Wild notion: What would be on your tv and radio if Media weren't centralized?
And Media is centralized. It has been relatively so and for all our lives.
In the last twenty years, what the nation sees in entertainment and news is decided by five or six Boards of Directors. Whether these Boards collude; just have the same corporate values; attract a particular kind of idiot or moral imbecile; are run by Corporations/Illuminati/Flying Spaghetti Monster, it is the fact that the substance and quality of program content is more or less the same across all the Media.
The Power to form Narratives, following upon their Gatekeeper Power: who can equal them? Who and what is admitted to the public discussion, and how it gets treated, that's all set by a handful of people. This de facto monopoly on what we hear and see is clearly a huge factor in priorities, policy, and politics.
For example, imagine in place of each "Weiner's Weiner" story all America saw, we had stories on nearly one-quarter of US children in poverty, or the over 300,000 troops experiencing brain image. Or, say, we spend more in constant dollars on War today than we have since WWII. Bigger than the Cold War, bigger than Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq War 1.
Wanna bet we wouldn't be having entirely different conversations going on in DC than what we've had?
At this writing, I'm interested in what people imagine would be worthwhile mass-reach programming, or how a community might come to shape content.
It's a brain storming diary. Pretend Media Central has been broken up into thousands, tens of thousands of locally owned and influenced outlets. Or, alternately, simply forced to have content input made by the local community. "Democracy Is Coming To the USA" we'll pretend. You not only have the First Amendment, you'd have a venue for the first time!
Personally, I only have to do this one thing...
Even if the Media Cartel weren't beaten, I think if we did just one thing, we'd completely undermine everything they try to do, as they try to keep us narrowly and ill informed.
Leave the programming the same, but one rule: there has to be a couple of minutes, each hour, devoted to teaching "Tricks of Debate."
Picture all the schools, teachers, professors, students across the nation. Throw in filmmakers and clever writers, all getting together to produce thousands of illustrations of one or another Debating Trick. Maybe there's some sorting, or everyone who produces gets to rate others, and from there we get a very large inventory for Media (tv and radio) to run. A Public Service message, no different than others. And the spots pop up randomly, no control by the outlets.
So not just lectures, but illustrations from history, or dramatizations, or rap songs, whatever is creative and, most importantly, reveals the trick and how to spot it when it's being used.
You'd see changes in our politics, imo, start to snowball within one week.
A variant: "Techniques of Mass Manipulation." Heck, business and government have spent tens of billions of dollars since 1950 on how to do that, and we don't even get one minute of explanation of what they do.
Then, I'd also like to have the Bill of Rights stated and illustrated a couple of times an hour too.
Ain't it funny how so many things which are easily doable, in terms of physical work and effort, always turn out to be "not political viable?" I mean "funny" in a sort of really depressing way.
More things I'd like to see:
An economics discussion show with a cleaning lady and/or an reformed con artist on the panel.
Heh. Make all the stations show stuff made by our kids in school. C'mon, Jerry Springer!?! Fake Court?! How about the local high schools with their drama clubs, sports teams, media and artists groups, chess clubs, all presenting competitions? You know, Reality TV. Except now the kids have a chance to earn glory and fame in their community for actually achieving things. Instead of the empty-calorie preoccupations of Media Central. The kids would have a reason to tighten up their act and focus on "how to do" in the world.
That's what I call a good basis for National Security.
There'll still be sponsors, there'll still be viewers. And it'll make the viewers feel part of the world when they leave their cubicles of home and office and walk around their town. See kids who are happening.
Anyway, that's as far as I go tonight. But people should riff, I hope. What would tv and/or radio be like if you had a hand in working out good things to have on them? Thank you.