Read the title, and you've read the heart of the diary. The rest is an invitation to you, Dear Reader, to allow yourself, and others, to freely brainstorm.
"Media Central." If you can deliver an identical impression, in a day or three, to 1 to 300 million people, I'm calling you "Media Central." Whatever your configuration, however slippery the terms to describe it.
MC's ability, instantaneous mass-reach,... But do I have to detail this, what it means about their political power?
This ability is not the elephant in our common room. It is the Mt. Everest on our necks.
How would we change that? Let's brainstorm.
Think of, say, the five public issues dearest to your heart. Tell me, in comments, how many are ignored, delayed, or stymied directly as a result of the near-absolute control over broadcast content Media Central enjoys.
I remember wanting Howard Dean for President when he campaigned hard. He had momentum, maybe lost a bit, but he went out to fire up a crowd of supporters. Every station in America broadcast his address, round the clock, for 4 days. Except they broadcast his crowd-noise-reduction microphone, instead of the floor microphone.
So it sounded like he was shouting to an nearly empty room. From a front-runner to lunatic shouter in 96 hours. A "credibility assassination" carried out in days.
A conspiracy? Copycat-ism? a Market Urge? Just an accident of personal relations?
Well, however it came to pass, there's a genuinely free election laying dead on the floor. All that matters regarding Media Central is that their mountain is on our neck, when it should be under our feet. The sooner the better all around.
"The Dean Scream" is just the vivid example which came to mind. We've all got examples along the same lines. "Swiftboaters" for instance. And on and on like that.
The Teabaggers? Billionaires' money plus media's free publicity and free pass. Bye ratings-leading Olbermann, Donahue, Ashely Banfield, hello rightwing Beckatics. Ain't chance that that's happening if you ask me.
Anyway, this kind of thing doesn't need listing. Just want to make sure we all know what we're talking about.
This diary is about literally shifting control over what gets broadcast. And making it a strategic priority, and doing it now. You can Hope, Change, New Deal, and New Frontier until the cows come home, but where the hell are we when our entire public "discussion" is created and shaped by a de facto cartel?
I will note that if you poke around the Board Memberships of our main Media Corporations, you will find that almost all interlock on Boards of the biggest in finance, weapons, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, mass-food, and oil. Well, put a chicken and a veggie in and you've got chicken soup, right? What are these Interlocking Boards a recipe for?
Anyway, If we don't deal with this, and deal with it directly, there simply is no freaking way ordinary citizens win.
It is impossible to win until the mass-media stranglehold on our speech is broken. This Media Central, it's an effective monopoly over what we see and hear, and as such is the lynchpin to the whole con game being run on us.
Here's what we have on our side when it comes to Corporate, Traditional, Mainstream, Media:
- Americans of every stripe hate it. For different reasons, but it is a rare politically/socially active person who doesn't revile what this monster has wrought. Maybe this is why I've never see the poll: Does Media serve the Public Good? But read around and everybody who is active in life hates what they do.
- The conceit that we are a Democracy.
The trick here would be to, under cover of Democracy, find issue-alliances across the political spectrum to break local and regional cartels.
Finally, we get to your part in this, should you choose to accept it.
The brainstorming. Defined as "produce ideas or ways of solving a problem." Anything goes, but saying "this can't be possible" without adding "but maybe something like..." is just being a dick. Please, don't tell us that nothing can be done. The fucking boat is sinking and thats the option we're trying to close off. Anyway, you'd just sound like a dick.
To list a difficulty, and to then follow with a possible work-around would be in the spirit. In such a session, nothing is thrown out, since know one knows which impossible thing might combine with what unlikely thing to light a trail. And nobody beats you up for having a clunker.
Making the media democracy-friendly is going to take some actual democracy. To my mind, there will not be a "key" which breaks media-as-is, but relentless pressure from a thousand angles. In that spirit I hope we can assemble some thoughts on the matter.
Because, if we don't break the de facto monopoly on what we hear and see, we'll keep losing, no matter what we do.
****************************************
Well, it's a little after midnight and I am doing other things now. There are 41 comments and 14 votes at this point.
I'm not sure why the core determinative factor of political outcomes in our nation -- centralized messaging instantly pushed into everyone's mind -- doesn't garner more recognition as something we have to directly address. Perhaps it's been this way so long nobody notices anymore. This brushfire, that brushfire, generated by the media, sure. But the setting we operate in... ? So far no. This diary obviously failed, but I'll be back with another try from another angle soon.
Goodnight.