We interrupt the regularly scheduled nothing new or magically oriented topics brought to you by Head for the Red for the following important News Item:
Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
I think she gets to the 2 key problems of American news - syndication and story priority being based on cost. Which goes back to the root of those problems - newsmedia here in the US is exclusively corporate. Even operations such as IndyMedia operate as businesses that are interested in maintaining their own existence - a "profit" motive that is often ignored by people who protest against Big Media...
ReplyDeleteI have no real solution - other than making the heretical suggestion that foreign news sources such as DW, BBC and even Al-Jazeera should be part of the nightly options on my TV. I *do* have quite a bit of these set to record nightly so that I can watch them while waking up with a cuppa - much more interesting and thought-provoking than "What's Martha Stewart making this week?"
Perhaps this might be a nice objective test of quality of results of The Work - media coverage manipulation...
This is why I tell people that my job is to make them stupid. It's not just that the things we cover are cheaper. It's that we are actively working to turn our nation into a body of uncritical consumers, so that entities like the one I work for can get into the national wallet more easily. Our system is based on the worship of money. Most people's goal is to amass as much of it as possible, not realizing that money, as opposed to wealth, last for a very short time. As they're trying to collect this temporary spending instrument, they are constantly convinced to part with it in order to purchase temporary sources of pleasure. That's the business I'm in, fooling people into buying trash with their money, instead of teaching them how to convert it into wealth. Converting money into wealth - that's what the people who run our big businesses do. can't have the little people doing that...
ReplyDeleteThe news is just more mindless entertainment in today's America. Bread and circuses, that's what we get, although, lately, more circuses and less bread.