Our Televisual Fairyland

Check out George Monbiot's A Televisual Fairyland at The Guardian.

The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive regimes do: they internalise the demands of the censor, and understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and what is not."

"So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor..."

Toadies. "Attack Poodles" as James Wolcott calls them. I used to think of them as mere enablers of the Fascist Right, but I was far too generous; they're dues-paying Fascists themselves and they reap many rewards for their allegiances. Well dressed pigs beneath domesticated hair and pancake makeup, winking at each other for being in on the joke that is The News.

I'll never forget listening to Jennings and Brokaw play down the staggering number of protestors at Bush's first coronation; descriptions of a festive, jovial environment that was more than a little disconnected from the tense scenes shown by the cameras. It made for a strange narrative. That's when it hit me the so-called Fourth Estate had completely collapsed, gone as though it never existed.

In hindsight, I feel foolish for ever believing The Fourth Estate was anything more than a comfortable myth. Damn, ain't life full of those.