truly important problem. But, if the government is a steam shovel for clearing the financial wreckage, the media is the cross-wired control panel that can bring the whole tottering edifice down on our heads with one false motion. It must be repaired.
When Bush was in the WH, at least the media had the excuse that it was parroting the lies of the GOP. At the same time, the left had the focus of attacking two sociopaths (Bush and Cheney) who still had power and the media who did their kneecapping. But now that the GOP are currently a speedbump, the continued media partisanship is not merely false - it is crazy-making. The left is fighting phantoms that can't be killed.
Here are just a few of the questions that make me want to bust a beer bottle over any "news personality" I come across in public:
- How many times can sane people see the same lie rebutted, the same distortion explained, the same verbal dodge pinned down before they succumb to being buried alive under an unending avalanche of media horseshit? It is a form of psychological torture - continuous bombardment with loud, disgusting noise.
- When does the media become accountable for its massive cheerleading on behalf of the crooks who bankrupted our economy, the war criminals who wrecked our defense establishment, the politicos who privatized our protections away? Does it ever?
- When do the people who were completely WRONG about the Iraq War and the economy get fired to make way for the lefties whose dire predictions turn out to have been right?
- When do sane religious people get equal time with anti-abortion nutcases, birth control deniers, abstinence-only charlatans, "purity ball" sickos, anti-gay bigots, and Christian nationalists?
- How many times does Bill Kristol get plum jobs that he lies himself out of in six months? How many corporate droids, like Santelli, get to inject politics into supposed "business" channels without opposition (in fact, with the active support of the channel's management)?
- How many letters, protests, and marches (like Sharpton's on the NY Post) can sane people undertake before they suffer outrage fatigue? The corporate media is one giant game of Whack-a-mole. No matter how many times you smash them, they pop right back up spouting the same crap.
I could go on with the questions; but I think you get the point.
I haven't gotten my news from corporate media since the Clinton Impeachment circus. But its only gotten worse. The corporate media has an overwhelming right wing tilt. It buries news that embarrasses the right and carries lies that support the right. It tolerates stuff from the right that would have mobs in the street were it said by the left. For example, wanting the President to fail, hoping for revolution, saying that opponents should be shot. Can you imagine a thrice-divorced, liberal talk host allowed to remain on the air after being caught buying illegal drugs and jumping bail for sex tourism in the Dominican Republic? Can you imagine the media response in early 2001 to Democrats blatantly obstructing George W. Bush, who could honestly have be portrayed as having stolen the Presidency?
The response you can imagine is why the Dems sat on their hands and let that bum cut taxes on the rich. Today, they scream that returning the top income tax rate to the level under Clinton is "class warfare". But, tell me, if returning it is class warfare, why wasn't reducing it in the first place the exact same thing? Avoiding an entire side of the debate is a kind of non-logic, that does not even rise to the level of "fair and balanced" . "Fair and balanced" is already a lobotomization of "objective" media which has been foisted on America by concentrated corporate media. When truth can be balanced by lies, discussion is irrelevant. All that counts is sheer brute power.
The GOP is like a crack house, and the corporate media are its addicts. The owners of the crack house are violent gangsters who don't care how many lives they ruin as long as they make a profit. The media have been reduced to captive junkies, begging for their fix of insider gossip. And the media has proven itself willing to whore out their profession, burglarize houses, pistol whip citizens, and generally terrorize the neighborhood to get the wherewithal to service their habit. At this point, the biggest media whores are as demented as terminal crack addicts - offering their favors at bargain basement prices. But, the public is so put off by these skanky wrecks that they won't go near them any more.
In conlcusion: I have fucking had it with the crap the media continues to spew.
Among all Kossites, are there no lawyers that can find legal grounds to do something? What does the refusal of Obama to restore the Fairness Doctrine do to any prospective legal challenges? What can a re-lifed FCC do about enforcing the public interest in mass media? Thinking people want to know - before they just put a knitting needle in their ear and push.