| There are many more examples that I could draw upon as this rampant, blatant failure has become the norm. Infotainment, political ideology, religious extremism and corporate CYA have become factors which jaundice whatever little real news reaches us via the mainstream media.
The blogosphere has become a necessity, and staying informed is no longer a question of sitting down to breakfast over a cup of joe and reading the paper or snapping on the radio or the TV. No, it's become nearly a full time job as concerned people on blogs and email lists send each other links to articles in foreign media outlets like Der Spiegel, Russia Today and the Times UK.
They say that bad news sells, but I must warn that the really bad news never even makes it to the back pages. The propagandist fearmongering of the Bush administration, often as not based on bad kabuki "security theater" performances by government shills, brought us into two heinously costly wars of aggression that are still ongoing. That's bad enough, but when the news media fail to inform the public of REAL threats - THAT'S EVEN WORSE. That's what's happening here, and when this becomes the norm in a society - ANY society - then what I hear whistling down from future skies are the winds of war. War on American soil.
It begins, always, with the war for the hearts and minds and souls of the people who rely on their government to protect them and their press to let them know if their government simply isn't doing that for whatever reason. A failure of the press to keep it's public informed of threats to their lives, livelihoods and well being indicates a fundamental failure of the social contracts which bind us together.
One of the reasons the government works so closely with the press when a war is in progress is that public information is a primary concern of military intelligence. Information reaching the public's ears can win or lose a war. Command and control determines what reaches the ears of the public and when. There is a reason the CIA has an office called the Nonproliferation Center.
When information is blocked and micromanaged to the degree being seen here, the war is already raging where we cannot see it. When it becomes more important to the combined infrastructure of our government and our press corps to protect Bank of America's reputation than Bank of America's customers; to protect Binyamin Netanyahu's quite necessarily bruised ego than to protect innocent and unarmed Palestinians enduring Israel's genocidal agenda; to protect a domestic terrorist rather than a Congressman and his aides and constituents... then what we have in progress is the gathering storm of war.
Get ready. It's coming. |
