What is the news, if it’s not broadcast with some form of ulterior motive? Has this ever been the case? Ever? Don’t know. Don’t think so. For the organism in question is forever holistically tied to what fuels it and maintains its growth. Mass media is a publicly traded business. And all such businesses fundamentally do two things: they grow, or they die.
And, like all such businesses, it produces its energy, metabolically, from a single source.
The best example I could come up with of it not being that was socialist or union-based pamphlets and things, distributed to members to keep them informed about the collective. It maybe talked about the daily/weekly goings-on, leaders to be elected, big decisions to be voted on, someone’s spouse took a dive, threw his back out, had a couple fingers chopped off working the assembly line, and anybody who’s able to pitch in should if they can, to keep the rest of the family from starving or facing eviction or whatever.
But a lot of the time, they’d talk about the enemy, right? It was certainly real, and generally fought for the dissolution of the collective, which meant greater profit and financial security for them (the enemy) and less for the collective members, because that’s why they‘d signed up in the first place. (No one becomes a socialist or joins a union if they’re doing well in life, unless it’s that faux-fascism-capitalism kind of Communism that seeks to enrich the state for the benefit of the leadership and keep the population poor, subjugated and most often brainwashed.) The shareholders of big businesses, top executives, or just the gentried citizens who advance most smoothly through the cogs of society, whom society seems most geared toward: they were the enemy, and they sought the furthering of the status quo through the stifling of a more radical-than-gradual change.
All that aside, however, there seemed to still be ulterior motives for the news in those situations. When you’re fighting a battle, you need to fight that battle, you know? Otherwise, you’re done. It’s the nature of battling.
Community radio comes to mind—people getting in front of a microphone with not a whole lot of transmit power to talk about local events going on which would lead to the enrichment of the active community, which is very likely small, and some equal-parts mixture of urban and rural. It seems a little more altruistic.
Assuming it lacked commercials.
Anyway, it’s an aspect of the news whose cruciality isn’t lost on me, and which can’t be secerned from the holism of Big News today. In other words, trying to separate ads from the news is like trying to separate a vascular system from a puppy. Hopefully, it’s not lost on you, either—that the news is virtually the same thing as a social media post, and hardly little different from what’s known as clickbait. Clickbait is just another species, though certainly a more severe one, among the same taxonomical family; one may be more informative, educational and better-researched, but chimps and humans still share 98.8% of the same DNA, you know what I’m saying?
And sometimes I wonder what the hell I’m selling, if all I’m doing is talking about the same news, myself. If you know not to try to separate the product-based companies that are courted or seek to advertise on all news platforms—TV, online, radio, podcast, etc.—from the news organizations themselves, because puppy needs its vascular system, what do you trust?
Well, I have a feeling you’re going to trust what creates a safe space for you to vent your frustrations at certain ethnic groups or the government or your neighbors, what substantiates your sociopolitical belief system and what continues to spark and swell the greatest of emotion in a sitting—from sadness to joy to rage—to keep you safely tuning in.
So, in the end, what I say really doesn’t matter.
By the way, here are some of the week’s most interesting stories:
After Ukrainian drones exploded at an air base deep inside Federation territory, officials in Kyiv now say Russia is stationing Grad rocket launchers near a nuclear reactor at the shuttered Zaporizhzhia power plant, using it as a base for war operations against Ukraine, again raising fears of a potential nuclear incident.
In climate news, the Biden administration is auctioning off seaspace 25 miles from the coast of California to erect floating wind farms meant to generate substantial national gigawattage, beginning a serious shift of the national grid away from its dependency on fossil fuels. Because why? Because of things like the Keystone pipeline this week spilling enough oil to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool (14,000 barrels) into a Kansas creek, and for having vurped out another 12,000 barrels in 22 spills over the last dozen years. And because climate scientists again are telling everyone showing up for UN biodiversity summit COP15 in Montreal this week to stop being so acquiescingly diplomatic and start actually f—ing doing something to stop the decline of the Earth’s variant and crucial biodiversity, inside of which every living thing, including humans, is inextricably linked.
Which, of course, the burning of fossil fuels has played a huge part in screwing up.
In politics, after the votes were tallied and Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock had clearly defeated Republican puppet Herschel Walker in Georgia’s senate runoff—over a million over them coming in early as mail-in ballots—the GOP is starting to rethink its Trump-sanctioned strategy of voting only on election day to ensure voting legitimacy. Because, for the hundredth time, there was no widespread voter grift in the 2020 election, nor was there any in this most recent one. Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel even went on Fox News to start beating the reality into the gullible heads of conservative voters that if they keep listening to Trump and his Acolytes of the Dark Triad, Democrats will remain in power until the devil comes to collect on all those contracts he made with them.
The bill protecting same sex marriages cleared the House this week after having already cleared the Senate, and was headed to the desk of Joe Biden. Not only would it make every single state in the union accept any and all marriages between identical sexes, but also make every marriage regardless of sex, race, religion or national origin legit, no matter how much people think the Bible is a guide to social matters in the 21st Century. After the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision this summer nullifying the assured legality of anytime-abortions in America—and while the Supreme Court this week seems likely to rule in favor of a graphic artist who won’t do design work for gay couples because of her discriminatory religious beliefs and scruples—and then justice Clarence Thomas talking about same sex marriages maybe being next on the chopping block, the bill was kickstarted in the lower chamber, where 10% of Republican lawmakers made a clear show of support for it.
And finally, in business news, the FTC is looking to further prevent the global marketplace from looking like an actual game of Monopoly® by suing to halt the $69 billion merger of Microsoft with video game developer Activision Blizzard, on the grounds of further preventing the global marketplace from looking like an actual game of Monopoly®. I’m not sure, but I think it’s really because they want to further prevent the global marketplace from looking like an actual a game of Monopoly®.
But that’s me.
