Back to Business

Well, Karr isn't being charged with killing JonBenet. Hopefully that means that the media circus over the issue can die back down within a week and we can get back to the real issues threatening the nation today: corruption, war, media consolidation, and the devestation of the Gulf Region from last year's Hurricane Katrina. When the media is so focused on the lurid circus of their own self-perpetuation, ignoring all else, then it does little service to democracy, to the need for the public to be well-informed so that they may make decisions. Why couldn't one of the major media outlets focused on important local, national, and world issues during the Karr circus, and leave the for-profit insanity to every other station, newspaper, and newsmagazine across the nation. The American media are serial-sensationalists, focused on the murder cases and fluff of the globe. Campaign coverage is practically issueless, the way the mainstream media portrays it, and only soundbites and photo ops matter: Dean's "Scream", Kerry snowboarding, Bush on an aircraft carrier. The "Scream" is the perfect example, a repetitive attack on a Democratic frontrunner by the media which culminated the end days of the most powerful Internet mobilization of peole power -- democracy -- in this nation as of 2004. An Internet movement that once again made myself, and others of my generation, proud to be not only Americans, but Democrats. Progressives. Even... liberals.

This nation is so ruled by for-profit media, with few exceptions to the rule (Christian Science Monitor comes to mind). Everything is about entertaining to increase viewership; all at the expense of information. "Info-tainment" they call it, but have you taken a close look at it lately? More "tainment" than "info", that's for sure, and it's progressively decaying to an even worse standard. There are your bright lights among the murk still, but they come infrequently. Democracy is being held at gunpoint, and the gun is in the hands of the Murdochs of the world. Media is no longer an independent voice to inform the people so that they may make educated decisions: it is a massive entertainment machine operated to maximize circulation and effeciency at the lowest possible cost to the owners. Operating at the least common denominator is not news, not when you've eliminated your own actual national and international reporting and depend on someone else -- AP, Reuters, the Monitor -- to do it for you. And when you do ship one of your guys out there, it's for a media circus: O.J. Simpson Trial, Michael Jackson Trial(s), et cetera.

This is by-far one of the biggest threats to our electorate, lagging only slightly behind partisan redistricting, restricting ability to vote in states like Ohio and Florida, and outright "buying" of the vote through high-paying corporate donors and their "bundling" policies which buys them access to the pols once elected. Why the hell do "we the people" stand for it? This is our democracy, God damn it, and we're going to take it back. And when we do, the news media won't know what the hell hit them. Infotainment is reaching it's limits, all the while the people are striking back: blogging and organizing where they're blind. On the Internet.