We have our brave new coup to thank. It has finally woken
the American sleepwalking public to political reality, a reality that has
overtaken us more than 46 years ago. The only difference is that now, even the
blind can see. Our resistance is late; we should have been in the streets 46
years ago. But—as they say—better late…..
Nation-wide
protest: Carl Jr. workers take fightfor15 to Secy of Labor nominee, CEO
Andy Puzder’s headquarters.
Vets
return to Standing Rock as human shields. National
call for mass mobilization.
Whistleblower
pay off: National Security Adviser Flynn quits three weeks into the job.
80,000
March in Raleigh for Voting Rights.
Tenants together
battles California displacement.
Dems
Take Aim at hedge funds. Slap them with a tax increase.
Governing a large
country is like frying small fish. Too much poking spoils the meat.
—Lao
Tse
Trump’s Corporate Enabler: The Media & How to Deal with It
Twenty days
after the arrival of our very own Big Daddy-T-bagger, a substantial portion of
the corporate
media's normalization agenda is rolling out and confronting us. The
big question is how much of the “Swamp” will it succeed in draining and how can
it be countered? And what can we do about it?
In view of most
of the major issues this country faces, we must confront the fact that role of
the corporate media is to legitimize Big Daddy T and the elites set to control
our two party duopoly.
Oscar Wilde wrote:
In old days men had the rack. Now they
have the Press. That is an improvement certainly. But still it is very bad, and
wrong, and demoralizing. Somebody — was it Burke? — called journalism the
fourth estate. That was true at the time no doubt. But at the present moment it
is the only estate. It has eaten up the other three. The Lords Temporal say
nothing, the Lords Spiritual have nothing to say, and the House of Commons has
nothing to say and says it. We are dominated by Journalism.[source|
On the one
hand, we might do well not to underestimate the current danger we face if it’s
anything like what the authoritarian regime did to the secular media in Turkey
after the 2016 coup as reported in this two part piece (Part I)
- (Part II).
On the other hand, we could be facing a very different world if Big Daddy
rips apart the internet and Network Neutrality, or the big media players try
pulling off a sacrificial lamb attack like the Washington Post
tried to do around Fake News. In themselves, these two events could
launch a new level of oppression or result in a far bigger tent of ?neocon?
allies. The question is how to sort out the media’s fake claim of “fair and
balanced” vs. the unawareness—so far — of most people in this country as to
our present state of affairs, since so few of them are able to identify
the media as the single biggest lobbyist in D.C., a lobby that has
long been against any attempt at election reform.
And why? Because the media make enormous sums from every election cycle, and they have
no interest in reforming the way things operate.
For example,
the media has routinely shown its power to distort perfectly legitimate
protest, alienating public sympathy by foregrounding violence. And
incidentally, particularly at this time, the Black Block issue should be
resolved. From U.C.
To D.C.,
its subculture and violent public tactics must be addressed before the media
manage to parlay them into a tragedy that will affect us all.
We have an
urgent need to better understand and counter the media's unfair biases, less it
assist this administration in avoiding coverage of any major issues from human
rights, climate, environment, labor to local and international militarism
Bill Moyer's Movement Action
Plan or the Eight Stages for
a Successful Movement, offer an important tool, depending on the
level of public awareness and support behind an issue, to help us determine
what kind of tactics are appropriate.
We need to
counter corporate media's use of polls and focus groups as instruments of
citizen manipulation, not so much with protest but with town hall forums and
people-to-people organizing, online at home, or face-to-face. At the same time,
if the internet is still left to us as an organizing tool, we had better
start understanding that the only global “one-to-many” news broadcasting tool
we have is twitter – and we had better know how to use it to organize critical
information and to put our own set of news channels in place.
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