Treason of the Radicals, part II

The church, with its new position in the West as a Crusader against manufactured woes, has shown itself to be an institution wherein the self can be shameless and ceaselessly flattered with the creation of a paradigm of Us/Them and the destruction of a one's own society. Now, not all churches are like this, and I am not going to make the fallacy of construction by saying that every single denomination is a monolithic structure wherein all followers march in lockstep to a collective goal. This is the same mistake the United States made during the Cold War with its avowed Communist enemies (Until we learned to play Chinese-based Communists against Soviet-based Communists, e.g. the Sino-Vietnamese War). No, I know there are individual churches and maybe even entire denominations that do not fit the aforementioned qualities. Yet, the churches that take it upon themselves to declare holy war on the very society they are members of in a desperate last grasp of meaning in an increasing relativistic world are the ones that are the most numerous, the loudest, and the fastest-growing; however, it's when this is coupled with other sensationalist, fear-mongering constructs that make self-gratification easy to take part in and easy to to enforce.

This is the media today as we know it. The United States media, fully using the hysteria and sensationalism of the yellow press, has created an environment in which fears are promoted and spread through an ever-present medium. Simply put, the advent of the 24-hour news networks is, for all things considered, one of the worst things to ever befall the pysche of Western humanity. How often has it been that we have turned on our domestic news channels only to see one more upper class white girl has gone missing? How many times are we going to hear about runaway brides? Simply put, the American media today makes mountains out of molehills and creates an atmosphere in which smaller, insignificant stories become huge national scandals and stories that grip our deceived little hearts.

Simply put, our media is baseless. Useless. A waste of energy and space on the airwaves. Our media has, over the years, gone from a respectable institution to tabloids on the air. One man in particular is responsible for this new paradigm that has been brought upon modern media:

Rupert Murdoch. This man, the emperor of tabloids, the grand poobah of sensationalism, the reincarnation of Willam Randolph Hearst, the kind of man a James Bond villian could be based on. Simply put, this man has brought the trash and sleaze of base, emotional, tabloid classlessness to the constant talking heads of the 24-hour news networks. Is it any surprise that a man who got his start through unscrupulous business ventures and paparazzi-fueled tabloid publications would absolutely ruin the media of the United States once he tries to remake it in his own image? No, this man who routinely takes it upon himself to commit character assassination on a monthly basis has decided to reshape the news in the United States to fall more along his own idea of the Fourth Estate. Unlike other people who take chances to attack a man of this sort of wealth, power, and stature in the world, my main beef with this man isn't his questionable business practices nor his political ideology. My major problem with Mr. Murdoch's News Coroporation is the same problem people had with the yellow press.

Fox News, Mr. Murdoch's most famous vestige in America, made a name for itself in the days before the Iraq War as being an outlet for conservative opinion and unquestioning backing for the war. This was the rule, not the exception, as all 175 Murdoch-owned papers had editorials that backed the war. The main reason though, the rationale behind why Fox News was founded, is fairly simply to comprehend once you look at Mr. Murdoch's former business practices and modus operandi (The idea that Fox News was started to compete with Ted Turner's own CNN doesn't seem to hold much water, at least for me). Fox News shows a keen grasp that Mr. Murdoch has on the media markets, showing that he can not only acquire media outlets that serve his interests, but he also has inate feel for the markets, making it capable for him to provide services and information in a market that lacks something. In America, that would be news with a definite conservative spin in a market where cable television is reaching more and more families previously out of its reach in the rural, traditionally red areas of America. There is a definate liberal bais in the United States right now in the news media. Now, there are two main reasons why media in the US has this left lean, however slight or major one may perceive it to be (I'm not the only one who disputes the nature and degree of this purpoted liberal slant):

• Supply and Demand - To be unabashedly honest, we live in a capitalist society. Whether we like it or not, those are the rules for the game we must play by. Now, media does not have any exception from these rules, meaning that they too are rules by the markets just like any other profit business. Taking this into account, if the majority of people with access to mass media have been, until very recently, traditionally liberal, why shouldn't media have a liberal bias? It provides news to their chosen demographic in a manner that is easily digested by the masses and returns key profits to the media construct.
• Post-Watergate Attack Dog - Since the triumph of media over the Presidency that came with the Watergate fiasco of the mid 1970s, some have argued that whatever sort of ideology a President has while in office, the media will take the exact opposite and see to it that the administration's every move is criticizied and watched. If this is true, than the media has had a liberal bias consistently from Reagan to the current administration (Clinton, for all of his liberal banter, constantly waffled and will go down in history as a moderate president who could wheel and deal with both sides consistently).

Either one of these theories can explain why there has been a liberal bias for the last several years, no matter what degree it might exist to. In the first case, it was simply an abidement to the rules of the marketplace by a capitalist agency. In the second, an unfortunate consequence of successive presidencies that were not leftist enough to warrant a right-wing slant. Either way, Fox News provides a end to both circumstances as it shows Mr. Murdoch can either capitalize upon masses of new people acquiring cable broadcasting for the first time, or simply capitalizing on a lack of coverage from a different angle, or both simultaneously.

This is where my major grievance with News Corporation, specifically Fox News, comes in. It is a tabloid on the airwaves. It is base. It is emotional. It is sensationalist. It is war-mongering, starry-eyed, demagougic banter and trash with little or no respect for journalistic integrity and a tendency to be reactionary in gathering of stories and treatment of other networks (How often has a Fox News story been nothing more than refutation of another network, i.e. "Rathergate"). Now, this would be less problematic, perhaps even tolerable, if this sort of drovel was confined to one network. Unfortunately, when Fox News dethroned CNN as the cable news source, CNN wisened up and started copying News Corporation.

"In this country, Fox News has gotten a big, big audience that appreciates its independence. There's passion there, and it's pushed. ... It has taken a long time, but it has now changed CNN because it has challenged them -- they've become more centrist in their choice of stories. They're trying to become, using our phrase, more fair and balanced."
Rupert Murdoch

So, did CNN become "fair and balanced," to quote Fox's buzzwords, or did they pick up the same sensationalist entity by a different name? Simply put, CNN became even more sensationalist with many of their programs, falling back on flashier programs, more typecasted talking heads (like Tucker Carlson and Richard Novak as the typical heartless conservatives) and gone to an even more extreme version of the attack dog mindset.

It goes without saying that whatever the shape of media was, it is worse now. Our papers and television sets are filled with inane stories of naive rich white girls disappearing in the Bahamas, brain dead people being used as political cannon fodder by both parties in this nation, car chases, or other big flash stories that wouldn't have made it into the news 20 years ago. Basically, our news has turned into explosion-filled, poorly-written Jerry Bruckheimer film. What purpose does most of this serve? What point does the ticker on the bottom of the screen serve except to give us a drip-feed of fear?

Basically, media is an even more prevalent source of fear and self-gratification that the church is. It is constant. It is ceaseless. And when it meets the church head on, by allowing talking heads from an organization that is a shadow front for the church on (usually an organization with the name "Family" in there somewhere), the effects of the paradigms of the church, plus the fear and easily-consumable goods of the media combine to create a potent mixture for the flattery of the self and the creation of delusion and affliction on an unheard of scale. But what of our very politcal structure?