I love how Norman Solomon writes about media...
The Politics of News Media
from the book
False Hope
by Norman Solomon, 1994
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/False_Hope.htmlCorporate control is not interference in the newsroom-if you own an institution you aren't interfering in it, you're running it. -------
The debilitating obstacles that face journalists-and the rest of us-are primarily institutional. If we push hard to challenge the institutions around us, the struggle can change us for the better in the process.
Rather than succumbing to the media manipulation that continues to foreclose better options, we can tune up our personal and collective "radar screens" to track unidentified flying propaganda. Determination to battle for more autonomy over our own possibilities-as individuals, as people communicating with each other, and as a society- opens up new and vital horizons.
In contrast, evading the truth of corporate power over news media is a disorienting mental traffic pattern that keeps tromping a path of political confusion. False mappings of society immobilize us to the great extent that we trust public mythologies more than firsthand realities. Imagine if Rand McNally and its competitors issued maps that had little resemblance to actual streets and highways and terrain. To the extent that we believed those maps, we'd be unable to go much of anywhere; we wouldn't be able to plan our journeys, or meet up with other people; for that matter we wouldn't even really know where we were."The news" and punditry provide orientation- guiding the public's perception and navigation of the world. At various times, on various subjects, the media compass needle may actually be pointing south, north, east or west; it's no accident that conventional accounts of politics are disorienting, since they take citizens on detours every day-away from clarity about power: who wields it, how, and why. (Astute investors would never make the mistake of trying to get their bearings from the "A" sections of daily newspapers.) As informative compasses, the mass media indicate much more about how those in power want us to perceive and navigate the world than about how the world really is.
Popularized renderings of reality, however phony, supply us with shared illusions, suitable for complying with authorized itineraries, the requisite trips through never-never lands of public pretense. Privately, we struggle to make sense of our experiences; perhaps we can create some personal space so that our own perceptions and emotions have room to stretch. But the limits of privatized solutions are severe. Public spheres determine the very air we breathe and the social environments of our lives. The standard detours meander through imposing landscapes. Beyond the outer limits of customary responses, uncharted territory is "weird"-certainly not familiar from watching TV or reading daily papers. Following in the usual footsteps seems to be safer.-------
Meanwhile: Criticism is surrounded and absorbed, amoeba-like, by the circuitous mainstreams of what we could call "skipthought"- repeating and recycling endlessly. Skipthought habitually jumps over ideas and perspectives that reject the legitimacy of corporate rule. Elsewhere, in places as far away as East Timor or Turkey or China, rank lies and flagrant violence may hammer human beings from dawn to dawn, but here and now in the United States the lies and violence are apt to be combined with soothing velvet that adorns the dominant scenery. The biggest hoaxes depend on the biggest illusions. Wholesale, they make the reigning "freedom" possible.
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Journalists are neither more nor less courageous than people in other professions; we can hardly expect corporate-paid reporters and pundits to make careers out of biting the hands that sign their paychecks. Those who pay the piper, as the saying goes, call the tune-not every note, but the overarching score-orchestration that may seem to be nowhere in particular because it is now almost everywhere, with an insistent drumbeat that after a while gets confused with the human heart.
The political muzak keeps functioning as white noise, constant and familiar, with little variation, and loud enough to prevent us from hearing much of other sounds. 
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