With elected power came the ability for Republicans to game the system even further (they're doing this again right now), with FCC deregulation of radio and TV ownership restrictions giving even more broadcast licenses to fewer corporations with which to amass ever more influence over the public mind. Private partisan profit and governmental power, hand in hand.
Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry because it affects consumer choices. What if you had propagandists masquerading as talk show hosts, airing what amounts to Heritage Foundation/Frank Luntz-style GOP "commercials" for legitimate content, to affect voter's choices? You couldn't afford that type of partisan "advertising;" the dollar value would be astronomical.
What we have come to now in American media is the racketeering of information and it's system of distribution--an ideological monopoly, married to media corporations, the craven functions of which are to make money, regardless of the public interest FCC license obligations, and to politically herd the passive listener with hate, fear, piety and greed to the desired GOP vote outcome. Profitable for media corporations and the Republicans yes, but at the price of American democracy.
Corporate media today is beyond the dreams of Orwell, or the 20th Century totalitarians who inspired his dystopian world, in its breathtaking reach and impact on popular thought. The formerly gray process of mass control, which Orwell codified, is not now about state-controlled media, per se. With profit and power in lockstep, Big Brother is now ruggedly handsome, privatized, commercial and attractive--a human face, focus-grouped to give you confidence in bad policy and keep you safe from terror. Transformed by modern marketing and technology, today's propaganda sparkles with graphical or auditory flash and sizzle. The lies are packaged, marketed, made appealing and sold as gold-standard truth. Fool's gold, sadly.
As lies get bigger, the commuting dittoheads find their paychecks shrinking, their jobs shipped offshore, their medical costs soaring and their futures looming in shadows. If their kids won't have health care, a good education, Social Security, a decent job, or peace and prosperity, at least same-sex marriage will remain illegal.
That's the Bush social contract.
That "contract" should be called "The Old Deal," because that's what it is. His goal seems to be a return to the Gilded Age. Is it a mere coincidence that we now have the greatest separation of rich and poor since that time? And that the Middle Class of the 20th century--the greatest standard of living for the greatest number of people in the history of the world--is going away fast? Bush has become the "reverse FDR," which is exactly what he wanted to be. The Bush family never cared much for FDR, nor his Social Security, the antipathy for which G.W. has made abundantly clear. (By the way, I hear that Dick Cheney ordered FDR's New Deal kidnapped and renditioned to Eqypt for torture interrogation, a bit of water-boarding, and some long-time standing in a hypothermia cold-room. A signed confession will be ready in time for a no evidence show trial.)
As things get worse for the average American, the mighty Wurlitzer of the Republican Party plays on, despite the growing gap with reality. As the gap grows, the question the GOP media-industrial-political complex asks is: who are you going to believe--Rush Limbaugh or your lying eyes? Problems they can't spin away, they blame on liberals and Democrats. But reality will have its day. For the working and middle-class commuters of the Inland Empire, it has been gas prices which have been the cruelest dose of Bush reality. Many drive guzzling SUV's and trucks, and are seeing what they saved in buying cheaper homes in the IE being lost by the sheer cost of commuting.
And where is journalism today in reporting these issues? Henry Lewis (H.L.) Mencken said that journalism should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." Today's corporate media journalism, with some few exceptions, comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted. How did this happen?
Reagan's FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, drunk as many were in the Reagan administration on Adam Smith's marketplace miracle kool-aid, held that a television is nothing but "a toaster with pictures." In their feral ideology, information is neither good nor bad, nor balanced or unbalanced; it's only a commodity, over which the marketplace should have the only say. This "Reagan's toaster" thinking has toasted this country to a crisp.
The Republican noise machine makes reasoned democratic discourse impossible. Nothing true, fair or real can be heard over the ranting GOP spokesmodels, with their symphony of Frank "define and destroy" Luntz wordplay. Their think-tanked talking points are a swindler's list designed to have good-hearted hard-working Americans give away their democratic birthright and their futures to corporate criminals such as Ken Lay, crackpots such as Pat Robertson, and miscreants such as George W. Bush.
The problem with an unregulated broadcast media "marketplace" is that demagoguery will trump fact and reason in popularity every time. Anger is emotional energy. It's exciting. Factual information is soooo boring and reasoning is hard work. Demagoguery gets good ratings, and reason gets cancelled. But a democracy needs fact and reason in order to survive. Fairness doesn't happen on its own in a marketplace driven by sensation, scandal, terror, shark attacks and missing blondes; the oxygen of democracy needs to be supported by law.
In my non-candidate life, I have a number of pursuits. I criticize the media, but I'm also involved directly in media. For a number of years, I have produced a weekly public radio show in Los Angeles (Kos himself was on the show a few months back). Several years ago, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was featured on the program. He said some things on the air that I had been thinking since the early '90's and talking about publicly since I first ran for office in 2000. I was happy to hear Kennedy independently echo my own convictions: the two core problems of our democracy are 1) we need to fundamentally reform campaign finance, and; 2) we need to reinstate the broadcast Fairness Doctrine.
By campaign finance reform, I mean that we need public financing. Everything we see today, from war to deficits, from toxic politics to toxic waste, emerges from our defective political infrastructure, which starts fundamentally with how campaigns are financed.
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