CORPORATE MEDIA AND TRUTH:
LIKE BELIEVING IN SANTA CLAUS

A nice long rant posted by one of the Media Matters people about the significance and blatant anti-liberal double standard of the New York Times' recent front page story on the Clintons' marriage is all the rage on the left side of the blogoshpere today. It's actually an interesting read, so go check it out if you want. On the other hand, it suffers from the chronic tendency of establishment liberals to go after the mountain of damning details, point-by-point, while staying the hell away from a more succinct and overall institutional criticism of the news media of the Noam Chomsky variety--generally, that's the problem with the liberal-left, as opposed to the progressive-left or far left; their mindset tends to value the institutions that make up the overall power establishment, and, consequently, are only able to criticize their actions, rather than their existence or how they are structured.

At any rate, one of Tom Tomorrow's blog team, Jonathan Schwarz, who cross posts at This Modern World the stuff he does at his own blog, A Tiny Revolution, immediately saw the deficiency of the Media Matters piece, and adds to it this golden nugget:

Of all the things that drive me crazy about my progressive compatriots, it’s this belief that you can change the corporate media with accurate criticism of it. They believe at some point the people within the media will realize they’re wrong, and their behavior will improve.

This is insane.

Click here for the rest.

That is so true. He briefly explains why such criticism is likely to have no effect, but the real punchline is in a piece to which he links that he wrote on his own blog last December:

There Is No Santa Claus

One thing I repeat is that the mainstream media does a FANTASTIC job. Day in and day out, they turn in an extraordinary performance—at what they exist to do. And that is to make as much money as possible.

Of course, in terms of helping people learn about the world, they are an eternal catastrophe. But why would we ever expect any different? The mainstream media is made up of gigantic corporations. Like all corporations, they manufacture a product, which is their audience. They sell this product to their customers, which are other huge corporations.

Informing people about the world is not just irrelevant to the purpose of making money, but in many ways actually HURTS a corporation's profitability. No business goes out of its way to piss off its owners and customers.

Now, obviously it's true you hear constantly about the media's Unending Fight For Truth. But you also hear constantly that a fat man wearing a red suit breaks into America's homes at the end of each year to distribute new X-boxes. Neither of these things is real.

Click here for the rest.

Again, that is so true. The corporate news media is simply not in the business of providing the news: they provide audiences for commercials and ads, and they attract those audiences by giving them programs and articles called "news," which may or may not actually have some correspondence to reality. For the life of me, I just can't figure out why liberals don't pound away on this concept 24/7 when criticizing the obvious rightward slant of the corporate news media; it seems like such a natural place to begin the debate. The only answer I have is what I mentioned above, that liberals favor the power establishment, and are utterly unwilling to really go after it in a way that might ultimately achieve the goals they say they want.

It's maddening, I know, but until American liberals, who far outnumber progressives, begin to realize that supporting the institutions of power which comprise the US establishment plays utterly into the hands of conservatives who, in the end, are the real ideological face of of American power, it's all going to be pointless debate. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. You can't be a part of the establishment and oppose it at the same time.

I learned that while I was teaching high school.

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