America’s Road to Nowhere

The public becomes dumber, in part, because our media is a dumbing-down machine. No wonder, alternative voices are brushed to the margins by our not so free press. This past week, I was interviewed by RT and AlJazeera, but none of the U.S. TV news networks that I used to work for will have me on. It’s not a personal thing: I am not alone.

Yes, MSNBC has added two progressive hosts, but in the morning, on weekends, when viewing is lowest. Fox, meanwhile, dumped Judge Napolitano and his sometime sensible and outspoken libertarian show. Can’t have that, can we?

It’s time for Occupy Wall Street to add media reform to its emerging agenda. The media war is as real as any other, and unless we fight that one, we will lose all the others. Politics is a war of ideas, of different narratives in collision. It’s not enough to chant, “We are the 99 percent.” We have to explain who rules America and how to change it.

One way to do it is educate the country about how many of the same interests that own the banks own the media. Perhaps that’s why most media outlets are not reporting that unemployment increased this month and that underemployment is up to 19 percent.

(Source: azspot)