The folly of media reform
Media Review
By Stephen Dunifer
|  As
the saying goes, no matter how much lipstick you apply
to a pig, it is still a pig. Such is the case of media
reform. In the final analysis, it is a discussion about
making the jail cell more comfortable.
No matter the nature or degree of reform proposed,
media reform advocates are blind to the greater context
out of which the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
arose. Surrendering the broadcast airwaves to corporate
interests is the accepted narrative surrounding the
Communications Act of 1934, enabling legislation that
created the FCC. True as this narrative may be, a much
larger political gestalt was in motion.
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Put succinctly, the corporate media empires are large cogs
in an engine of imperial war and conquest. This relationship
was formalized by the Communications Act of 1934.
As much as the left tends to wax nostalgic about the 1930’s,
it ignores the largely covert war preparation program that
was put into play by Roosevelt with domestic economic recovery,
social uplift and job programs providing the cover story.
Roosevelt implemented a sweeping mobilization of resources
and programs to place the United States in a position to conduct
a major global war in the Pacific and Europe.
Beginning with the Committee on Public Information (aka Creel
Commission), whose World War I propaganda efforts are well
documented by Noam Chomsky in the book Manufacturing Consent,
the US government continued with both overt and covert efforts
to regiment the public mind—aided and abetted by academia,
media institutions and industry. Witness the extremely racist
cartoons created in the 1930’s to portray the Japanese
in the worst possible way. If your intent is to move a population
from a relatively pacifist or isolationist position to one
that is supportive of a global war, then it would make perfect
sense to place the broadcast spectrum in trusted hands—RCA,
Western Electric, etc. Certainly not labor unions whose definition
of a bayonet is "a sharp instrument with a worker at
each end." Further, you sweeten the pot with the prospect
of obscene war profits—according to some statistics,
corporate America made $1,000,000 of profit for every US service
person killed during World War II. Finally, you take the propaganda
machine that has been running since 1916 or so and supercharge
it once the war has begun. At the end of WW II, this machine
was not switched off. Instead, it was turned full bore on
the American public.
Many major media figures, both frontline journalists and
corporate bosses, had prominent positions in this war propaganda
apparatus. For example, William Paley, CEO of CBS, served
as deputy chief of the psychological warfare branch of General
Dwight Eisenhower’s staff. When that is not sufficient
you buy journalists by the dozen as the CIA did in the 1950’s.
Now most of them are such skanky whores they do not have an
asking price.
Given the integral and vital role of media in creating and
maintaining a hyper-saturated propaganda environment domestically
and an ongoing campaign of media imperialism abroad one would
have to be delusional to think that any degree of reform is
going to fundamentally alter this reality, or be allowed to
have any meaningful effect by the ruling elite. As long as
reform is maintained as the only "viable and realistic"
option available, and its advocates can roam about their comfortably
appointed play pens, underwritten by liberal foundations,
then those who run and service this mechanistic Moloch, to
which all must be sacrificed in the name of profit and greed,
can rest undisturbed.
Further, most advocates of reform fail to recognize that
every citizen of the United States is the target of an ongoing
psychological warfare campaign. It is terra-forming of the
human internal landscape. An old movement slogan had it right,
"It is hard to fight an enemy who has an outpost in your
head." When someone is carpet bombing your mind every
second, minute and hour of the day, blowing the hell of out
of your sense of self-esteem, self-identity and self-worth,
would any intelligent, free thinking person believe that media
reform aspirin is the solution and cure? No fucking way!
Yes, many worlds are possible. Only if we step outside our
jail cells and reject the narcotizing effects of reform. Our
only option is to continue to create our own systems of media
and information with massive campaigns of electronic civil
disobedience on a global scale; screw their broadcast regulations,
intellectual property laws, v-chips, internet filters, self-appointed
gate keepers, proprietary software, indecency standards and
all other impediments to the free flow of news, ideas, cultural
expression and artistic/intellectual creativity. Stick your
thumb in the Cyclopean eye of media monopoly and thought control.
Hack the planet, hijack the starship!!!
Stephen Dunifer is the founder of Free Radio Berkeley
and author of several books on the micro power movement. He
also co-edited Seizing the Airwaves.
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