By any definition, the MSM is an oligopoly at best. At worst, it's a cartel, but without the drugs and guns. In what we might term the political information economy, it is the MSM that is the most egregious, recidivistic transgressor against informed, balanced, intelligent, free and open discourse in the public interest. It is this institution -- and the folks who populate it and to which they proudly proclaim an eternal devotion -- that touts itself as the terminal bulwark against those aforementioned "pathologies". In all of these concerns, its 'core product' the truth, is customarily abbreviated, anonymized, and/or attenuated if presented for serious scrutiny at all -- the lies just as routinely accentuated, augmented and/or amplified to accommodate the desired narrative.
To be sure, the MSM has for generations always served these same interests, operating akin to an echo chamber located inside a hall of mirrors; although much lip service is tendered to suggest otherwise, increasingly though they make less effort to keep their dirty little secret under wraps. Put bluntly, the Western MSM is an institution that has consistently and blithely betrayed fundamental journalistic principles -- truth, accuracy, independence, impartiality, fairness, humanity, accountability etc . As they might be defined by the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights, they've made a mockery of the basic tenets of liberty, freedom and the rule of law along with conventional notions of peace, truth, privacy, and security into the Faustian bargain. All the while they have steadfastly asserted they remain islands of integrity as it were in a vast, turbulent ocean of disinformation, misinformation, obfuscation, and manipulation.
To all intents then they've collectively morphed into a Praetorian bodyguard of the 'tissue of lies' that's become necessary to hold together the fragile fabric of the increasingly all-encompassing delusion that was once the republic, lest it come apart at the seams at the first sign of any collective critical awareness by the masses they have been 'had' by both parties, and had big-time. To say that time is getting closer may be overly optimistic, but keep saying it we must. The powers that be must never be allowed to think we've packed up and gone home as it were. This even if they keep acting like we've already done so.
-- The Worst of Both Worlds --
Although he was not alone in doing so, in his seminal 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Neil Postman delivered us a forensic take on the nexus between the contemporary power/political domain and the modern media and information landscape. It is instructive that Postman also examined the differences between George Orwell and Aldous Huxley's respective views of the human condition and the possible worlds the less attractive pathologies said condition was capable of spawning. These were portrayed -- respectively -- in their dystopian novels 1984 and Brave New World.
In the latter respect, Postman's concerns were related to which author's vision was the more terrifying, clear-eyed and germane to the times when his book was published, with also a keen eye to which would prove to be more (or less) so in the years going forward. His book posited that Huxley -- more so than Orwell -- had nailed the nature and character of the impending social and political zeitgeist, a point to which we will return.
Written at the height of the Cold War during the halcyon days of Reagan's era -- the former president personifying the symbiotic links between media, show business and politics -- it was still pre-information revolution, pre-Internet, pre-unipolar and pre-9/11 'perpetual war for perpetual peace' days. Each of these factors and others would go on to help reconfigure the Orwell v Huxley 'balance sheet', in ways we are all still grappling with.
On its face, it's easy to see why some might've viewed Huxley as having won the crystal ball gazing 'contest'. Postman's son Andrew -- who wrote the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition of AOTD -- concluded even at that point his father's appraisal of Huxley as the more insightful haruspex of the imminent tenor 'n terror of the times still remained largely intact.
But that was then, and now is now. In this a full decade and a half into the post-9/11 era, we'd be hard-pressed to refute the unassailable reality Orwell's foreshadowed vision remains similarly intact. The T-shirt says it all, (as T-shirts are wont to): 'Memo to Power Elites -- 1984 was not an instruction manual'.
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