By manipulating the press, and allowing private parties to actively buy controlling positions in the media, the state department and Securities and Exchange Commission of the US have undermined the public reputation of and the perception of the facticity of the press.
Media concentration enabled the rape of the press. Concentration of media ownership by media conglomerates took place when the first Bill Clinton administration exempted the US media from Anti-Trust laws, preparing the way for gross political manipulation as exemplified by the reverse reality TV of “embedded” reporting of the Endless Wars.
Permanent damage has been suffered by civil society. The American public can no longer evaluate viable sources of information. Having lost its authority to establish facts, the media has reverted to gross Party propaganda machine, scrambling the American electorate’s organic democratic process, already heretofore imperfect, into a profound and novel incoherence.
A state of panic, a sense of impotence, and primitive fear, are restrained only by the intensification of gaslighting and denial. Public psychosis commences as a monstrosity of lies is normalized into novel doctrines. Values abound in manias of spectacle and bunting of lawn signs taking sides in each Endless War.
The condition of our discourse today, is itself in a crisis vastly intensified by corporate and state media capture. Corporate media is a radical barrier to democracy. American civil society has no basis upon which to do anything through its elections, when public discourse is so profoundly compromised, as it is today. Reform is impossible here. Effectively the elections have been captured. A “Party-Media Complex,” whose product is public hysteria, controls public debate for empire and profit. Fanaticism and organized paranoia follow the reduction of all discourses to their propagandistic form. Evaluative processes are torched. Lacking facticity, political ideology is reduced to godless religions, schemata of stridently declared values disemboweled of history or even irony.
What to do about generational failure? Concentration, party control, conformity block the exits. A bypass mechanism, a way to get out of their system, is needed: an escape from Big Media in 2024? Barring a Wait for Godot of state and federal Anti Trust reforms, we seek a new model to rescue the Press from the Media: starting with the printed word, without the promise of fair rules, to put us beyond their power.
The question is, what is the basis for such an escape? How would one know that one had escaped? What is it that distinguishes truth from propaganda? We must commence in a befuddled state. So what has been lost exactly, in the 80-year period of this American empire, that could somehow be asserted in new form to perhaps resuscitate our native intelligence and intrepidity?
Crisis is opportunity, or death. Responding appropriately to the collapse of all economic systems within the stereo din of American politics, we must not merely criticize power, but MAKE new forms of power. Awareness of the need for Americans to find our feet and awaken from this long, long slumber, is perhaps emerging, whatever the theory behind it, to most Americans. We have created THE WRY MAKER, a Western Massachusetts print newspaper, with MEDIARCHY.ORG, in order to engage the awakened in whatever ways possible.
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