Significance of Tea Party movement

With the recent merger of Comcast and NBC, people may be curious to learn how media content is shaped and transmitted to the public, given the relentless trend toward concentrating corporate control over the means of mass dissemination.

Bear in mind, any corporation is legally bound to be profitable to the best of its ability, often with severe consequences to the general populace (the recent Toyota recall springs to mind). Media companies in particular exist to sell audiences to another business – advertising.

According to BusinessWeek, “Fox can still charge advertisers a hefty premium for shows like Family Guy that have built huge followings among young viewers,” knowing most teens will want to stay well away from the news even during a crippling recession. Most programming does not even pretend to have redeeming value and when the medium literally is the message, television content is specifically intended to transform a potentially active and engaged population into docile, isolated units – in other words, good consumers. More importantly, these same conglomerates hold an even greater influence over content of substance, that which is vital to forming a factual, coherent outlook of the world.

As any rational person may expect from a system designed by the powerful, change is only considered permissible when it aligns with the interests of generating money or prestige, or during the rare instances when popular sentiment becomes too widespread and dangerous to ignore.

For example, during the 1960s, a collection of militant civil rights groups, feminists, peace movement activists and student protesters forced an end to the Vietnam War as described in the Pentagon Papers, as well as starting numerous other civilizing movements (third-world solidarity, environmental legislation). However, unlike the radical movements of the 1960s, the current climate of protest, which gives rise to such gatherings as the Tea Party movement, is not as authentically grass root as widely proclaimed.

Let me stress that the concerns of these people are in no way insignificant and are doubtlessly true, as stagnant wages, unemployment and increasing debt batter the lower and middle classes. What remains artificial are the organizing structures catered to the dispossessed and the answers given as patriotic fact, of which I will delve into in greater detail next issue.

Posted by Michael Russell on Apr 16 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry