THE MILITARY, INDUSTRIAL,
AND ENTERTAINMENT COMPLEX
Politics and Entertainment

From ZNet:

There is no objective, independent scientific evidence to show that the populace prefers entertainment to reality. At the same time, dominant media's treatment of "reality" encourages mass withdrawal from democracy and the public sphere by making political and public life practically unintelligible. Reflecting a rigid elite consensus on how issues are to be framed and topics chosen, mainstream news is stuck within a narrow ideological spectrum that mandates biased, confusing, and uninspiring coverage. It is forbidden to tell the population what is really going on at home and abroad, making it exceedingly difficult for harried, time-squeezed ordinary people to determine whether or not Iraq really had "weapons of mass destruction" (forgetting of course that Uncle Sam possesses more WMD than any nation in history) or why the US (the supposed beacon of global freedom) has the highest incarceration in the world (to give two among countless possible examples) without undertaking their own exhausting independent research projects. Under the at-once Orwellian and Huxlean (Aldous Huxley's Brave New World depicted a nightmarish future in which totalitarian elites entertained the masses to political death) power of the dominant media corporations, current events are presented in a chaotic, de-contextualized, uninspiring (the heroic rebellion of the workers and peasants of Bolivia cannot be presented in a serious and justly favorable light), fatalistic/determinist (how many times were we told that Bush's attack on Iraq was "inevitable" even as the majority of the world's population opposed American "war" plans?) and power-worshipping fashion that seems calculated to send us all running to sit-coms, personal finance gurus, the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), Dr. Phil and/or the local psychiatric and related pharmaceutical authorities. At least MTV, WWF, the sit-coms and the movie channels are openly fictitious and contrived, making no pretense of doing anything other than putting us to moral, intellectual and political sleep.

It's not that television sucks (although it does suck bigtime); rather it's that television, movies, and popular music are sucking away the nation's attention from extremely important issues. This is not a problem that can easily be dismissed with "it's only a TV show" rhetoric. Our country is literally amusing itself to death, and it's not by accident.

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