The Corporate Owned News has been slow-boiling you like a frog for decades
“Don’t jump out now, hot little frog, it’s just getting interesting!”
I remember when the news changed. The news throughout my childhood had always a kind of dry, banal recitation of events, with some State Dept. spin on the side and someone like Walter Cronkite reading the script. You usually never really found out what was actually happening (like maybe … the illegal mass bombing of Laos and Cambodia) but you didn’t feel like you were listening to heavy handed state-sponsored propaganda. It certainly didn’t feel like some kind of warped entertainment venue with snide jokes about foreign leaders. It was the boring old news.
But then things changed. If you lived through it, you might have noticed that, in the early 1990s, the news began to get chummier, like a talk show. Maybe even like a game show. More like the rest of the crap on TV at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The initial shift seemed very rapid to me. At places like CNN, Bernard Shaw was out, and Wolf Blizter was in. We even went through what seemed like the game show phase with things like Crossfire, on CNN. This trend continued until the Bush era, when news took another turn. Now the state department propaganda on outlets like Fox, CNN and MSNBC became very noticeable. By the middle of Obama’s presidency, the propaganda got very thick. That’s when Obama decided to overturn the Smith-Mundt Act with the Smith-Mundt “Modernization” Act. This ended prohibition of the United States from broadcasting US propaganda inside the United States.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/house-bill/5736
The Blob wants to push political opinion to the right as far as it can because this enables the plan to privatize and militarize the entire world for The Blob’s benefit. They push the limits of hyper-conservatism to see how far past them they can go, relentlessly. So the rhetoric gets more and more extreme, until last week’s extreme seems almost reasonable. The simple fact is, it works, as long as the public frog is boiled slowly and relentlessly. They use a ratchet effect, where once they get the public to accept something that is very harmful, like mass surveillance, they never let it slip backwards to how it was before. Then they push further to the right again, like internet censorship, and lock that in place. The overall effect is that the Overton Window has now moved so far to the right that in retrospect, Richard Nixon almost seems like a hippie and Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell speech makes him sound like a commie.
Just know that the Corporate Owned News is not an information source. They are two things, and two things only: money-making entertainment businesses, and state-sponsored propaganda outlets. If you are still treating them like the boring old news, you are living in the 1970s. It’s time to engage that news skeptic in you that has been dormant for years.
If you were born after 1990, you have lived your entire life with the chummy version of the news; the People Magazine version of the news, where celebrity and infamy are key attractions. Forget about policy, that doesn’t bring in the ad dollars, and might make people think too much. Forget about honest analysis, that’s not good for business. If you want real information about what is going on in the world, you can’t go to the TV and expect to find what you want. It’s not there. The Blob is very active right now in restricting your ability to find information that is not endorsed by The Blob. While you still can, search out alternative sources of information, where the people involved don’t have an agenda handed to them by corporations, or the state department. Don’t let The Blob lead you around by the nose.
Don’t get boiled.