The Fatal Flaw in the Post-Mortem Analyses

[JCanete]

75. You are looking at the FUV as if it isn't a symptom of something systemic.

While you are right, there's a lot of looking in the wrong places, I'd say looking at the product of our societal evolution is not the place to hone in on. The hands on the rudder of our spiraling nation, as much as there are any, should be where we focus, and I contend that one thing we absolutely can pin the election loss on, and so much other shit that has continued dumbing us down more than just civically, is our corporate media. (of course that's symptomatic too, but its closer to the mark.)

I know a counter to that would be that in the scheme of things, nobody watches or reads it, but I assure you, if something gets said on fox, eventually I'll be hearing it from people who never watch Fox, regurgitated to me as a matter of fact. And frankly, in some ways Fox is the least egregious. At least it wears its affiliation on its sleeve..."fair and balanced" slogan be damned.

The rest of our news is horrible, and that isn't just the way the cookie crumbled. It is horrible by design. It is horrible because the corps that own the media barely fund their actual journalism capabilities, and because everything is a third-rail issue when you have to appease the very same corporate advertisers that you would otherwise report on...to say nothing of needing to avoid anything to do with one's parent company or its interests, and you should probably stay away from the interests of dealings of other big corps who have a media wing, because your bosses probably don't want an arms race of . There are a lot of excuses for why good reporting can't get done in the main-stream, but the bottom line is, it can't get done because those who could make it happen, don't.

There's a reason why Thomas Carlyle said the fourth estate was the most important of all, and why Jefferson said “Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.” Because we need it for an informed electorate. We need it to prevent the excesses of gerrymandering and the disenfranchisement of voters, and the vandalism of curriculum in schools.

When the mainstream media is owned so wholly by a handful of mega-corporations, I would suggest that we aren't living in Jefferson's utopia anymore. Sure, people are free to report on anything they like...its a free country, but nobody has to help them be heard.