A
library for the price of a book.
Consider the neutrino. Billions of these pass harmlessly through
our bodies every day and we are not aware of them. They do not affect
us in any measurable way. HAS THE NEWS BECOME LIKE THE NEUTRINO,
present all around but lacking the power to change us, omnipresent and
impotent at the same time?
Who benefits from the trivialization of the news?
The paradox of the Information Age is that information has become so
commonplace it is meaningless. We have become immunized from its
bite.
In an earlier age, before the Industrial Revolution, when the great democracies of America and France were being born, information was power.
It was feared. It was adored. It carried with it the promise
of great transformation.
The Founding Fathers recognized the power of ideas and facts.
They granted information and speech special status. They exempted
these things from the inexorable laws of economics as enunciated by Adam
Smith. They removed information from the sweep of the “invisible
hand.”
Why would a group of dedicated capitalists do such a counterintuitive
thing?
Because information was not a commodity, like tea or animal pelts.
It was the INVISIBLE ETHER OF DEMOCRACY.
This is how the notion of the Fourth Estate came into existence.
The press was the great disseminator of information. Democracy required
the informed consent of the governed. “Informed” implied “information.”
The Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians accepted this notion.
It’s why we have the Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
It’s why we have a Declaration of Independence and a Constitution.
It’s why we developed a democratic republic, “if we can keep it.”
Newspapers and pamphlets proliferated in early America. Every
town had at least one. Every fledgling party had one.
Before the age of media consolidation, ideas mattered, at least to
the Caucasian property owners who enjoyed that early franchise.
We have greatly expanded that franchise. Now every adult citizen
can vote, yet under half bother to do so. WHY?
A democracy that believed its own hype should embrace the notion of
mandatory voting, and provide minor sanctions for non-participation.
The goal should be to raise the voting percentage over 90%. The drivers
license fees might be doubled, or cable television access suspended, for
those who chose not to comply. Nothing criminal, just a small civil
penalty.
Who would win elections then? How would the parties frame their
platforms differently?
Why does nobody advocate this? Why is the governing elite of
America afraid of the near universal exercise of the franchise?
Why do the media not live up to their historic function and ask questions
like these?
It’s not because the media have become too corporate. It’s because
the media have fallen from their state of grace. They used to be
exempt from the requirement of showing a profit. They performed a
vital public service. They encouraged the informed consent of the electorate.
Even after the media became corporate and comglomerate, they continued
to inhabit the high ground of the Fourth Estate. I can remember when
Walter Cronkite or William S. Paley would go before the CBS shareholders
and proudly defend the unprofitability of the news. Even after consolidation,
broadcasting licenses were premised on such public service contributions.
What has happened?
For one thing, the nature of the media has changed. Print morphed
into radio, radio morphed into television, and television morphed into
the Internet.
The change from radio to TV was especially critical. TV is the
greatest device for selling commodities ever invented. But there
was a ghost in that selling machine.
The lurking spectral ghost was our old friend, the Invisible Hand.
Selling commodities should have made TV so profitable that it could easily
underwrite the news division.
This required men and women of good will who had faith in our democratic
system. At some point, these people were replaced, gradually, by
technocratic managers and bean counters who, like piranhas in a tank of
tropical fish, consumed all the competition.
The exemption of the Fourth Estate slowly eroded, and the defenders
of the old system got so wealthy they abandoned the crusading principles
that attracted them to journalism in the first place.
Could I make this argument to Bill O’Reilly, or even to embedded Ted
Koppel, without being shouted down in the first instance, or euphemized
away in the second? I doubt it.
Those of you who agree with me are the true conservatives, the real
traditionalists.
Those who breathlessly communicate the latest government spin are the
new totalitarians, the American Bolsheviks.
Our country has already betrayed its anti-imperialist beginnings at
least twice in my lifetime – in Vietnam and in Iraq. For charity’s
sake, I’ll overlook Grenada and Panama, Chile and Colombia, Libya and East
Timor.
What can we do about all this? What specific objectives should
we focus upon this weekend, and in ongoing future efforts?
Allow me to make six specific suggestions.
We invent and enable a means to counteract, in real time or nearly
so, the distortions and narrow points of view that the mainstream media
offer us in the names of fairness and balance. And we develop a clever
marketing plan to spread this counter-programming far and wide.
We take advantage of burgeoning consumer digital technology by establishing a central clearinghouse for all non-professional media. Example: a UN aid worker in the Sudan shoots some handheld digital video proving genocide. He or she should be able to upload this to a central server from any Internet Café, and by so doing, would waive all ownership rights. This video would then be available to anyone willing to pay a nominal public access download fee.
We establish a popular think tank to seek alternatives to war (which is obsolete in this age of suicide bomber terror). Democracy is one export that, by its very nature, cannot be coercively implemented. It is, instead, an inevitable consequence of fairly-distributed affluence.
We find a way to encourage cross-platform comparisons. For example, why have the aggregate European Union countries, which possess an economy and technology level comparable to the USA’s, chosen such a different developmental path? What can these two great economies learn from one another?
We insist that ideas like these, and their historical antecedents, be taught to our young people in participatory ways. Every mature adult system and institution that we set up should have an educational counterpart that invites the up-and-coming generation to further refine our ideas, the ones they shall inherit.
We create a global planet watch that does for environmental understanding
what our digital clearinghouse does for human rights.
If we are to become the media, if we seek to replace the cheerleaders
of distortion with visionaries of proportion, if we choose to create a
better world for all by persuasion and not by coercion, we should learn
from those who have turned the marketing of products into a science and
similarly market our ideas to an eager world.
This entails promoting positive programs and challenging the darker
assumptions about human nature that propel our opposition accurately and
with good humor.
Remember the neutrino? Even though we cannot sense its presence,
it affects the cosmic balance of the universe. The way we conceive
and enable our media has the same potential to affect the quality of our
lives, and those that will come hereafter, on the fragile planet that is
our communal home.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard SeltzerA
library for the price of a book.
The
Middle East -- Context for Conflict: Iraq, Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon,
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States. Historical
background and context for understanding today's news. This CD contains
the full text of 10 "Country Studies" published by the Federal Research
Division of the Library of Congress. Each country study is presented as
a single document, in plain text form -- easy to read, to print, and to
search (rather than as a collection of over 100 separate documents for
each book). The tables in the appendix of each book are presented as html
documents. In addition, we include: The 2003 edition of the CIA
World Factbook, an interlinked set of hundreds of HTML documents, with
detailed up-to-date reference information on every country in the world,
with images of maps and flags; and some classic works of history, literature,
and religion, including The Koran and books on the traditions of Judaism,
all in plain text form. Complete
table of contents Free sample: Iraq,
a Country Study.
Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
The Readers' Corner and
Writers Showcase
Return to B&R Samizdat Express
| Internet Business Showcase: | ||
|
|
|