I think its safe to say that anyone who follows political discourse and life in general knows that, at some point, our collective media stopped being watchdog of the common man and slowly shifted toward being an Orwellian vehicle for propaganda. And anyone who has followed the truly galling and outrageous effort by BushCo to gut the inner workings of our federal government by firing career professionals and installing hacks in an effort to run a government without actually believing in such a thing.
I also think its fair to say that, while this was all being plotted out the big money in the political world decided - in a bipartisan effort - that corporations are more important than people, and legislated and ruled accordingly. And in this effort, the media - watchdog of the people, eyes and ears to the world, uncoverer of the seedy underbelly - fell under the auspices of the very people the media used to reveal to us.
Winston Smith knew that.
Anyway. I compare the top-to-bottom disembowling of the media as we know it to the ongoing effort to turn our federal government into a crony-laden country club with free contract money for every winking executive board member in sight, and it reminds me why the corporately-puppeted media is failing, and will ultimately fail altogether.
The internet.
Journalism, after all, isn't a business. Its an ideology. Its a mindset. Its a craft. And despite the inner and upper workings of those who attempt to present it on the large scale, those values and concepts cannot be and never have been contained within the walls of the machine. Every paper and broadcast outlet will have a traditionally minded journalist or two buried beneath those hired for Limbaugh factor - shock and ratings, be as outrageous and entertaining to whatever sense of entitlement fits the target demographic. But outside of that, there are people who believe and understand that, as a musician doesn't need a record label to make music, a journalist doesn't need a masthead or a call sign to be a journalist.
The internet is what corporations fear - something that allows the masses to create and distribute ideological property that they once 'owned', and thus profited from. Everyone from musicians to investigative reporters to sports to science to information services to, of course classified ads have been liberated from their traditional bastions and allowed to be defined and created freely, often at the expense of the monoliths.
My question is this: If the internet, and other means of connecting people and sharing information and skill and talent and creativity at the individual level, can make certain specifically inherent corporations and institutions practically obsolete, then what possibilities are there that those who find our political machine to be equally deficient to lead and gather and call together from the bottom up?
The individuals with the skills to bypass the machine have done so. Is there a way to bypass this machine?
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