DEATH OF DEMOCRACY AND RISE OF MEDIACRACY

 

Mediacracy is a situation in government where the mainstream mass media effectively has control over the voting public. Mediacracy is closely related to a theory on the role of media, especially in the United States social and political systems that argues that media and news outlets have a large level of influence over voting citizens’ evaluations of candidates and political issues, thereby possessing effective control over politics in the in the world today.

2016 US Election has thus thrown up a fundamental issue of DEMOCRACY to the whole world: the growing irrelevance of election at the behest and meddling of privately owned hi-tech media monopoly ruling the roost and contaminating American political and social systems.

Here the moot question is: can the world be a mute witness to this wanton rape of democracy in a nation that is supposed to be the leader and model of democracy in the world?  Can this leading nation any longer remain unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements and beyond the reach of the law?

 

“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people. Outwardly we have a Constitutional government. We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state…. The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization… It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government…. This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech

 

 

 

2016 us election has thrown up many fundamental questions to the world. Let us examine the main question: Who/what decides the RIGHT and WRONG in the present ‘democratic’ world.

The answer: in the present world, the RIGHT and WRONG is decided by those that own, govern and manage the INFOSPHERE (a loose term used here to mean the global stock of all man-made knowledge/information in the world–see image below)

Now the question arises as to who/what own this infosphere.

Here the clear answer is: the infosphere is owned by those whose voice/word is the loudest and the widest, and reaching to the largest number of people.  That is, a handful of giant global media corporations that owns and operates almost 90% mainstream media and that cater to almost 95% people in the world on a monopolistic fashion, own the infosphere in the world today.

In other words, today’s mainstream media, exclusively owned by the private global corporations, decide the RIGHT and WRONG in the world today. 

The latest example: Veteran Journalist Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate scandal which brought down President Richard Nixon, is said to no longer be with the Washington Post Newspaper. Woodward was the associate editor of the Washington Post. Rumors are flying that Woodward had been trying for weeks to write about the Wikileaks revelations about Hillary Clinton and was forbidden to do so by Post Owner Jeff Bezos.  The issue apparently came to a head very recently, when Woodward allegedly demanded to write about the subject.  Some people say Woodward was told no, and quit.  Others say Woodward was fired.  

CBS NEWS investigative journalist explains how mainstream media brainwashes the masses:. “Only a handful of corporations, 6 to be exact, control over 90 percent of the media. That means nearly everything we hear on the radio, read in the news, and see on television. Multiple celebrities have even spoken out about this. Roseanne Barr, for example, said that MK Ultra rules in Hollywood. MK Ultra was (and I believe still is) a program run by the CIA to practice methods of mind control and experiment on human beings.” http://www.collective-evolution.com/2015/08/13/cbs-news-investigative-journalist-explains-how-mainstream-media-brainwashes-the-masses/

 

Monopoly Media Capable of Making and Unmaking Leaders

Today we all know that:

• the media are capable of making and unmaking any leaders they want

• the leaders the people thus get are only the wrong/evil type of leaders from whom the people any nation have to elect one  

• the global media, privately owned by global corporate media moguls, controls almost 95% of the mainstream media in the world through corporate and other hi-tech strings

• the leaders thus elected by the people have to serve their real ‘electors/choosers’ and not the people

No wonder, Adolf Hitler was chosen as Time magazine’s Man of the Year for 1938.  What media did to Rwanda genocide, it is doing to the whole mankind today.

Showing a very small example of where the real power of monopoly media lies, and what the real establishment is, Rahul Roushan writes: “Establishment is the bunch that systematically controls your thoughts through media and academics, not the govt that’s there just for 4 or 5 years.”. Hitlers may come and go, the likes of TIME magazines are at the helm of affairs of the world today, everyday. 

 

About 500 years back, there were literally no printed words, let alone printed books or newspapers or TV channels. Therefore few depended on these types of ‘opinion of others’ or second-hand knowledge in life. Humanity then had to rely on word-of-mouth type of live organic information and knowledge for whatever these types of little ‘second-hand knowledge’ then. Thus the spread and influence of second-hand knowledge had only very insignificant role or practically no role of human life, for millions of years.

The typical modern human mindset is the most dangerous creation which is formed by a combination of bad social programming, mass indoctrination and faulty education, and it is all poised to destroy man himself. He seems to be trapped inside a mental “box” of perceived limitation set by modern culture.

The process of mechanization and the real contamination of human knowledge and its automation began only in the 15th century with the introduction of the Gutenberg printing press where text and ideas became open to commodification, the drastic and immediate consequence of which was expressed in the following words of the famous French revolutionary Rousseau:

“Consider the frightful disorders which printing has produced in Europe. Wherever ‘knowledge’ arises, the moral health of the nation decays. There was even a saying amongst the philosophers themselves that since learned (expert and scientific) men had appeared, honest men were nowhere to be found….~ (from Rousseau’s Social Contract).

However, forty years after the invention of the press, there were printing machines in 110 cities in six different countries; 50 years after, more than eight million books had been printed, almost all of them filled with information that had previously not been heard of and unavailable to the people. Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it ever since.

In 1990, in America alone, there were 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting tapes; 362 million TV sets; and over 400 million radios. There were 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 world-wide) and every day in America 41 million photographs taken, and just for the record, over 60 billion pieces of advertising junk mail come into our mail boxes every year. Everything from telegraphy and photography in the 19th century to the silicon chip in the twentieth has amplified the din of information, until matters have reached such proportions today that for the average person, information no longer has any relation to the solution of problems.

We, in the post-modern society,‘ have easy access to a huge amount of information. With many things we simply trust what we are told, and it is only confirmed by empirical evidence later, if at all. As such there is a now a ‘huge division of epistemic labour’ in modern society. But we have less and less knowledge that we can actually validate these things for ourselves.

Never before have so many people understood so little about so much. Shouldn’t we be worried about our epistemic dependence on specialized knowledge-area experts, on our own arrested intelligence getting manipulated through machines, thereby vastly eroding our ability in finding immediate solution to our catastrophic problems?

Thus people today are born in the info-sphere box of the corporate knowl;edge industry and media  And, as Alejandro Jodorowski wrote: “Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness”, we simply do not know to think critically or to use our own innate organic intelligence.

 

A World in Crisis, and No Genius in Sight

An old order is being swept away, and political leaders everywhere seem lost.

Many genius have happened in history.  It was a genius cluster that invented America. Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Jay and Monroe came together in the same place at the same time and invented something new in the history of man.

Today what the media choose for us, as models, are but evil geniuses

 

Why Do Americans Distrust the Media?

The accuracy of news is fast declining and the public is losing trust. For decades, the pollsters at Gallup have been asking Americans if they trust their media. In 1974, the year Woodward and Bernstein brought an end to Richard Nixon’s presidency, 69 percent of them did. In a poll released last year, that number was at a historic low. Today, the only institutions Americans have less faith in than television news (21 percent) and newspapers (20 percent) are Congress and “big business.” That’s pretty damn low — humiliatingly low, especially for a group of people who fancy themselves members of “the Fourth Estate.” The other three estates don’t really exist in 21st-century America, but the fourth’s high opinion of its role in the body politic has been pretty constant.

Media people are no longer protected from market forces. They are obsessed with the incredible horse race. Whoever the subject, the press can be cruel (just mechanical), selective in its cruelty.

The media has lost power, and cosiness with its subjects; it serves the celebrity industrial complex, by engaging in political operations, big business. The media is also clueless about its audience, let alone about the dismal fate of the present world and humanity.

This collapse in trust is not evenly spread across all demographics. The drop has been most dramatic among young and middle-aged respondents and, most recently, within the GOP. This loss of trust, however, is not limited in the case of media alone. Fewer Americans now say they trust the church, the medical system, the presidency, the Supreme Court, public schools, banks, organized labor, the criminal justice system, big business, and Congress. Public faith in each of these institutions has fallen this decade.

Most of all, many citizens have lost interest in democracy itself 

How the US Presidential Election Lost Its Glory

Conspiracy theories go against human nature. Conspiracy theories, usually dismissed as a fringe phenomenon, have taken center stage in the current electoral season. “Rigged” has become the watchword of 2016, invoked by candidates and embraced by voters across the political spectrum. Surveys show that close to half believe media moguls have picked the election’s winner and coordinated their coverage accordingly.

For a democracy, the proliferation of conspiracy theories may signal a toxic breakdown of trust, order and governmental legitimacy. But for the people who embrace them, these narratives help hold chaos and despair at bay by serving as a buffer against hopelessness.

Many believe it is a rigged system and that it always has been.  Some regard politics there is as corrupt as any banana republic; only that they are just better at hiding it.

 

Honesty Doesn’t Win Presidential Elections

In his speech about the U.S. presidential campaign in March, Mitt Romney described both parties’ front-runners, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as dishonest. Voters seem to agree. Is it all-important, though, for a successful candidate to be perceived as honest, or more honest than his or her chief rival? Previous election results appear to indicate the opposite.

For many veteran observer of the American political scene since the 1960s, the 2016 presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were not only just anticlimax and disappointment but it were  reportedly unimaginable.

Corporate Media As The Real Villain

First the media choose two evils, then the lesser of these two evils, which sometimes happens to be the real bigger (expert) evil that really scores the victory. To most Americans, the presidential campaign is a media freak show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. I’m not in any way a Trump supporter but lately there has been an overwhelming rush to classify Trump as a villain and Hillary as the only option to save them from villain. 

There have been a lot of villains in this election, from, the candidates to the media, the political elite to the cultural revolutionaries, big money donors even foreign governments, but IMAO, the biggest villains of them all have been the voters. The wilful ignorance, the ability to believe any lie as long as it’s what they want to hear, the great lack of curiosity and intelligent research, choices fuelled by dumb fear and hate. Believing gossip as gospel is the reality.

Read  related Essays: 

• Shrinking Communication, Growing Miscommunication:

  http://www.humanfirst.in/essays/communication-natural-versus-mechanical/ 

• CORPORATE PRESIDENCY OF DEGENERATION:  http://www.humanfirst.in/essays/corporate-presidency-of-degeneration/