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I recently left a comment on the website of a radio station I worked at for a long time. It breaks my heart to see this station's ass getting kicked all over the place by media outlets like Fox News Radio, where Alan Colmes covered Bradley Manning long, long before anyone else did, interviewing Daniel Ellsberg and providing nightly commentary. Anyway, when I worked there, a dangerous trend was in place: the reliance upon television media for news updates. When it comes to "breaking" news, that's fine. TV news has the resources to cover that.
But when it comes to important and deeply-involved issues of public health and public safety, issues that won't get coverage because to expose the issues means threatening someone's money supply, that was the station where it could happen. And it didn't and it doesn't.
I left a comment to the effect that to find what's actually going on, one MUST turn away from advertiser-supported sources of information. Advertising is never going to go away, and it's not necessarily evil. It is what it is.
But unless there are TRUE alternative sources of information, sources that are truly independent, sources that can be checked for authenticity, compared with other independent sources for verification, and vetted by *truly* independent experts, the communication system humanity relies upon for survival will be broken.
The fact that most people do not understand the simple truth of communication politics means that they will take what's available---what voices are in their ears, on their radios, or televisions. Most people don't have time to dig, to read, to research, to obsess (like yours truly) about what the F is actually going on and why certain issues have the unmistakable smell of bullshit and obfuscation.
And even smart, worldly, savvy people fall for it. That's because they truly believe, at some level, that the "free market" leads to competition, which ensures that news organizations will compete for "scoops."
They do not. What they do--because media companies ARE full of people who DO want to report important information---is they report all the conventional, expected stuff, the crimes, the DA's press releases, the City Council votes, the Mayor's pontifications, the weather disasters. And then, in among all that stuff, when and where they can get away with it, they report the stuff that's going to piss someone off.
There is NO journalistic enterprise that can report on all the things that matter---because the things that matter involve human beings with money, career and family at stake. The plant spewing pollution into the water at Woburn employed people who needed the cash to feed their families. The lawyers who defended the plant's operators needed the jobs; the politicians who allowed the pollution to happen didn't want to be exposed; and so, people were poisoned, sickened and killed. And the people who were wronged didn't even win the lawsuit--and the lawyers who fought for them were bankrupted and driven out of the business.
Happy endings are never guaranteed. There is too much at stake, and too little leadership in the healing arts.
What of communication?
It's all here, and available. It's available from individuals who are looking at their surroundings, observing, and recording. If I find one person reporting on trees dying, that's just one person.
But there are many more people reporting and noticing dying trees.
And there are experts tracking the death of bee populations.
Something is happening, and it's very important.
I can't figure it all out all by myself.
The computer is here to help us communicate, but too often I see it preventing communication, causing confusion and alienation, causing people to seek answers within screens and not in front of their own faces. I myself am guilty of it--seven years now of daily physical and mental conditioning, on the computer.
And yet---and yet. As much as I complain about the computer, there are people on the other end. Those people need to be heard. We know what the TV people say. They say the same stuff over and over again and they themselves don't even sound like they believe it. Show me a TV show, and I will show you a lack of passion and immediacy.
But as much as I hate TV, and I do, I love YouTube.
It gives me hope. Because people are communicating--and sending pictures.
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