Reply #19: So what do we do about it?

[dreamnightwind]

Excellent post. It's so obvious that we often overlook it, but really, media control, to a large degree, equals control of perceived reality. No less.

To those who think the American people just need to be smart enough to see through media manipulation, well, some are, most aren't, and if they were, the media would just find different ways to manipulate the message that are less transparent.

Seriously, propaganda works. Always has. The answer isn't for everyone to see through it, the answer is to get the media out of corporate hands.

Corporations have agendas. It has more to do with profit than with veracity. Hell, it's right there in the corporate charter, they have to maximize returns for their shareholders. That's what corporate values are, profit. That'd be the 2nd or 3rd thing to change after (if) we get publicly controlled and financed media.

It's been going on for a long time, and just gradually gets worse. We're the slowly boiling frog, the changes are subtle and most of us don't even notice it much, and we're just about cooked.

In my opinion, there's no better place to focus than on media ownership. And no better time than now. Every other issue that confronts us, whether it's the economy, global warming, foreign wars, social justice, they'll all become achievable if we can get an honest media that's not based on corporate profits.

They'll try to control internet media soon, and they may even succeed. This is no joke people, the only way it stops is for people like us to focus our efforts on it.

I can see one other place that could possibly be a better initial focal point, and that would be campaign finance reform (complete public financing of elections, no corporate money whatsoever), that'd be an even better reform-that-enables-other-reforms, but with the current propaganda machine, who's going to get all worked up about the need for campaign finance reform? Not people who get their information from the corporate media, that's for sure.

It might be possible to slip in underneath the corporate media. The future of broadcast media is the internet, not cable, satellite, or over-the-air. This change will happen soon, in most of our lifetimes. Why not get some people's version of CNN and MSNBC going on the internet? I know there are some fledgling efforts at this, and CNN and MSNBC aren't the best models anyway, but building the future we want on the net could be done without the huge infrastructure needs of the mainstream broadcast media. Then, when the 'net becomes the new media instead of cable and satellite, we'll have our alternatives in place, and the lies of the propaganda machine will be more transparent when compared to honest public media.

Or it could be approached through legislation, giving the airwaves and the bandwidth to public instead of corporate interests. I don't know how we could ever get that done, though, we'd have to pry it out of the corporations' cold dead hands.