Cory Doctorrow posted the following passage at Boing Boing, and it’s worth reposting here. It’s from a book called “The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves,” by Curtis White (an excerpt from the book is featured in the current issue of Harper’s).
This passage goes right to the heart of how modern, corporate media — including the properties still undeservedly called news or, even worse, journalism — have assisted in the death of responsive democracy in America.
The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there’s hardly a soul on these shores who doesn’t know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even “watchdog” liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb’s connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it’s perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn’t a secret. The real secret is that it wasn’t a secret, and certainly wasn’t a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of “scandal,” when in fact it’s all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our “entertainment” and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!
but thank god you can make commentary like this and not worry about being thrown in jail, shot, or “disappearing” in the middle of the night. this country may be full of liars, but at least we can call it as we see it. On the other hand, i guess that means Ann Coulter gets to have her say, too. damn!
The freedom to speak is still relatively intact in this country. But that’s only part of the equation needed for a healthy, democratic society. Does calling it as one sees it make a difference if most people aren’t really listening, and they feel that governing is a spectator sport only?
Corporate media is conditioning people to passively accept events as a circus show. We’re supposed to enjoy the gladiators, lions, and blood, and then spend our free time consuming products rather than involving ourselves in the governing of our country.
The challenge now is to figure out ways to make an end run around established media. Citizens need to communicate, inform and organize more directly. And passivity needs to become passé.
agreed, but i think the bigger challenge is the apathy and inertia of the majority of this nation’s citizens. How do we condition them to put less energy into their new chevy avalance, home theaters and butterfinger bites? If most people are (or think they are) perfectly content without taking any interest in the direction this country is headed, how do we get them to wake up and participate?