Common Sense

It
is hard for those of us who grew up listening to the world as related
by Walter Cronkite, and first heard of all of the seminal events in our
formative years – the elections, the assassinations, the confrontations, the accomodations
– from Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, to imagine a world where people
who matter get their news from anywhere other than the Major Media Conglomerates.
I imagine it is that much harder for those who were weaned on CNN and
MTV.

This may be part of the reason that so many people have a hard time accepting
the possibility that blogs can function as a vial alternative network for
the diffusion of news about the things that we currently find out about
through network news, cable and newspapers. But let us not forget that
this Media Cartel is of relatively recent origin, dating only to around
WWI, during the days when the proto-industrial powers carved up the Ottoman
empire and laid the plans for a 20th century built on oil.

I don’t believe that even they could have imagined the degree to which the
mass media they created would become the ultimate arbitrator of the world
view of the global ruling class. Fueled by advances in technology culminating
in the 24-7 newsstream of CNN, now augmented by the minimally parallax
vision of FOX to give the illusion of three-dimensionality, the Mass Media
first became our window on the world, and then they began to define and
delineate that world. Personally, I am convinced that even Ted Turner has
become chagrinned and aghast at the monstrous golem his creation has become,
powerful enough that it had to be absorbed by the old-line media cabal
directly.

It wasn’t always that way. The Founding Fathers didn’t get their news from
CNN. They got their news, and their views on the issues of the day, down
at the neighborhood tavern, putting on a buzz with their buddies. They
got the news at the customs house down by the docks, waiting to pay their
extortionary taxes to get their goods out of hock. They formed their opinions
in the churches, temples and meeting halls, in the markets and hanging
on the streetcorners and commons. And you know, if they could, they would
have blogged.

Look at old Thomas
Paine, rabble-rousing bard to the Boston Boys who plotted the
end of an empire. A Natural Born Blogger if there ever was one, Paine penned
a series of anti-government screeds excorciating the British Crown, both Houses of Parliment, their
tax collectors, army, religion, philosophy and diet. Author a series of
titles to make any blogger proud: Common Sense…The Rights of Man…The
Age of Reason…The Crisis. Even his very first published article
had a catchy bloggerish title: The Case of the Officers of Excise;
with Remarks on the Qualifications of Officers, and on the numerous Evils
arising
to
the Revenue,
from the Insufficiency of the present Salary: humbly addressed to the Members
of both Houses of Parliament. You KNOW if he could have, Thomas Paine
would have blogged the American Revolution.

There is no natural law that says that the distribution of information
in a free society must be centralized and in the hands of those with the
greatest political and economic power. They have succeeded in taking that
control BECAUSE of their existing power, and want us to believe that they
have
a natural,
evolutionary right to it, but that is not the case. They continue to exercise
absolute control over our worldview because nobody has told them they can’t,
and because there is at present no alternative for a planet of inquiring
minds with an insatiable need to know. Perhaps there will be soon.