It may be telling that Bill O'Reilly hosts a FOX News show called 'The No-Spin Zone'. If anything can be said of O'Reilly and FOX News, it is that spin is their Raison D'être as it were.
Today many, if not most, westerners gather their daily dosage of current events from television. This medium--this message (to pull a page from Marshall McLuhan)--focuses on entertaining before informing, because after all, revenue is driven by commercials, which are driven by sales, which are driven by entertained people.
Beyond simple entertainment, 24-hour news aims to engage the viewer--not in any intellectual manner however, but immerse them in a realm of tension and hesitancy, where they can seek comfort in familiar things.
Why?
If you look at the stakeholders involved in most mainstream media, you'll find corporations or individuals who need people in western civilization to continue consuming, regardless of the ultimate cost to the consumer's economy or environment. Fortunes are founded on increased consumption.
We are all guilty of this conspicuous consumption. How many of you reading this diary are doing so on a computer a decade or more old? How many of you progressives out there are beginning to realize the cost of this consumption?
I would suspect there are far more hands raised to the latter question than the former.
This is the danger we pose to those who own the media--we have the capability to see beyond the fantasies constructed by our consumer desire and realize the true price we will eventually pay--a price that may well be paid by our children and our grandchildren.
We are the canaries in the coalmine the mine owners wish to stuff and fill with a music box--lest the miners realize the danger they themselves are in.
And so, while FOX and ABC, CNN and NBC, Global and CTV spin their illusions of 'fair and balanced' news and 'reality' shown at the top of the hour, and while the consumer masses are lulled into fantasies of being an American-Idol-Dancing-with-the-Stars-Hummer, the true war on reality is being waged against the Internets Tubes.
Corporatists seek to remove one of the last outlets for reality-based reporting, and condemn us all to a long, twilight struggle against their fantasies.
The freedom of the Internet is hangs in the balance as more pressure is put upon Congress to 'regulate' it 'for the good of good Americans' and most of all, for the good of good old American corporatism.
Sadly the foolish volunteers of the 101st Fighting Keyboardists and others of their ilk, fail to see that the war they wage is but a phantasm, spun and fed to them spoonful by spoonful by their corporate masters. Oh, I'm sure they see themselves as bastions of freedom, protecting the 'troops' and the right wing from the rabid attacks of the leftist lambs.
The reality is, they are slaves now, and will find their shackles growing evermore heavy, should those they support have their way in regulating the Internet.
No, dear kossacks, the true warriors are those progressives that fight for true fair and balanced reporting. They are those who fight for 'one man, one vote' elections where machines cannot be used to disenfranchise humans. They are those who fight for peace, and justice, and good heavens--even the American way.
At least, the American way enshrined in your constitution and bill of rights. The American way the world held to on that horrible day when 'We were all Americans'.
And so, like any ally, I take up the fight on my own home front--for here in Canada there are threats to our freedom and liberty. But I write this diary as a letter of hope to all you American progressives who work for change in your country. The whole world is behind you.
And when you succeed, we will all be Americans again.