I've talked about it before, but I am going to talk again about the brother sister duo of Amy and David Goodman's book "Static." For those of you who don't know, Amy Goodman is the host of the fantastic, alternative news program Democracy Now! The War and Peace Report.
This book highlights the lies that our government is currently feeding us and the roll that the mainstream media plays in feeding into those lies. There were somethings I already knew something about (Guantanamo Bay, Iraq's lack of WMD's) and other things I heard about but didn't really know about (secret US prisons in other countries, the media's role in the Iraq invasion) and other things I was completely clueless about (the US's role in recent Haitian politics). This is a great book; one that will open your eyes to a lot of the lies that have been taken place in the past 7 years. It also talks about the media's responsibility to question authority and not simply take what they say as face value. Everyone knows that politicians lie, so why is the media accepting what they say as truth? We need a media that is committed to research, questioning, and truthiness (yes, I went there).
As I was reading this book, however, I couldn't help but be discouraged. I don't know how I can stand up against these injustices and I never feel like my voice is heard. Sure, I blog, talk with my community, and attend peace rallies in town, but what good can that really do? Well, I'd like to end with a quote from the end of the book. Amy interviewed Alice Walker, author of the Color Purple, regarding this very issue:
"Sometimes you can't see tangible results. You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal. And a lot of it has to do with the ability to express yourself, your own individual dream and your own individual road in life. And so, we may never stop war. It isn't likely that we will, actually, But what we're doing as we try to stop war externally, what we're trying to do is stop it in ourselves. That's where war has to end. And until we can control our own violence, our own anger, our own hostility, our own meanness, our own greed, its going to be so, so , so hard to do anything out there.
So I think of any movement for peace and justice as something that is about stabilizing our inner spirit so that we can go on and bring into the world a vision that is much more humane that the one that we have dominant today."
1 comment:
I'm curious as to whether the authors mentioned the inherent "cronyism" in the media or if they just think it's some kind of big conspiracy that leads to the media not being critical of the government.
The thing about the media today is that it's not enough to write stories and sell papers...they need advertising money to rival the huge amounts of cash flow of the sitcoms that their ownership company also owns. If you piss off your advertisers, you have no cash flow. So you stay away from anything controversial or critical.
If a journalist in the White House press corp writes something critical or unveils a secret (ie New York Times with the Valerie Plame case) then they get kicked out of the press corp, they don't get the same information and they lose the proximity they had that allowed them to be critical in the first place. Sports writers do this all the time...if someone pisses off Barry Bonds, he stops giving them the quotes they need to do their jobs. So since it's a symbiotic relationship, and so much of the quotes and information in our newspapers come from PR people and hyper-spun soundbites, the news media (the people who write the news, not the commentators)lose their ability to get scoops and be critical. It's not that they don't want to be, they just can't if they want to keep working.
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