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marmar

(76,985 posts)
Mon Mar 23, 2015, 11:07 AM Mar 2015

Chris Hedges: Journalism as Subversion


from truthdig



by Chris Hedges


The assault of global capitalism is not only an economic and political assault. It is a cultural and historical assault. Global capitalism seeks to erase our stories and our histories. Its systems of mass communication, which peddle a fake intimacy with manufactured celebrities and a false sense of belonging within a mercenary consumer culture, shut out our voices, hopes and dreams. Salacious gossip about the elites and entertainers, lurid tales of violence and inane trivia replace in national discourse the actual and the real. The goal is a vast historical amnesia.

The traditions, rituals and struggles of the poor and workingmen and workingwomen are replaced with the vapid homogenization of mass culture. Life’s complexities are reduced to simplistic stereotypes. Common experiences center around what we have been fed by television and mass media. We become atomized and alienated. Solidarity and empathy are crushed. The cult of the self becomes paramount. And once the cult of the self is supreme we are captives to the corporate monolith.

As the mass media, now uniformly in the hands of large corporations, turn news into the ridiculous chronicling of pseudo-events and pseudo-controversy we become ever more invisible as individuals. Any reporting of the truth—the truth about what the powerful are doing to us and how we are struggling to endure and retain our dignity and self-respect—would fracture and divide a global population that must be molded into compliant consumers and obedient corporate subjects. This has made journalism, real journalism, subversive. And it has made P. Sainath—who has spent more than two decades making his way from rural Indian village to rural Indian village to make sure the voices of the country’s poor are heard, recorded and honored—one of the most subversive journalists on the subcontinent. He doggedly documented the some 300,000 suicides of desperate Indian farmers—happening for the last 19 years at the rate of one every half hour—in his book “Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories From India’s Poorest Districts.” And in December, after leaving The Hindu newspaper, where he was the rural affairs editor, he created the People’s Archive of Rural India. He works for no pay. He relies on a small army of volunteers. He says his archive deals with “the everyday lives of everyday people.” And, because it is a platform for mixed media, encompassing print, still photographs, audio and film, as well as an online research library, it is a model for those who seek to tell the stories that global capitalism attempts to blot out. ..................(more)

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/journalism_as_subversion_20150322




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Chris Hedges: Journalism as Subversion (Original Post) marmar Mar 2015 OP
Valid points. proverbialwisdom Mar 2015 #1
That excerpt is spot on. How sad is that though? sigh..n/t Jefferson23 Mar 2015 #2
Thank you. n/t Judi Lynn Mar 2015 #3
kick, rec Doctor_J Mar 2015 #4
Compare, contrast and reflect. proverbialwisdom Mar 2015 #5

proverbialwisdom

(4,959 posts)
1. Valid points.
Mon Mar 23, 2015, 01:54 PM
Mar 2015
“There were 512 accredited journalists covering fashion week in Mumbai and six journalists covering farm suicides, the world’s worst farm suicides ever,” he said.

<>

“If you cover farm suicides, if you stay with the story and want to tell the story, you are called an activist,” he said. “(But) if you sit polishing your stool with the seat of your trousers in the newsroom for 30 years churning yard upon yard of news from corporate press releases—why, then, you are a professional. You will even be highly regarded, a respected professional, because the corporations respect you. The great journalists in history are never professional in that sense...

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