For one source that will keep you riveted on what really is happening, get on the list for Media Lens. I get the feeling that if the world could meet in its pages, we could make things work. In addition to astute criticisms of goings on, you also get a sense of things we can do.
Here's the ending for two MEDIA ALERTS (on their site you have to click on Media Alerts and then on the title of each piece) — about a major appearance Blair made on British TV, BLAIR'S BETRAYAL – PARTS 1 & 2 — which are written with this premise: “We believe that Blair consciously sets out to deceive the public while obscuring his deceptiveness behind an appearance of sincerity. If this sounds like wild speculation, recall that it has in fact been standard political practice since the time of Machiavelli.”
All of the facts in this two-part Media Alert were readily accessible to us – part-time, unpaid writers – and yet almost none of them were raised by Jeremy Paxman – a full-time, professional journalist backed up by a large BBC research team – nor in the press in the days following the interview.
These omissions are obviously not the result of incompetence – it takes no competence at all to seek out well-known, credible sources, even via the web. Lack of resources is also clearly not a limiting factor. Nor can lack of significance explain these oversights – what could be more vital than to establish the basic facts challenging a prime minister's fraudulent case for war?
Instead, these omissions, we believe, are the result of a long-standing, institutionalised media aversion to seriously challenging establishment power of even the most ruthless and cynical kind. The reason is not complex: the liberal media so often trusted by the public – the Guardian/Observer, the Independent, the BBC, ITN – are all very much part of, and deeply dependent on, that same system of power.
We have a stark choice: we can continue to be deceived by the illusion of a free press, in which case many thousands of people will continue to be killed in our names but in the cause of profit and power. Alternatively, we can expose and challenge the 'liberal' propagandists stifling democracy. Journalists, even admired radical ones, may choose to maintain their silence to protect their hard-won reputations and lucrative careers – it's up to the rest of us simply to tell the truth.
These posts followed two others, FULL SPECTRUM DISSENT – PARTS 1 & 2, the likes of which I haven't seen from progressive political sources. In fact, they speak to what is missing from progressive politics. These pieces go to the human behavior that needs to be in our focus as what makes us who we are, and the deep understanding we need in order to change our world. Here's the conclusion of Part 1:
A crucial reason for modern levels of unhappiness, malaise and depression, then, we believe, can be identified in the impact of a filtering system distorting even our most fundamental ideas about ourselves and the world around us. Corporate interests need us to pursue a version of human happiness that serves profits but not people. The results include individual depression, global environmental collapse, and wars for control of natural resources in countries like Iraq. In Part 2 we will discuss the possibility that there are more rational approaches to achieving human and social well-being, and that these, too, have been filtered out by the propaganda system.
And here are quotes from Part 2:
“The ultimate root of many of our problems is that very many people care a great deal about themselves and their immediate families, but very little about anyone else. This is the basis of much unthinking obedience, passive complicity, and enthusiastic participation in state-corporate destructiveness. This self-centered concern, in turn, is rooted in the deeply entrenched – but, we believe, false – conviction that personal happiness is best achieved by applying maximum effort to securing the needs of ourselves and our immediate families, such that we have little inclination to attend to the needs of others deemed irrelevant – people who often pay an appalling price for our actions. We often rightly focus on the logic and function of state-corporate systems, but we need to remember that states and corporations are in the end mere abstractions – they are made up of, and run by, real people.”
“Compassion and concern for others are of course implicit in much dissident thought – relief of human suffering is quite obviously what motivates many writers and activists. But explicit focus on the importance of such concern as an antidote to individual human misery, and to the many problems rooted in the unrestrained greed of corporate capitalism, is almost nowhere to be found in contemporary radical thought, just as it is rarely found in mainstream scientific and other thought.”
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