On the unwillingness — and failure — of the media to report basic truths
Focusing on the incident—the man on wire or the lone gunman killing a child—the mass media ignores a system of corporate peonage which imprisons and executes a million childhoods. The barker on the boulevard of ordinary life is shouting out, “Extra! Extra!”—pointing to the Extra!ordinary and ignoring the ordinary. The media gives a false proximity to the incidental, but a false distance to systemic wrongs. Dangerously, it implies that the system needs little remark: witness the lethal length of time it took for the issue of climate change to finally make it big in the press.
The Sound of One Trickster Clapping | Jay Griffiths | Orion Magazine
Advertisements
Wednesday, September 30, 2009 at 9:22
I recall being in a Medieval Lit. class where people shook their heads in disbelief at how, city-dwellers in Europe, throughout the Middle Ages, lived without sewers, human waste filling the streets and generally getting all over everything, ultimately causing the Black Plague. “What were they thinking?” we would ask. No doubt, the people of the future will be asking the same question about our sluggish response to climate change…