Orwell simply had no idea. “The media is the right arm of anarchy,” thus spake Dan Brown. Can I hear an “Amen!”? They still enjoy cover from the hoary and anachronistic that they and we share concomitantly an interest in news proliferation. Accurate at that.
Controlled diversion. In fact I can think of no better anarchic co-conspirator than today’s news gatherers. In this, today’s audio transmission I compared the “front pages” of the New York Daily News and the New York Post with a very popular alternative news aggregator. The differences could not possibly be more startling and obvious. The mainstream media that we accept as authoritative provides a daily buffet of intellectual junk food. Cerebral poison and imagination killing contaminants. They repeat and do not report.
Hamburger Helper for the soul. They are pop culture generators and serve the front page, bumper sticker, echo chamber, cookie-cutter worldview of denizens of this most complicated social experiment. This, mind you, while they bemoan plummeting viewer and readership numbers. When newsrooms are shattered and institutional tabloids and newspapers are up for sale. Instead of shoring up their resources and making a full-fledged and bona fide commitment to readership culling, calling and attraction, it’s business as usual. More direct. More pablum and bunkum and intellectually void morsels of nothing. Listen to the stories I inform you about that I guarantee you, you will hear nothing about today from those you’ve entrusted to awareness to. And not his well that, as the Google story which I reference illustrates, the sources of institutional censorship will be from platforms and media that are not subject to state control and where allegations of state action would not lie. If Google can rank websites and in effect reject references to a site that it deems not verified, think what this means in the commercial circuitry of free thought. And when you have complicity between private entities and DARPA-like research configurations, it’s very difficult for the civil libertarian to unravel this Gordian knot.
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