Message #94142

[Bianca]

“Reality” and the media


Television and radio play an enormous role in the Saturn pictures that Americans absorb every day about their world. The amount of hours Americans spend in front of their TV sets remains near an all-time high of more than eight hours a day. There are more TV sets in America than people to watch them.

So it would seem more important than ever to take a sharp look at the realities being drummed into our minds during all those viewing hours. The fact that the ownership of American media outlets has been consolidated into an increasingly tiny group of government-abetted mega-corporations, whose echo-chamber technique insures that the same handful of news reports are repeated over and over on all the networks and newspapers at once during a brief but intense news cycle, tells the tale: certain cherry-picked stories are being chosen to be the realities Americans think about and subscribe to. (2)

Much has been written about how fluffy newspaper stories are becoming in Rupert Murdoch’s America, and about how the “news” on TV is morphing into a uniquely modern engine of vapidity identified by the apt coinage infotainment. But as disturbing as it is to see Britney Spears’ parenting woes make headlines in so-called serious newspapers, at least the trend it represents is under discussion (even by the absurdly self-conscious meta-media itself, which spent at least as much time chastising itself for caring about Paris Hilton’s mini-incarceration as it spent reporting it). The American populace is clearly aware, on some level, that such content is printed only to sell newspapers.

Far more dangerous in terms of forming a reality picture of our world in these times is the news that doesn’t get told.

Throughout the ages, the function of propaganda has been to reinforce the idea that if an event isn’t mentioned among the information presented, it must not be important—or, worse, it didn’t happen. When we look at America’s current cultural reality from the Big Picture, it seems unimaginable, for example, that a populace as obsessed with the concept of democracy as ours is would have allowed to fade into the back pages of its newspapers the Military Commissions Act of 9/06: the one that eradicated the writ of habeus corpus for whomever the president decided to call an “alien unlawful enemy combatant.”

More egregious still is the fact that an equally appalling piece of legislation got virtually no media coverage at all. The John Warner Defense Authorization Act was signed at a private Oval Office meeting the same day as the act mentioned above, passed with ninety percent of the votes in the House and cleared the Senate unanimously (a consensus blatant enough to loosen any scales that might still be left hanging from the eyes of those who hoped the Democrats’ triumph in Congress last November would mean a return to sanity).

Tucked away into the deep recesses of this multibillion-dollar catch-all bill for defense spending was a section allowing the president to declare a “public emergency” and dispatch federal troops to take over National Guard units and local police if he, and he alone, determined them unfit for maintaining order. In other words: martial law. (3) This story got less press than George Bush getting down with the maracas on a Brazilian dance floor.

Even so, the martial law item was and is part of the public record. In our last column we discussed the art of using our inborn intelligence, our Mercuries, to self-inform. Were we each to use this birthright consciously, it would provide the data necessary to establish a framework of reality that bears some relationship to what is actually going on.

That’s the kind of reality framework Saturn gives us when it is functioning properly.