>Almost every day I encounter a jeremiad berating "the Media" for NOT being "pro-democracy," at all or enough. This complaint expresses a misunderstanding ot the evolution of "the press.
>The media can't be "pro-democracy," because they are inherently "pro-Corporate," owned lock, stock and barrel and directed by boardrooms of mega (and not infrequently MAGA) corporations which, as we all know, are autocratic and authoritarian and thus hostile to equality.
>The Media Consolidation movement of the late 70s through the 90s--it might properly be described as "monopolization"--erased the public as its sponsor and turned to customers. The "free press" completed AJ Liebling's prescience when in the late '40s he wrote, "The press is free... to those who own one."
>Any "media-ted" communication is necessarily and unavoidably altered in the process. None of our experiences which we do not live in the existential moment are "authentic." All have been infused with the "intention" of the interests which own and control them. and those interests are inherently, at the minimum, passively aggressively hostile to democracy and equality.
>Nothing you/we have learned, essentially since birth, has been unedited except our raw experience. So, part of the purpose of a "good education" is to provide one with the tools necessary to deconstruct the edited versions, and make informed decisions about how to interpret them.
Yeah, adulting's hard.
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