How Our Media Fails Us

...Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.

Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.

These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.

Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people.

Thus speaks the unimpeachable Bill Moyers, the journalist's journalist, on what We can now laughingly call the Fourth Estate. Conceived as the ultimate counterbalance to Executive, Legislative and Judiciary powers, Our media--especially the sludgepile We have in Puerto Rico--is but a self-serving, bottom-feeding,  morally-bereft herd of horse's asses braying loudly in the hopes of garnering attention. 

In the U.S. of part of A., media ownership convergence has reached "incest-based mongoloid" status. Don't take My word for it: Just peek at this chart. In Puerto Rico, media ownership is largely sheer corporations with absentee ownership, so "Money as King" is the only journalistic "standard." As for newspapers, the Ferré-Rangel cartel IS the very definition of "deeply embedded in the power structures of society, (and thus) not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work."

Moyers does have a solution: "...The fate of the cyber-commons — the future of the mobile Web and the benefits of the Internet as open architecture — is up for grabs. And the only antidote to the power of organized money in Washington is the power of organized people at the net roots... Wherever the Internet flows — on PCs, cell phones, mobile devices and, very soon, new digital television sets — we must ensure that it remains an open and nondiscriminatory medium of expression."

Organized people. Attentive people. People that are engaged, alert, involved and committed to true progress, not self-serving fraud. Quoting Moyers again: "Democracy only works when ordinary people claim it as their own."

Unless We stand up for Ourselves, unless We choose the points where Our entire being says without reserve "This is what I believe is true and I will not let you lie to Me any longer," We will continue to lose ground to the vermin who act against Us. It is Our responsibility and We cannot--We must not--shirk it.

Let Moyers himself make it perfectly clear: "As journalism goes, so goes democracy."

The Jenius Has Quoted.