No News Is Good News
for release 03-18-05
Washington D.C.
This writer has been in the business of journalism for a few years, like about forty, or at least long enough to understand how things work. If you buy a half-page ad in the local paper to advertise a concert or a play, the paper is much more likely to send a reviewer to the show. Likewise if a drug company spends several million bucks buying ads on the evening news, the editors and producers of that news show are more likely to be simpatico with the idea of running commercials disguised as news stories. You know the ones I'm talking about. They usually start out with, "recent studies have found....." and then they describe a new disease or condition or syndrome for which Merck or Pfizer has just developed (at great expense) a new drug that will cure it. If you have little monsters under your toenails or if your esophagus is not purple enough or if you are not getting that long-lasting experience when you want it, there is a pill to take. If you want to open your sinuses or close your emotions or have more red blood cells, there is a pill. Ask your doctor (who is also on the drug company payroll.)
Our government seems to have learned what the corporations have known for a long time--advertising pays. During the first term of the Bush Administration, a quarter of a billion of your dollars were spent trying to convince you that they were protecting you from terrorists and that Saddam Hussein had a knife at our throats and that your kids were better educated and your elderly parents were being cared for and that Social Security was in the same shape as the Titanic ten minutes after hitting the iceberg. These are all lies of course.
Karl Rove's propaganda machine has been paying advertising and PR firms to produce political ads disguised as news stories. Lazy media outlets have broadcast them as news. It's a disgrace.
The problem is not only with government. The news organizations have lost their livers as well. Part of the reason for the gross erosion of our free press is because these organizations are no longer run by journalists. They are run by suits that belong to the same skull and bones club as their lackeys in government. And part of it is because the American public would prefer to be entertained rather than informed. So, be assured, the very institution that guarantees your freedom--the press--is being purchased by the propaganda machine. My cultural consultant is a twelve year old girl, and already she knows that what we are being served as news is for the most part bullshit, nonsense, advertising and propaganda.
Thank god for the internet. It's a means and an excuse for rampant democracy and the type of unbridled free thought that made this country great. Oh, I know that the net is a persistent thorn in the side of those who would prefer that your information be fed to you from a single source which they control. But that was the twentieth century. That was the century when the mass media could be controlled by a few for their own purposes. That was the century of Goebbels and Hitler and Stalin and Roosevelt and General Motors and of information that only moved in one direction, from the top down.
If you own the reporters, you own the news. I don't get a dime for doing this. It's my passion. I don't owe anybody and I can say whatever I want. Nobody is paying my bills, so I don't have to parrot the party line. That's the beauty of the twenty-first century media, it moves in many directions, not just from the top down. This has to be a nuisance to the control freaks.
Technology is breaking down central control. In Beijing's Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989 there was a demonstration. The world would not have known about it without the presence of fax machines. People in the People's Republic were taking pictures and faxing them to the world. It was a classic case of technology overtaking repression. The Chinese government couldn't close down the phone system in order to prevent news of the demonstrations from reaching the outside world. And the internet is even worse. Within minutes a single person, an eyewitness to events, can publish material that is available anywhere in the world. If you are beheading a reporter or a Halliburton contractor in Baghdad or Fallujah, it can be seen in Cincinnati within minutes.
Just as the revolution of the sixties was powered by the technology of chemistry (LSD, etc), the revolution we are witnessing now is driven by the technology of communications. The internet is a psychedelic tool of populism, and it is worldwide. And just as the Nixons and the Gordon Liddys of the sixties tried to close down Timothy Leary and the chemical revolution, the Roves and the Bennets will try to close down the internet, because it represents something that they can't control. They will try to tell you that your children are being corrupted by pornography, or that terrorists are using the net to communicate or that people are using it for identity theft and all manner of crime and espionage, but what they are really afraid of is that the Truth will leak out. That's not profitable.
The Poet's Eye will probably continue to see government produced 'news.' Don't trust anything you see on TV. Assume that it is bought and paid for, like the Swift Boat and Move On ads in the last election or the Levitra commercials you see on the news every night with that sexy mature woman with all the collagen in her lips and the bedroom eyes who looks like she's just dying to go down on you. Be suspicious when they tell you that democracy is breaking out all over the Middle East or that the caribou in Alaska just love oil wells and pipelines or that marriage is only between a man and a woman. It might sound like news, but it's only a commercial.
It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio and the airplane.
Future generations may conclude that the radio had as great an intellectual and spiritual impact on the masses as the printing press had before the beginning of the Reformation.--Joseph Goebbels, 1933
