Methods The Corporate Media use To Mind Fuck You

July 29th, 2005 · No Comments

Kuro5hin has an excellent piece where they analyze how the corporate media works in the US:

Thus we have a system that encourages lowest common denominator stories that appeal to the Jerry Springer in all of us, stories about missing teens in Aruba that we can all get concerned about. This is also why we don’t see stories about Darfur, Genocide, children being raped in Iraq, or all the other unpleasant things that are happening in your world tonight. What isn’t profitable for the corporation isn’t something the corporation wants to show, and those things disturb people, make them feel bad and guilty for not doing something. It makes them question their wisdom in electing their current leaders. Worst of all, in the corporate eyes, it makes them change the channel. And when that happens, people in the news room lose their jobs.

Stories of political bias in the media abound. What people need to understand is that those very stories are propagated as a form of viral advertising, devised by corporations to steal market share away from each other’s network newscasts and into their cable media news-flavored television product channels. The pundits who endlessly repeat the phrase “liberal media” all draw their paychecks from major corporations, they are salespeople out to drum up business for their true masters. The people who repeat that phrase might as well also wander around saying, “Coke is it!,” or “Campbells Tomato Soup, possibilities!” They are unpaid advertisers, not for some mythical “conservative” media, but for the all pervasive Corporate Media that has ruthlessly exploited its dominant control of almost everything most Americans see or hear.

If you really want to see how far things have come, watch MSNBC for a few hours during the next run of “The Apprentice,” and watch how their reporters spend entire news segments talking about who was fired from the boardroom as if it were actually news. These newscast embedded commercials for products produced by the corporate owners have become more and more common as time has gone on, and include anything from toys to video games to movies to television shows.

What can we do about this? For one thing, stop watching corporate media. For another, push for more transparency in reporting (say, by clearly marking segments for media or products of the parent corporation or its affiliates and subsidiaries as Advertisements on the bottom of the screen). Finally, call your local news stations and ask that they make available copies of their raw footage of local events (such as local government press briefings) after 24 hours so that the public can see what really happened. The Corporate Media is going to have to work hard to rebuild our trust; and if they don’t, they will see their profits continue to decay as more people get their news primarily from the Internet. Which might not be such a bad thing after all.

Sadly, this sort of shit is also spreading to the rest of the world. As long as people like this are allowed to purport their lies and spread ignorance the average American Joe will never get how the world really works and why so many people dislike the USA (the words “your goverment” and “constantly screws the rest of the world over” come to mind). Even just comparing the American version of CNN with the international version shows a world of difference.