Howard Dean used to say, "You have the power!" Once that chant sunk into the consciences of lethargic voters, they got off their butts and starting doing something on their own to make things happen. Well, for a while anyway. But this post is not about Dean's March 2004 implosion. It's about people waking up and realizing the "power" to change the world is entirely in their hands. No longer content to sit around waiting for the official powers that be to make enough improvements in our social atmosphere to have a positive effect on individual lives, they've started taking matters into their own hands. And coming up for 2008, we're about to see how motivating their levels of discontent really are.
Let's take the corporate "mainstream" media as a solid source of this discontent. They've selected the frontrunners of the presidential campaign and annointed them as the only viable choices for the voters. But after repeatedly being discredited for broadcasting their falsehoods all the way back to the beginning of George Bush's 2000 presidential campaign, the people seem to have finally had enough.
And now they, the corporate media, find themselves the topic in more and more discussion about what's wrong with our society. Certainly media-controlled censorship is not a new phenomena by any means, but the extent of it lately appears to be reaching critical mass.
Let's start here with an article about their roles as democratically-subversive kingmakers:
Corporate Media Won't Let the Public Pick the Next President.
This example of reality's absence in mainstream media best illustrates the extent of the bias in their coverage of the presidential campaigns:
Ron Paul Wins Five Straw Polls, Mainstream Media Remains SilentNext, Prof. Paul Levinson analyzes the blatant media bias against Ron Paul as a central theme in his recent lectures and interviews:
We discussed the problem of media bias in general - easy to find, it's pervasive - and I even offered my view that the FCC, in daily violating the First Amendment to our Constitution, is treasonous.
(Podcast here, Levinson's blog here)
Now
these two fellas have taken a more aggressive approach to
hold the media accountable, accusing corporate media of conspiring to censor Ron Paul's campaign to the point of launching RICO criminal charges in their sworn affidavits. Best of luck to them, but after the
recent court ruling that says TV news stations can lie with impunity, I'm not going to hold my breath on this one.
The point here is that with the internet's end-run around media's censorship, and by the power of the internet's
equalizing effect as Dr. Paul would say, more than a few grains of sand are starting to shift underneath the monolithic establishment's foundation.
by Naomi Wolf
