CORPORATE MEDIA TURNED EVIL ... AGAIN

Do you think the partisanship of the major broadcast media is new? It isn't. In fact, the history of print media, television and radio news is predominantly one of social manipulation in the USA and abroad. Why does it seem so polarizing at the present time? Independent streaming media has made this glaringly obvious. It is a Fifth Estate, a product of the internet. 

I watch some broadcast media via a cable TV subscription. Local video media is dominated by junk news. Lots of kitten-in-tree stories involving natural disasters, war-veteran disabilities or local crime. National broadcast/cable media is different. These outlets, such as Fox News and CNN, are focused on politics and the corporate financial world, that marriage made in hell in this corporate global economy. 

Whatever the political pole represented, the messages are clearly manipulative. This manipulation of a "free" media infosphere, once monitored by a non-partisan elected government, is the great evil of our time. It is a war of ideologies, each fighting for the control of our minds, which have been addicted to garbage-in content by our computers and phones.

The unintended fallout is the degradation of public intelligence and skepticism. By regressing the society to school-day teams on matters of social and national importance, the corporate media have contributed to making Americans undiscerning. 

It seems a form of Stockholm Syndrome to me. The constant flood  of useless media information which is unfiltered for its value to society as a whole is a form of brainwashing by profit-driven corporations whose only motivation is greed. Those addicted to electronica eventually surrender to the oppression by it. They defend it. They see it as liberating. They see it as indispensable.

The side effect of this mind-numbing is manipulated mob-think and its unpredictable consequences. Two mobs pop up at a political event in response to two sources of manipulating media. A demonstration and counter-demonstration turn into a riot. Red hats against bandana-covered faces. To what end? Calmer individuals in the mobs recite sound bites in empty monotone when asked. Like zombies.

This zombie apocalypse is in progress. And it is spreading stealthily through screens big and small. But, unlike media fiction about zombie apocalypses, there are no legions of survivalists wielding ice picks of skepticism into infected frontal lobes. 

What can stop this corporate evil? Well, the last great waves of corporate social domination led to World War I in The West, The Great Depression and World War II globally. These were corrections of sorts, unintended and lethal corrections. I happen to believe that our planetary ecosystem demands balance. The greater the imbalance, the greater the correction. 

So what could balance out this great evil of surveillance capitalism and oligarchy? A massive disruption or collapse of the world's electricity supply chain would do it instantly. This is the stuff of mid-20th-century sci-fi, but it is still true today. A nuclear conflict would also be an effective global correction. And climate change, if it has a threshold that should not be crossed, may well be the most likely correcting force. 

As long as corporate profits are flowing into the pockets of those at the top, the dangers associated with the evil of mass manipulation grow. In a media age, the life force of that flow of capital are electronic media. Communication media do not have a history of inner reform before an external correction brings them down.