Easily laudable

It was great to watch Jon Stewart crucify Jim Cramer on March 12. It was beautiful. Stewart argued passionately for CNBC to start doing reporting for the good of the people, instead of cozying up to the fat cats on Wall Street, and ignoring all their corruption. As Stewart elsewhere has put it, he wants the media to: “Come work for us again.”

Here is a link to the show.

Jon Stewart and his team’s obvious brilliance has been touted all over the world, but this latest battle with CNBC and Jim Cramer seems to have caught everyone’s attention. You can read page upon page about it in news papers, on web sites, on blogs and watch it talked about on TV. It even found its way to press secretary Robert Gibbs’ press briefing room, where it was described as serious journalism and thoroughly enjoyable.

I just read about the well deserved comparison of Jon Stewart to Edward R. Murrow in the paper of record, The New York Times, who described how this comparison was now being made by journalists all over the US.

Murrow was really an icon, and I love the portrayal of him in the movie Good Night and Good Luck, where he takes on Senator McCarthy and argues vehemently for TV not only being used as an instrument of entertainment, but also as an instrument which can teach, illuminate and inspire people.

The main arguments of Murrow and Stewart are more or less the same. Both want TV and the news to have the best interest of the people in mind. It is noble to argue for this. It is a noble endeavor to seek this. It is a noble cause to fight for this. And even though I admire both Jon Stewart and Edward R. Murrow greatly, I have to be honest and say that their argument is utter folly, and that it is based on false logic and a lack of understanding of the dominant forces in American society.

The basics of commercial media are pretty simple. The viewers or readers are not the audience, they are the product. The articles or the TV shows are not the content, they are the filler. Other corporations are the audience. The commercials are the content.

The huge corporations who own news papers or TV networks use these as a business to sell audiences to other corporations, so that these corporations will pay for the opportunity to advertise.

It then logically follows that TV networks want to maximize the product, namely the viewers, and at the same time shape their filler material so that it creates a good image of either current advertisers or possible future advertisers. All incorporated businesses are bound by law to maximize their profitability for their owners, so it would either take a completely stupid or criminal corporate management not to follow this logical conclusion.

Furthermore it also follows logically that any filler material the public is served by these corporations, such as for example news, never has the public’s best interest at heart, only the bottom line of the corporations.

In such totalitarian systems, because corporations are 100 % undemocratic, the only concern for the public good will be found with individuals. It is good that people like Stewart or Murrow laud such individuals and try to be them themselves.

The reason however that Stewart and Murrow are so highly praised by everyone in the corporate media and by many among the elites, is not only because what they are doing is obviously praiseworthy to anyone who can think their way out of a paper bag, but also because what they are doing is not challenging the system – only appealing to the people within it to do their best.

The corporate media is teeming with great reporters who quite often report real and thoughtful news, with the common good of the people in mind. These reports are however always in a great minority, always given few resources and never allowed the access or audience they deserve, because they are helpless in the big picture of the corporate system.

This is the reason why the US public hardly heard any voices opposing the second Iraqi war before it was already too late. This is the reason why the US public hardly heard any voices questioning the stability of the financial markets before the crash the fall of 2008. This is the reason why the US public hardly hears any voices in the corporate mass media supporting “single payer health care” – a policy that the majority of the people themselves support, and what almost every other industrialized nation on the planet considers as the best solution.

Stewart and Murrow get easy access and praise in the corporate media because they do not see the obvious truth – That their prophetical and true criticisms of the TV networks do not at all address the underlying reasons for the problems.

Jon Stewart said it perhaps best himself when he mocked Jim Cramer for expecting a CEO to tell him the truth about his company. For this I must now mock Jon Stewart, whom I admire and greatly enjoy watching, for expecting that a corporate network could ever tell the US public the truth about the world.

Contempt for democracy

It is with quite a bit of horror and dread I think back on the Vice Presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.

The shrill voice of Sarah Palin still makes me physically ill, not because of its timbre but because of the words it speaks. She was clearly not engaged on the very important political issues, and did obviously not understand them at all. She was running in a beauty pageant to become the next VP of the US. I have no problem either accepting or understanding this, only a problem with all the people who pretended to take her seriously.

Oddly enough it was not Sarah Palin who made the most outrageous statement the night of the VP debate, that came from Joe Biden. Not only was Biden’s statement outrageous, but it was also so incredibly contemptible that I couldn’t wait to see it make headlines all across the US the following morning.

But what did I find? Nothing. Not a word anywhere. Sure you could read page upon page about how Sarah Palin said she would not answer the questions like the Washington-insiders would like her to, or how she kept winking to the audience, but not the New York Times, HuffingtonPost or even my beloved DemocracyNow mentioned Biden’s disgraceful statement from the evening before, and neither did anyone else I could find.

What was this statement you might ask yourself? Well here it is at 4:28:

Biden criticises President Bush for allowing the Palestinians to hold elections after the death of Arafat. Now this sentence should make every awake journalist in the world stare at the TV in disbelief.

Biden tells us that both he and Obama opposed the elections in Palestine in 2006. Elections which international observers said were free and fair. Elections which were held in a part of the world starved on democracy. Elections held among a group of people, the Arabs, who are generally ruled by vicious dictators, and who desperately yearn for a way to take part in the governing of their own countries.

As outrageous as Biden’s statement was, it is nothing compared to the lack of reporting this issue got around the world after the debate. It really speaks volumes as to how widespread the indoctrination is in the media, and how deep the utter contempt for democracy runs.