United States of Distraction

I check a few websites daily to get my news (most are linked to the right – l mean physically on this blog) and one of them (nj.com) is that of the state’s largest newspaper which has by far the least pertinent information for me. Based on my rough estimate of New Jersey-related events and the percentage that the Star-Ledger covers:

• Local government budgets – 0%
• Murders – 1% (unless  a pretty woman is involved in which case it jumps to 50%)
• New Jersey public pension system – 2% (which drops to 0% if you exclude official press releases)
• Bruce Springsteen – 25%
• Mike Francesa’s app: 50%
• “Jersey Shore” – 75% (which jumps to 100% if either Snooki or Mike “The Situation” is involved)

Why the embargo on so much that directly impacts our lives and the obsession with what any thinking individual would deem trivia? This book blames it on corporate ownership (either direct or rented through advertising) of the media. Excerpts follow with my comment at the end*.

The dystopian scenarios portrayed in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World look like understatements compared to today’s plutocratic deployment of communications technologies, many of them developed by taxpayer-funded government programs and grants. (page 16)

Giving people motivating opportunities to think for themselves on matters of public importance and peril is far superior to pleading, necessary as that is, with networks, the cable industry, and the woeful PBS and NPR. (page 20)

While Democrats and Republicans openly clash over issues of social justice, women’s rights, gun control, diversity, health care, and immigration, certain matters remain quietly uncontested: issues of free markets, globalized trade, militarization, surveillance, corporate power, tax cuts, and bailouts. (page 27)

“A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself.” Joseph Pulitzer (page 37)

[Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton] recognized that in the four decades since [Lyndon] Johnson’s jackass joke, the press had become less focused on holding politicians publicly accountable and more focused on furthering their own commercial interests. (page 38)

In 1974, they succeeded in exempting newspapers from the 1934 Communications Act, opening the way for newspaper monopolies to emerge by removing the limits of ownership. After the Telecommunications Act of 1996 effectively gutted the 1934 Communications Act, diversity of media ownership significantly diminished, with the fifty corporations that owned the bulk of the media during the 1980s being reduced to six by 2012: News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS, and Comcast. (pages 46-7)

In 1962, historian Daniel J. Boorstin anticipated that the rise of “the image,” in combination with U.S. commercial culture, would lead us to increasingly consume news that was based on nothing more than manufactured “pseudo-events.” (page 55)

In a post-truth era, the quality of statements is measured by how many people believe they are true, not if they are actually true. (page 97)

Given the dismal state of the economy for journalists in general, incentives are needed to cultivate independent local news programming and community journalism. Local journalism can be re-created through subsidies from federal and state governments, as well as the involvement of state- and community-level colleges and universities. (page 168)

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* The gap between the last two comments is because a good portion of the middle two chapters focused on examples of what the authors view as Trump lying and distorting the truth which was either over-familiar or irrelevant to me. It is that last quote about government subsidizing local coverage where I started paying attention again and it delineated my main problem with the book. Yes, corporations do buy media coverage and propagandize the populace (tobacco and liquor did it in the old days with insurance and pharmaceuticals the most obvious players these days) but what of politicians who are also bought to distract? What kind of media coverage are they going to subsidize?