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Anyone old enough to have been paying attention to politics and society for any number of years has already realized that, even as you were trying to advance whatever your own interests were, something else has been gradually, then suddenly, encroaching over all, until finally it was the overarching determinant of everything else, and other, previous concerns no longer even existed. This thing that replaced all else, is the media, and as it has changed, it has changed our whole society with it.
I first noticed the media interfering with the true course of things, and intruding on a sphere of life that had once been independent, during the '70s, when I first really paid attention to the larger world. Rather than covering the news of the day from a distance, and just trying to get the facts right, TV news now began to hype it, with music during stories, and something I had never heard of before and was immediately annoyed by, TITLES, like slogans, for every news story. They were pitching it, like fiction. They started to cover social movements and societal complaints the same way, and I remember thinking, about this peculiar new, dislocating treatment/attitude, that every movement nowadays needs a slogan or a catchphrase, or it won't be covered. It was like they were trying to sabotage us, by no longer locating the story in the real world, where we actually were, but filtering it through their corporate boardrooms as their "information campaign," told their way, and not allowing access to anyone, to just put the case straightforwardly. It was only the beginning, of course.
The next clear memory that something had totally changed, and was not "normal" anymore, was an incident with this bastard Ronald Reagan, just after leaving office. There was another threat to the auto industry from capitalists importing mid-level Japanese cars and killing the domestic market, and a big backlash here in Michigan and elsewhere, as plants closed or moved. Suddenly, here is Reagan on TV and on a speaking tour in Japan, warning against "Japan-bashing," and that was the term that was used, the first time I had ever heard the entire media so oddly coordinated, all using this same strange phrase that I had never heard of before. It seemed for a while like some brave remark, standing against the crowd and warning tolerance, etc.--bizarre to say the least, coming from Reagan--when it then came out that the prick was being paid over a million dollars from a consortium of Japanese automakers and etc., to go on this speaking tour; and the media never exposed it. Greedy, manipulative and selfish, right to the end. You might recall how Reagan's opinion rating plummeted right after that, as the truth came out. It was the first time, I recall anyway, a "news" story being totally and completely invented by the media and one of their own, and was a totally false impression of things, knowingly presented. It was an advertising campaign, presented as a social trend, an event in the real world.
Now, of course, we are much further along down that road, so much that many psychological effects are noticeable, that never used to exist, primary among them, thinking that the media and its opinions are at the center of the universe, and we as a people, a society, are not. Many people now, do not even think of their own original issues anymore, but only think , obsessively, of how to deal with the media, how to answer its lies, etc. Everything has been thrown off course. Now, having achieved its goal of ownership and control of what was once "the public," they can conduct an unbroken, unchallenged, disinformation campaign that now passes for the "natural world." We do not even have primary contact with our immediate external world anymore, but live instead in an isolated mental sphere of corporate propaganda and even premisses for thinking itself. The perameters of awareness now as controlled as a modern-day extreme close-up that won't ever let you look where you want to on the screen anymore, sound so loud and filtered as to block out thought, we now "live" in a stream of corporate-produced attention-getters, flashing by so quickly, with no reference to the actual past but only to the TV and etc. media past, that it eventually makes you give up and quit, as if it is all now unreachable, only an image...somewhere. It has the (deliberate) effect of wearing you down, and making you feel disconnected from the process, as if it is not "you," it is "them" and "their process."
A few days ago, this WE cable network re-played the 1976 TV-movie "Sybil," with Sally Field and Joanne Woodward, and it has been having the same profound effect on me now as it did then. It reminded me that there were actual moments of brilliance on TV then, and made-for-TV movies and miniseries, a lot of them, that were of astounding, top-level writing and acting, that made you feel you now understood something, and felt it. The networks and sponsors deliberately killed off this high level of quality during the '80s, after it was shown that when the station went to commercial, the drop of quality was so evident to audiences, that their opinions of ads, sponsored products, etc., dropped also, by comparison. It was a conscious decision to lower the quality of the program's writing, as they did not want to put forth the effort to raise the quality of the sponsor's contribution. Now, there is no such thing as greatness, nothing to reach up to, no higher level, no lasting history. There are only sales pitches, and products.
The whole attitude is different, between a public medium that the society controls, and a corporate/commercial medium that only has greed and selfishness as its motivator. There is no reason to be great or profound, but there is a reason to be vulgar, abrasive, or mindlessly trivial--they sell. There is a (corporate) reason to lie to people and keep them ignorant, as this furthers a cause of theirs that would never be present, if it had been the people's regulated utility.
I would tell it that way to people, to get their real concern--I would remind them (they have to be old enough to remember the '70s at the latest) of what they have lost, of what higher level of information, drama, comedy, music, etc., that they can remember, that they have lost. It is easier to get mad, and stay mad, when you think of something you used to have, and now no longer have, that was taken away from you, than to try to imagine some way of life we never had. This can be concretely thought back to. You KNOW what you lost. I would tie the media issue to the larger issue of an educated public, and how it now is impossible, where once it was not, and how if the entire media is at a higher level, then you can just teach a Nation's history as part of the great storytelling of the culture--not only "painless" but exciting and fun--when the entire culture was on a higher level, rather than only hoping for intelligence in school, and nowhere else. How violent people are now, as anti-intellectual, ignorant people, corporate-controlled, as opposed to the elevating effects of education, when the media had a social purpose, controlled by the people.
I would tell the whole thing this way, so people can really feel the neverending, real-world effects of this issue and the loss of the Fairness Doctrine and the old laws limiting ownership by the same corporation; relate it to the real-life experience of feeling the loss of your own place in what was once you own country--and let people burn, thinking about it.
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