The medium is the message

PZ sends me a clip, a newscast from Canada’s public news corporation, the CBC, with a journalist ridiculing Jeremiah Wright and calling the pastor “nutty” and “disgraced” (Sunday, 9.00 PM eastern, Radio 1 news) for his alleged “anti-american comments”. I think by now everyone knows about Jeremiah Wright and the gospel truth he preaches about the US’s disastrous policy so I’m going to leave it. My observation centers around the media’s role in furthering the agendas of the powers that be. How else can one explain the disgraceful use of words so unbecoming of a serious news corporation? PZ, a journalist, is outraged: “we are supposed to deliver the news, perhaps offer a point of view, but not cast judgments”.

Well, it isn’t really that outrageous – the bigger the media’s reach the more penetrated it is by the spooks or the government, whether in a tyrannical dictatorship or the so called free and democratic country. Individual
journalists as well as their often politically nominated management are prime targets. It’s a fact, if little known to the general population. This is not to say that every journalist is a willing or coerced agent of the state / spook agency, a strategically placed asset will often do the trick. Learn to live with it, as it is often done under the pretences of your own good, and learn to discern when your good does not necessarily go hand in hand with the good of those who manipulate the message that reaches you.