Sunday, December 15, 2019

Letters From Facebook Jail: Day 20


The Media Has Interests, And They Don't Align With Yours

I previously wrote about how the media will never permit you the presidential candidate you want. They may dangle a few interesting candidates in front of you to sucker you into the game, but you’re never going to get that candidate. They will do whatever is required to peel enough votes from the candidate that got you interested in politics in the first place, then do the old bait and switch. There is no level of smear that won’t be used to get such a candidate to the point where the media can then deem his cause hopeless, and then say the only sensible course for him is to back the establishment candidate.

Unelectable. It is a word seemingly used only in presidential races, and then only on Democratic candidates. Just like third-party candidates are only called spoilers if they’re running to the left of Democrats. You never here the Libertarian candidate called a spoiler. You never heard Ross Perot called a spoiler as he was running his campaign. You never heard Trump deemed unelectable. But Ralph Nader was a spoiler and Tulsi Gabbard is a divider because their campaigns are “unwinnable”. They are unwinnable because the media will never allow them to win, or their issues to be seriously considered.

You never hear the media say a game is unwinnable for the underdog, do you? They never say, “Nah, no use watching this game, viewers, The Patriots are going to destroy them." That’s because, even if it is often true, it is not in the interest of the media or its advertisers to have you tune out. The media will do everything in its power to get you invested in a rivalry, do anything to create drama. 

Besides, the media loves a good Cinderella story. There’s nothing they like more than a good upset, a Rocky defeating Apollo or the U.S. Hockey Team taking down the Soviets. Until it is corporate interests who are in the role of the wicked step-sisters, at which point they will treat Cinderella like Carrie. Yeah, I used to think Stephen King’s bad guys were unrealistically sadistic, but the depths to which the media sinks proves otherwise.

Unelectable. It’s odd that nobody said that about Donald Trump, a man with orange skin, three divorces, four bankruptcies and a grifter’s history. A guy who was on tape saying "Grab 'em by the *****. Nobody said he should drop out of the race because he couldn’t win. They secretly must have thought he couldn’t, but they never said so. If they had believed Trump had a chance to win, they would have started the whole Russiagate story BEFORE he was elected. Trump was an “oops”, and the full court press of Russiagate was their way of containing the accident before it caused too much damage.

As I see things, Tulsi Gabbard is the candidate most capable of being a uniter. She appeals to people from across the political spectrum and for the best of reasons. She is a veteran and a principled politician. She has the potential of overcoming the partisan politics that is absolutely tearing our nation apart and keeping us from dealing with issues that have broad appeal. But the media does not want a uniter. The media does everything in its power to divide us, rile up our emotions and shut down our minds. If you get angry every time you think about politics, you cannot deny it’s true. It’s been this way for decades and it’s only going to get worse until we can find some way out of our partisanship. That would not be good for ratings, nor would it be good for the corporations that have no desire to see popular issues enacted. The revolution will not be televised.

Whatever your opinions of Tulsi Gabbard, they are most likely your opinions because of what the media chose to tell you about her. Go ahead, without thinking about it, state an opinion you have about Tulsi Gabbard. Now, if you’re brave, type in the exact words you used in Google and see if you don’t get a match with whatever outlet you get your news from (if you said "toadie", I'm guessing you read the New York Times). Don't feel bad, the media spends more energy manipulating you than you have to uncover their manipulations. 

The media will never give you the candidate YOU want because it will never be the candidate THEY want. If the two ever align, you should have serious doubts about your candidate. But it’s not just presidential candidates. The media will never allow you to have Medicare For All, open government, fracking bans, affordable pharmaceuticals, penalties for corporate crimes, peace, etc. You will likely never again see a prominent politician or a corporate executive go to prison again unless the crimes they committed were against the powerful. You will never get what you want, what  the planet needs, until you realize the media is not your friend but your gaslighter

The media will never give us the information we need to change our society from one focused on serving corporations to one focused on serving human beings. It’s not in their best interest. Corporate media will only give you corporate talking points. I don’t know why that is so hard for people to understand. 

The fact that they have you believing in a magical system where corporate profits result in the best of all possible products for the customer IS in fact true in this case. But where they have deceived you is by having you believe you are the customer. You're not, because you're not the one paying Sean Hannity's and Rachel Maddow's obscene salaries . You get what you pay for and nobody pays much of anything nowadays for the news they consume. News that is given to you for nothing is not news, it’s propaganda. It’s advertisement for what they want to sell you, which is corporate values and corporate fantasies of how the world works. The only thing that keeps the propaganda from ruling you completely is that it is so far removed from the reality you have to live in.

Therein lies our hope. The more the media lies, the more it has to lie. The greater the difference between observable phenomena and the official narrative, the easier it will be to spot the lie. We’re at the point where we don’t need a Buddha to pierce the veil of illusion, we’re simply waiting for a child to innocently say the emperor has no clothes. Actually, it will take quite a few of us. We will all have to shout as loud as we can that corporate media will only ever support corporate interests, and corporate interests are the greatest threat to the future of humanity. The lies are necessarily louder, clumsier, more aggressive, because the situation for humanity is becoming increasingly more tenuous and harder to deny. We are flooding our oceans with plastic, poisoning and consuming its fish, heating the water with our CO2 emissions with what oil we do not spill into the oceans directly. 

The time will come when the lie breaks down, it is unavoidable. But there is no guarantee it will come in time. That is up to us. Now's not the time for shyness, insecurity, or self-doubt. A planet is at stake.



No comments:

Post a Comment