One of the many tactics used by the Right Rich to give them traction is the vilification of the “media”. It is also one of the more successful ones.
Basically, the purpose of what we call “journalism” is to both establish the facts on an issue and then report them. This comes directly into confrontation with the purpose of conservative political spin, that being to hide the overall objective at work, ie allowing the rich to get richer.
So the more doubt that can be cast over journalism, the more the RIch get away with justifying their actions.
Of course it doesn’t help when so-called journalists can be bought. Entire media empires are owned by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi and here in Ireland, Denis O’Brien and their basic function is to serve as a mouthpiece for their interests whenever they see fit.
And the prevalence of these conservative media outlets puts even more pressure on the few journalists left who actually want to get on with the task of reporting the facts as they see them, pushing them instead towards what we’re meant to believe is a “balanced” view taking the Rich point of view as “half” of the argument.
Probably the best and most powerful of these is Fox News. They make full use of the First Amendment of the US Constitution to push forward the conservative agenda. If that were to be your only source of gleaning information, you would quite literally be brainwashed into thinking that everything President Obama does, for example, is pushing the country ever closer to a socialist Muslim state.
The constant hammering home of their message puts pressure on other news sources to lean more towards those who choose to “attack” the Rich, rather than those who simply want to report the facts. This is a terrible shame in my opinion. And I find myself doing it all too often when I write myself, so it’s not like I’m saying it’s easy.
“OK, I’m about to give my opinion on something. But when I do, what will the conservatives say about it? They’ll call me a tree-hugger, or a liberal, or a socialist, or some other label that they invented and have been drilling (fracking?) into everyday usage for decades. So everything I say I have to try and water down in case I leave myself wide open to their response. Or even worse still…what if my opinions are ones they actually agree with? Screw it…I just won’t say anything.”
Sound familiar?
I’m hoping to get to a point with this blog that I can just sit at my computer every Sunday morning and hammer out my opinions on things without giving a damn about how certain people will react, especially when that reaction doesn’t represent a counter-argument, rather a smokescreen that when broken down is nothing but puerile name-calling.
Might take me a while to get there though. Already I have edited and re-edited this short post about a dozen times! JLP
First Person Plural 