Gelding the Media: Going Goebbels One Better

Dear George,

One symptom of the Corporatist State’s emasculation of the media is the public’s belief that if a story is heavily covered, it is important, earthshaking and trend setting.

The midterms turned on the size of Mark Foley’s pecker, while the burning issue of this campaign seems to be the Edwards affair (a great story considering that he isn’t even a candidate.) In politics, peckers rule.

Goebbels is in his grave kicking his own ass for not coming up with the sound bite that does more to corrupt a free press than the strictest state censorship: If it bleeds, it leads.

However, the media’s greatest act of trivialization is their breathless willingness to lap up your tall tales. You have given them the one morality play that plays well in Peoria, the Hollywood western, that study in celluloid morality for a celluloid people. Iraq burns, the Constitution dissolves and the Geneva Conventions are “quaint,” while the media sloshes here and there looking for the next trivial Dingleberry they can hold up to the public as if it were a nugget of gold.

Keep the media distracted with celebrity dazzle, with garish weddings, gossip and scandal, and the media will morph into a bloated clone of the supermarket tabloid, while you have a free pass to do whatever you want, as long as the public is properly titillated.

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones