Journalist Chris Hedges Is Arguably too Vitriolic a Critic of Corporatist Culture to Gain a Foothold in Our Attention — but He Is Consistently Right

25 March 2013

Chris Hedges’ latest column affirms something that I’ve noticed — there’s hardly ever anything intelligent on news-related television

Yesterday, he said:

I am not sure exactly when the death of television news took place.

The descent was gradual—a slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news.

But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003, when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls for war in Iraq.

Donahue and Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who challenged the rush to war in Iraq.

General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice.

Donahue was fired, and at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure.

It used to be that you could turn on cable television — or read a newspaper — and see something both informative and nuanced

For example, years ago, I could watch CNN and get a feel for what was going on in the world. No longer.

When the network replaced anchor Aaron Brown with Anderson Cooper, it essentially replaced intelligent inquisitiveness with innocuous pretty boy sensationalism. Cooper’s show has gotten so inane that I no longer can tolerate watching it. The rest of CNN pretty much parrots the same brand of Cooper-esque pap.

The slide into bread and circuses is apparent across all television news and analysis outlets.

The phenomenon, of course, is not isolated to television. Most early mornings, I scan a very long series of English language media websites from much of the world. Their contents are repetitively shallow. After reading three, I can pretty much tell you (a) what’s going to be on the rest and (b) how badly covered.

Perhaps the only reliable exception is privately owned Al Jazeera English, which still tries to find things out — and then delivers its news in often concisely penetrating ways. Al Jazeera’s exception to the overall trend is most probably due to its comparative freedom from being a slave to external financing.

Corporatism’s claw hold?

Mr. Hedges explains Stupidity’s mechanism of control:

The celebrity trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script.

They spin the same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or acknowledge the structures of corporate power.

Their role is to funnel viewer energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or Republicans are not corporate pawns.

The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, General Electric or ExxonMobil.

These corporations, in return for the fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people, usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable.

And when there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did, along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.

Amen to that.

Meanwhile, our troops and “foreigners” are still dying as a result of America’s misbegotten wars

It is exactly because Truth matters that our corporatist state ignores it.

Why be truthful, when lies are so much more profitable. After all, it’s only a comparative handful of people who are dying. And, in the absence of a universal military draft, virtually no one cares about them.

The moral? — When evidence-based Truth is no longer the ultimate goal, all manner of “sin” follows

That explains Chris Hedges’ vitriol. And mine.

PeteFree.com

Journalist Chris Hedges Is Arguably too Vitriolic a Critic of Corporatist Culture to Gain a Foothold in Our Attention — but He Is Consistently Right