Reader caution: rant ahead
A while ago I wrote an article about Bill Maher's proclamation that the job of the media is to make what's important interesting.
The media are now so universally loathed that even lawyers and real
estate speculators rate higher in public opinion. You can't blame us,
especially after last week's disgraceful spectacle. The mainstream
media have Maher's advice exactly backwards: They're trying to make
what's interesting (to the dumbed-down public, in the most lurid and
sleazy sense) important in some way, when it's not. In that sense they have become, in every sense of the word, nothing more than pimps and panderers.
As
the chart above shows, the world's affluent nations are becoming (and
North American nations have already become) Crooked Broker Societies.
The rich and powerful no longer get their hands dirty actually doing
anything of value. They merely use their money and power to
intermediate between desperate vendors and weak, addicted buyers. And
as James Surowiecki has pointed out,
they're not 'honest brokers' either, balancing the interests of vendor
and buyer and mediating for a reasonable fee. They have divided up the
brokerage role into two parts: an exploiter role, designed to subjugate and oppress the desperate supplier, and a procurer
role, designed to pander to and gouge the weak buyer. The exploiters
and procurers then collude (and sometimes merge to play both roles),
paying the supplier next to nothing and charging the buyer a huge
amount for worthless crap. The chart above shows how these roles siphon
wealth from both suppliers and buyers, providing nothing of value in
return, in just about every sector of our modern society.
You
see this in struggling nations, and in areas like North America's inner
cities, where poverty, desperation and lawlessness are endemic. The
fact that this same tawdry oppression of suppliers and gouging of
purchasers is now occurring everywhere attests to the dysfunction of
our political, social and economic systems, and the growing sense of
market anarchy, where any behaviour is justified if it is profitable,
and where the ends always justify the means. It is evidence of a
culture in the terminal stages of decline and disintegration.
Nowhere
is this more evident than in the mainstream 'information' media. This
should probably not be surprising, when these media are owned by a
corporatist oligopoly that measures success by profit, not by the
quantity or quality of information it delivers. For the past week we
have been subjected to the sorry spectacle of these media fawning over
a single deranged man who set them up with the video and audio and the
violence they needed to justify lazily and irresponsibly passing this
off as somehow newsworthy. They were able to play this up for a week
and it cost them essentially nothing. The consequence was to stir up
enough hysteria to sell a lot of newspapers and attract enough bored
ambulance-chasers to make the entire undertaking enormously profitable.
The conservative politicians and corporatists loved it, too --
it took attention away from rampant political and business corruption
and incompetence, and allowed fear-mongers to advocate more crime laws,
conservatives and preachers to lament the decline of moral values in
our society, and propagandists of every stripe to exploit the event for
the media circus it was. The message for publicity-hounds was clear: If
you're desperate to get a lot of global publicity in a hurry, make sure
to (a) kill a lot of people, (b) do it in an affluent nation, (c) do it
in a spectacularly gruesome way, and (d) pre-create and edit your own
audio and video for the media so they can't screw your message up.
Whether or not it means anything, or there is any lesson to be learned
from it, is irrelevant.
In the meantime, between the
propagandists, the media conglomerates and the advertisers, lots of
profits were made and lots of political points were scored, and the
citizenry was left as dumb as ever. Even more dumbed down, in fact,
because of all the events that received little or no coverage while the
mainstream media gleefully and rabidly pimped for a suicidal loser,
political interest groups exploited the 'event' by misinforming the
public about its 'meaning' (with no challenge whatever from the
reporters), and shareholders and advertisers raked in the extra dough
the publicity generated.
It was a shameful, disgraceful
performance but it's one we are getting terribly used to from
exploiters and procurers in every aspect of our lives. Whether it is
the misogyny, sleazy product marketing and violence-promotion of rap
videos, or the willful broadcasting of blatant corporatist lies in
'advertising', or the abrogation of responsibility for investigative
journalism (and the ignoring of citizens' whistle-blowing and
investigation, lest it offend advertisers), or the obsession with the
crime blotter while crises facing our world remain ignored because
they're too complex or too expensive to work on, the mainstream 'information' media show themselves to be nothing more than pimps and
panderers, wasting our time and public bandwidth. Fiddling with
sensationalist minutiae while the world burns.
We need to
liberate hard-working producers and beleaguered customers from the
bullying freeloaders and corporate-welfare bums in the middle two
columns of the chart above, fat, lazy, overpaid, greedy, obscenely
powerful do-nothing middlemen all of them. Let's start throwing out the
crooked brokers who stand between us and reasonably-priced, socially
and environmentally responsible, quality products and services and
important, actionable information. Let's peer-to-peer them all out of
business.
/rant
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
