Text & Phtot By Mickey Z.
Mickey Z. is the author of 11 books, most recently the novel Darker Shade of Green. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on an obscure website called Facebook.
During the July Fourth hoopla...
We learned Tom Cruise may be getting divorced.
They held another hot dog eating contest at Coney Island.
Hundreds of revolutionaries made the scene at the Occupy National Gathering from June 30 to July 4 in Philadelphia
Which of the above has garnered the least media coverage?
The American corporate media has utilized its entire arsenal in dealing with Occupy Wall Street (OWS). In roughly this order: It was ignored, treated as a curiosity, and then out came the big guns. Occupiers have been portrayed as slumming rich kids, drug addicts, rapists, selfish, lazy, unwashed, and inevitably: terrorists.
Mic Check: The pervasive and willful distribution of misinformation is typical of life within a society dominated by a corporate-run press.
“There is an odor to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakable: the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine.” --Norman Mailer
Whether you label them liberal or conservative, most major media outlets are large corporations owned by or aligned with even larger corporations, and they share a common strategy: selling a product (an affluent audience) to a given market (advertisers).
Mic Check: The media is as liberal or conservative as the corporations that own it.
"History is not happenstance; it is conspiratorial, carefully planned, and executed by people in power." --George Carlin
Of course the mainstream media distorts and/or ignores OWS. That's their job and it's a waste of time and energy for us to expect otherwise. They've been given the keys to the public (sic) airwaves and we don't yet have the means to change that. We do, however, have the means to circumvent this model.
Mic Check: We can't yell louder than the professional propagandists of the corporate media but we damn sure can whisper more effectively.
The media can't be "fixed" any more than all the other dying institutions (banking, health care, education, etc.) can be. So, I say: Let the corporate press rot while we utilize our resources to create an entirely new model.
To help make this happen, we need more of the 99% to join us and thus, must reach out far and wide, keep whispering the truth, and continue working to model new alternatives.
If we build it, they will Occupy...
It will require both outrage and outreach for us to outlive the corporate pirates (and the politicians they fund) who have hijacked our future. Keep yourself informed and inspired, but most importantly, to counter media misinformation: #OccupyOutreach24/7.
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