The Spirit of Tom Paine
............Today in the US, the major media are nothing short of a national thought-control police. They're owned or controlled by dominant large corporations (the kind Noam Chomsky calls "private tyrannies"
grown increasingly concentrated over time and having a stranglehold over the kinds of information reaching the public. It's given them and the interests they represent the power to destroy the free marketplace of ideas essential to a healthy democracy now on life support in large measure because of how effective they are.Ben Bagdikian documented their progression in the various editions of his important book, The Media Monopoly, most recently updated in 2004 called The New Media Monopoly. He showed since 1983, the number of corporations controlling most newspapers, magazines, book publishers, movie studios, and electronic media have shrunk from 50 to five "global-dimension firms, operating with many of the characteristics of a cartel" - Time-Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom and Germany-based Bertelsmann. Maybe it should now be a big six after Comcast Corporation acquired AT&T Broadband in 2001, expanded its cable and other holdings further since, and is now the nation's largest cable operator reaching over 23 million US households..............
............Thought Control by the Corporate Media in A Democracy
Engineering consent is also the essence of its corruption as today giant corporations control our lives, how we're governed and the information we receive that influences how we think and act. It's the realization of Lincoln's fear when he wrote: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country....corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." He left out the part about future governments colluding with the country's "money power" making it easier for them to benefit at the public's expense and be able to destroy the republic in the process as Lincoln feared.
Lincoln wrote those words before the collusion began post-Civil war in the first gilded age of the "robber barons" who were pikers compared to the current crop in an era of "globalization" and "the-anything-goes-under-the-administration-of-George Bush." It was long before technology made mass communication possible and the privately-owned media could gain the kind of reach and influence it now enjoys. It was also before the Supreme Court in 1886 gave corporations the right of personhood granting them their long sought after same constitutional rights as people without the responsibilities, enhancing their power greatly, and allowing them to become the dominant institution of our time with the help of the major channels of communication they own, control and use to their advantage.
With them, they control the free flow of information assuring it's compatible with the interests of wealth and power but that ends up being harmful to the public welfare that gets more marginalized as corporate dominance and influence grow. It's left democracy on life support and allowed giant corporations, including the huge media ones, to co-opt government at all levels and do it by keeping the public uninformed on the most vital matters it needs to know about to keep democracy healthy and vibrant. The media gatekeepers make sure that doesn't happen by suppressing all the ugliness it wants concealed, falsely portraying a picture of society in glowing terms and failing to let on its mission is to serve the interests of capital, something these corporate giants are rich in and want a lot more of.
It's long past the time needed to jump-start a process to fight back - to rebuild democracy allowed to wither and is now somewhere between life support and the crematorium. It should start with a national debate on the most pressing issue of our time that must be resolved before anything else can be - real media reform, reclaiming our space and giving the public more control of the airwaves it owns, breaking up the giants, creating more competition and diversity in the commercial spaces, allowing the free flow of information now denied in the mainstream, and creating more open and expanded non-profit/non-commercial alternatives including online where the free interchange of ideas flourishes but is endangered as discussed below. Without all this, no democracy is possible.
It means stanching the corroding effect of a culture of out-of-control commercialism and the glorification of wars against threats that don't exist and waged for conquest and profit. It means reigning in the media giants allowed to go unchecked and helped by friendly legislation that must be halted and reversed. It's up to those on the left and the public en masse to get on this issue - to understand how central it is to all others including war and peace and the health of the state, and to realize how endangered we are by the predations of giant corporations, including the media ones, in league with a rogue government that must be contained to have any chance to save a republic on life support.........
--------------------------------------------------------------------
It all starts with PUBLIC AWARENESS THROUGH KNOWLEDGE, that's what Thomas Jefferson meant when he said "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free....it expects what never was and never will be....Educate and inform the whole mass of people....THEY ARE THE ONLY SURE RELIANCE FOR THE PRESERVATION OF OUR LIBERTY....Enlighten the people....and tyranny and oppressions....will vanish like evil spirits....Every generation needs a new (regenerating) revolution."
The free flow of ideas on the internet represents a threat to those powerful economic entities and people who wish to control the US masses, dumb them down with dis-information, create thier smoke and mirrors, bring you a view of world events only " THEY " want you to see, mold to thier designs a popular conception of things, which serves to further thier ambitions of power and wealth. and to keep you in there service as merely a tool to be used. They are working to get thier tentacles of control around this ( internet ) highly important bastion of free exchange of ideas even now. The way things are currently going, its looks like they will succeed, in the not so distant future.
