Down in the Gutter, Looking Up at the Stars

ANNOUNCER: Ladies and Gentlemen. The Network News Hour! With Sybil the Soothsayer, Jim Webbing and his It’s-the-Emmes-Truth Department, Miss Mata Hari and her Skeletons in the Closets, and tonight, another segment of Vox Populi, and starring…

MUSIC: A FLOURISH OF DRUMS.

ANNOUNCER:… the mad prophet of the airwaves, Howard Beale!

— Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (1976)

By Dan Hagen

I tuned in to the Weather Channel one morning just in time to catch the end of a rather odd news report about something they called a “Kim Kardashian.”

I figured it must be some kind of tropical depression.

In fact, of course, it’s a topical depression, and it’s a symptom of a kind of national cultural depression.

“Celebrity news” is just something to keep all those little American citizen-frogs distracted, docile and drowsy as the heat in their pot continues to head up toward the boiling point. Now, on television anyway, news pretty much IS marketing and/or propaganda, and almost nothing more.

Why else would we be subjected to endless stories about worthless, brand-name slut-puppy heiresses and playboys?


The economists have a handy concept called “opportunity cost.” When you invest your resources, the opportunity cost of that deal is the benefits you would have derived from whatever else you might have done with those resources.

Obviously, celebrity slut news has a considerable opportunity cost for the consumer. Celebrity news offers no practical benefit to the person viewing it, and chews up his time and attention.

But for the media corporations that so eagerly provide it, the opportunity cost is on the other foot. Not only is celebrity news cheap to cover (compared to $1 million or so it costs to send a reporter to Afghanistan for a year, for example), but its intellectual opportunity cost is a plus, too. When Americans are lulled into thinking about celebrities who have no possible impact on their actual fate, they are NOT thinking about the national issues that DO have a considerable impact on their lives. And many corporations prefer it that way. Celebrity reporting is a deliberate way to burn up the media oxygen so that little ACTUAL news is covered. Real news incommodes corporations.

Also, vapid media celebrityhood reinforces the corporate-right wing meme that you don't need any of that expensive education, health care or Social Security. Just be extremely rich instead. Must be a common state, since TV is lousy with rich people.

 “In media today, even among journalists who entered the field for the noblest of reasons, there is an internalized bias to simply shy away from controversial journalism that might enmesh a media firm in a battle with powerful corporations or government agencies,” wrote Bob McChesney and John Nichols in Our Media. Not Theirs.

“(R)elatively vast resources are deployed for news pitched at a narrow business class, and suited to their needs and prejudices; such news has come to dominate newspapers, specialty magazines, and cable television. Likewise, news for the masses increasingly consists of stories about celebrities, royal families, athletes, natural disasters, plane crashes, and train wrecks. Political coverage is limited to regurgitating what some politician says.”

The corporate media has demonstrated that it is perfectly willing to peddle us poison and label it lemonade.

I recall when Bush slipped during a press conference and announced that it was “scripted.” The White House altered the transcript to say “unscripted.” Now, tell me, why would anyone announce that a press conference was “unscripted?”

That's when I finally admitted that the once-heroic American press had become a hopelessly corrupted collection of corporate propagandists.

The business shows are there to peddle junk to patsies, right up to the point where Wall Street derivative fraud tanks the market, and the news shows are there to sell terrorist scares and phony military “victories” to patsies — all in the time left between ads for bankruptcy services, “structured settlement” thieves and pills to rescue your poor, lost erection.

Apparently people fleeced and impoverished by unregulated Wall Street crooks have a hard time having a hard time.

Working in concert, the corporate media manipulators can make anything seem to happen, or unhappen. Remember, we went to war to stop weapons that didn't exist. Howard Dean, the most liberal candidate, was kicked out of the race for the ludicrous reason that he supposedly made a funny noise at a screaming rally.

The right wingers even found, to their amazement, that — thanks to their corporate media echo chamber — they were capable of selling even a C-student, combat-dodging serial business failure who is an idiot as presidential material. So now they think they can palm any old winking, lying, phony creep off on the American people — Trump, Palin, Bachmann, Huckabee, Mittens Romneycare, anybody. And maybe they can.

After all, during the 2008 election, thanks to a relentless GOP propaganda campaign aimed at know-nothings, craven and wretched reporting by the corporate media and the general willful, thundering stupidity of the American public, what we were offered as "issues" were such topics as Hillary Clinton's capacity to sob, Barack Obama's middle name, the fear of his “secret Muslim religion,” whether he and his wife indulge in “terrorist fist bumps,” and his bowling score.

This was what the voters in this country allegedly wanted to discuss while deregulated financial fraud collapsed the world economy.

Even the so-called critics of the corporate media are often shills for it. CNN’s Howard Kurtz, for example, has been VERY good at his chosen mission, which is to attack the news media on the rare occasions when it actually does its job of informing the public. Remember how he got an attack of the vapors when Rolling Stone DARED to report Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s remarks when, in front of a reporter, he insulted his commander in chief?

In any sane society, the relevant, important truth about the conduct of a war is called “the news.”

For all their influence, though, the corporate media can still be blindsided. The Occupy movement — something new — caught the corporate media off guard last year, and they had to cover it if only to sow seeds of suspicion about it.

They’ve gotten their marching orders since, and are determinedly ignoring the Occupy revival this spring. And this is the same bunch that provided any lame gathering of 40-odd Tea Baggers with breathless national coverage.

It’s a quite a trick. The corporate media can make the American left simply disappear, with a puff of back-room smoke and the sound of Howard Dean making a funny noise.

And where, for example, is the serious coverage of the continuing Japanese nuclear disaster? The anti-nuclear implications frightened America’s corporate­controlled propaganda media. Hence the tranquilizer gas they sprayed at us.

American corporations are interested only in centralized power that can be delivered over lines to return a constant stream of greenbacks to them. Any alternative must be mocked, questioned and finally buried in media silence. Any permanent, obvious, deadly consequences to people and the planet must be waved away by Sunday morning talk-show gasbags as being irrelevant to what they call a “grown-up conversation.”

The events of the last decade illustrate the fact that the purpose of the corporate “news media” is often not to publish the truth, but A) to see to it that the truth isn’t published or B) to distract the public with puerile trivia if the truth does somehow slip out.

My guess is that we could see blood flowing through the streets of our cities and still watch the corporate news media desperately crank up the volume on the latest celebrity gossip story. Their job is to keep the news hidden, keep the news confused, keep the news brief — to do anything they can do to avoid fully reporting it until it’s too late for the people watching to do anything about it.

The corporate media must pretend, dance a little dance for the fools, to make sure they don't find out what's been done to them, and by whom.