If you haven't been following the evolution of Internet activism, then you're missing probably one of the most significant trends of the last few years. Case in point is the campaign to stop media consolidation as reflected in a new set of FCC rule changes allowing for a new round of media mergers. These changes were opposed by a broad swath of the American public from all sides of the political spectrum. Moveon.org garnered no less than 180,000 online letters in protest against the rule changes in an attempt to (at least) have them postponed until Congress could do a little bit more chin wagging over the subject. After Moveon.org's Internet blitz, supplemented by newspaper ads featuring Rupert Murdoch as a kind of poster child of Evil Media, no less than Trent Lott himself stood up and bemoaned the changes and -- along with democratic colleagues in a rare show of bi-partisanship -- complained how FCC chairman Michael Powell had broken tradition, ignoring a congressional request to shelve the rule changes until further inquiries could be made. Instead, Powell went ahead and barreled forward anyway, like Bush into Iraq.

While MoveOn cannot be credited solely for the public's reaction against the FCC, I do believe the Internet onslaught was key to moving opinion among leaders, and giving them the courage to stand up where they might have otherwise nodded off. The ability to quickly (literally within a day or two) harness such a broad and resounding voice of protest is perhaps unparalleled in history. It is one of the bright spots in our otherwise downward spiral toward media mediocrity, uniformity, group think and profit myopia. The Internet, if considered to be media, is probably the only true outlet for alternative media sources. One wonders how long it will last.

I asked Todd Gitlin in an interview for SolPix if he thought that media types thought strategically about the why of their approach and worldview
-- if media was created with a specific agenda in mind. My question hinted at the "C" word, conspiracy -- often a code word with mainstream news interviewers for "insane, paranoid and crazy" when guests like Gore Vidal question nasty things like the root causes of September 11 and Waco. It seems that the religious right is in cahoots with stupid, shallow, lazy reportage and have conspired to give us damn little why in the recent past. To get back to Gitlin, he believed that at least from the corporate side, no conspiracy existed -- all was based on profit. In other words, news editors were not saying don't explore the why because they got the word from on high -- it's just that they felt exploring the why would cause them to lose money, or they were self censoring based on conventional wisdom.

So to follow Gitlin's thinking, MSNBC, in hiring conservative commentator Michael Savage and dropping the liberal Phil Donahue, was responding to ratings and profit, not to ideology. There was no grand strategy to move MSNBC to the right in order to become "Fox light." Decisions on programming are supposedly dispassionate, existing in a vacuum, based on some grand calculus of return on investment. With all due respect to Todd Gitlin, I have to believe the notion that media executives operate in some kind of objective market purity is nonsense. Media executives are paid to sniff trends and react, and to react in a fashion that will increase profits, to be sure -- but the fact that they are so "flexible" in their movement to dump Donahue and take on Savage belies the true problem, that is, the inevitable corruption of a system based solely money and not balanced by basic humanity -- a corruption that exists no matter what the media's ideological face.

The fact is that the "givens" of modern capitalism crucify anyone who questions its validity. Modern notions of capitalism and consumerism are so above reproach as the binding "good" of society that to question them is like questioning the veracity of the Pope. Truth be told, the cold, hard decisions of the board room are often self-fulfilling prophesies generated within a world of market "givens" that can be controlled, if desired, by the marketers themselves. MSNBC may have been reacting, but it was reacting strategically and with an overall change in course in mind. This overall course is laid out quite clearly by the elites of global capitalism, and it has little to do with democracy and the promotion of the general welfare.

MSNBC's decision to go with Savage was not unlike all those good capitalists in Nazi Germany supporting Hitler because it was easier, it was convenient, and it lined their pocketbooks if they happened to be a war contractor or an industry that would profit from the war. The truth is, to be "on board" with the current trend toward corporate globalism and group think is a prerequisite for survival in the boardrooms of any corporation, be it media or otherwise. The ultimate issues come down to, as they always do, fear and control, and yes, money. But money within a context of a system that knows it must perpetuate itself and not promote ideas that would destroy its hold on the populace -- even if those ideas would promote the ideals this country was founded on. The result is "the system" -- an alliance of business and a quasi-democracy that exists in its shadow. As Ned Beatty so aptly revealed to Howard Beal in the film Network -- "The world, Mr. Beal, is a business."

The system has a contract with the people -- it takes care of you, it feeds you and it houses you, and in the United States it pays you better than the average starving Asian day laborer because you can vote and they often can't. In return you either let it alone or you support it. And as long as the contract is met we don't mind if our media has a kind of numbing sameness to it, that one commentator can be swapped out for another, that none of them can think beyond their earpiece -- much as William Hurt's character in the poignant and prophetic Broadcast News. News and media are foremost and primarily entertainment, fodder and fill in to keep us distracted long enough until the really important message -- the advertisements -- kick in. And we don't mind, because we're fed and we're housed by the Holy Mother System -- for the most part at least. And we believe the myths and fantasies created by the media organizations that placate us, make us feel like were good and moral, when in reality we are in many ways rotting, and both ourselves and our media masters are cowards to the core. And even if we don't know it consciously, we feel the numbing psychological pain of it, and take increasing amounts of anti-depressants and fixate on numerous addictions in order to avoid confronting our own awareness. And of those addictions, the addiction to self-aggrandizement is paramount -- the perennial re-enforcement of the myth that Americans are special, endowed with manifest destiny, and can forever depend on God's special status to keep us out of harm's way. And the purveyor of that myth is, to a large extent, the media.

Now what is "the system" and what is so bad about it? It's not unlike The Matrix, where the character of Cypher -- the betrayer of Neo and Morpheus -- looks into the hollow eyes of Agent Smith and tells him how he prefers the illusion of the Matrix to the reality of the world. Was Cypher wrong? I must say that he may be right, but to deal with the reality of our world is different from dealing with the reality in The Matrix in that the reality of our Matrix -- a largely impoverished and/or exploited third world living in a perpetual state of suffering tantamount to our great depression or worse, kept that way in many instances through the support or institutions and injustices we have a complete and utter ability to influence but don't -- the truth is that the reality of that world will eventually come shattering down with problems that no movie star or super hero (or even president) can stop with a quick karate kick or gun.

How will this occur? In one of two ways: sudden chaos or slow death. Certainly slow death is the preferred method, as it enables the system to make even more money in its attempt to cure the diseases that it propagates as a result of its value system. Let me give an example. I recently visited a tourist attraction/outlet store just outside of Gettysburg, PA. Inside the huge, Felliniesque building sitting in the middle of a rural landscape was a fantasy land of American crafts: wooden ducks, teddy bears, and a plethora or other handicrafts -- and all capped off with an elaborate, museum-like overview of the company's founders and history. The owner had begun humbly in Vermont, where he and his wife had made little wooden decoy ducks by hand. Now the company was NYSE listed, shown regularly on QVC -- and billed as the "most humongous teddy bear store in the world." And it was. Inside were hundreds of people, mostly crammed in on bus tours, wandering aimlessly and buying the cute little critters, and almost all of those people were quintessentially fat, as is the American norm.

And each of these little bear things and "American" craft items were made, in many instances, in China (at least based on my admittedly unscientific sampling -- but you get the point). And these overweight, anxious and numbed consumers, all force fed like some kind of fois gras goose, stumbled around in a kind of paxil fog, queuing up to buy these little bears they probably thought were made in the Good 'Ol USA by little handimakers in rural wherever. And what they were sold was what, primarily? The myth of themselves, the innocence of that myth, manipulated and packaged and foisted back on them when the exploitive economic reality underlying it was completely different -- even contradictory to -- the myth itself. And this is exactly what news commentators did recently with the war against Iraq. They fed our own myth back to us, force fed us to the point where we could only capitulate, overpowered by the force of their arguments and their assumptions as they rolled over the war's contradictions and unanswered justifications like so many Humvees through the desert.

Are their weapons of mass destruction? Are there conflicts of interest with the Bush and Cheney vis-a-vis war contractors? Were lies told? Who cares, just move on, because the consumer is so numbed by the process they'll just move on to the next item in the queue, whether that's a war or a teddy bear, ever willing to serve their country by becoming increasing depressed and diabetic. But all the better for pharmaceuticals who dominate the airwaves with their commercials anyway. But this moving on, unlike that promoted by MoveOn.org, takes us away from our inevitable confrontation with reality. This moving on takes us toward the grave, both spiritual and physical.

From Associated Press, June 15, 2003, regarding American Troops raid in FALLUJAH, Iraq:

"To diffuse animosity [among the populace], the troops followed up their assault by delivering humanitarian supplies, including school books, medicine and even teddy bears."

-- Don Thompson

Discuss this article on the nextPix FORUM by going to its discussion thread: [click here]

Don Thompson is a filmmaker/producer and co-founder of SolPix. You can find out more about Don by going to the website for his production company nextpix. You can also email him at don@nextpix.com

Copyright Web del Sol, 2003

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