Posted on by Ara

Bill Moyers on the media marketplace

There are a few speakers who I always want to listen to if I have the chance (in no particular order):

I don’t always agree with them and often I am diametrically opposed to their positions; but they are always interesting, articulate and challenging.

Let’s add Bill Moyers to the list:

For years, the media marketplace for opinions about public policy has been dominated by a highly disciplined, thoroughly networked, ideological “noise machine,” to use David Brock’s term.

Permeated with slogans concocted by big corporations, their lobbyists, and their think tank subsidiaries, public discourse has effectively changed the meaning of American values. Day after day, the ideals of fairness and liberty and mutual responsibility have been stripped of their essential dignity and meaning in people’s lives.

Day after day, the egalitarian creed of our Declaration of Independence is trampled underfoot by hired experts and sloganeers, who speak of the “death tax,” “the ownership society,” “the culture of life,” “the liberal assault on God and family,” “compassionate conservatism,” “weak on terrorism,” “the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” “no child left behind.”

They have even managed to turn the escalation of a failed war into a “surge,” as if it were a current of electricity through a wire, instead of blood spurting from the ruptured vein of a soldier.

The Orwellian filigree of a public sphere in which language conceals reality, and the pursuit of personal gain and partisan power, is wrapped in rhetoric that turns truth to lies and lies to truth.

So it is that limited government has little to do with the Constitution or local economy anymore. Now it means corporate domination and the shifting of risk from government and business to struggling families and workers.

Family values now mean imposing a sectarian definition of the family on everyone else.

Religious freedom now means majoritarianism and public benefits for organized religion without any public burdens.

And patriotism has come to mean blind support for failed leaders.

It’s what happens when an interlocking media system filters through commercial values or ideology, the information and moral viewpoints people consume in their daily lives. And by no stretch of the imagination can we say today that the dominant institutions of our media are guardians of democracy.