I Can No Longer Critique The Media Because I Can No Longer Watch It

I’ve been having a bit of trouble deciding what to write about lately. I know I’m not an expert on much, if anything, so I have always said I write not about events but about how the media covers events. As someone with a liberal arts background, I think I am semi-qualified to comment on how the media frames narratives, provides evidence, and gives context. This has worked well for me in the past, and I feel it is a useful service to others. The media itself has ceased to turn a critical eye on itself, as it once did. At best, liberal media hurls biased critique at conservative media and conservative media does the same to them.

The problem is that I can no longer tolerate establishment media. Where before I felt it almost a duty to critique the media for its many flaws, those flaws have grown so large and so ugly I no longer have the ability to look at them. It is like being in an insane asylum and trying to find some meaning and truth among the inane babbling of inmates in straight jackets. It’s like listening to one patient in a Napoleon costume arguing with another in a Batman costume. Behind the assured and measured arguments lies a black hole of madness. Throw in the fact that those in the media actually help shape public opinion and the madness intensifies.

It’s worse than that, actually, because the inmates at an asylum are speaking from their own internal madness, whereas the talking heads on news shows speak from some shared madness. Each is speaking from a script whether they have read it or not. They have internalized their masters’ values and attitudes. It is as if they have all contracted the same madness but they don’t even realize it because the circles in which they move are filled with the same professional managerial class that has long ago isolated itself from the real world. They wouldn’t know a working-class perspective if it bit them, have no desire to know anything about the average working person, and I suspect they would regard a working-class person the way they would a leper were they ever forced to interact with one.

Which might still be slightly tolerable if the people within the media were at least capable of evincing a modicum of intellect, honesty, self-reflection, or integrity. Their various other sins might be somewhat forgivable if they were capable of occasionally owning up to being wrong. The best they do in that regard is an occasional forced and scripted apology. I do not overstate things when I say the media as a whole has disappointed me more than I ever would have thought possible. I will forbear making historical comparisons lest I be accused of hyperbole.

It’s a shame because now I am in the dark as to what the masses are being fed. I feel awkward discussing matters when I have no idea how most people will react to my opinion. I only know what others are willing to share with me in discussion. I must confess that for the first time in my life, I feel that people who vote Republican have a greater tolerance for divergent views than those who vote Democrat, though they are ultimately no more swayable from the opinions they receive from their media sources than they ever were.

Unable to critique the media because I can no longer endure the media, I have sought different topics to write about. I write about history, hoping that by giving background the media is hoping we’ll all forget, people might more clearly see the present. I talk about universal and timeless moral principles, in the hopes that people will see how far short those the media presents as heroes and leaders fall from upholding such principles. I try to discuss logic, logical fallacies, and weasel words people use to avoid saying anything, hoping I might make bad faith arguments more obvious. And I write of spiritual notions of transcendence and awakening as a way of inviting people to see from an elevated perspective. Lastly, I speak of hope and a determination to create a more just and beautiful world, because I’m quite confident the media is still failing miserably in that area.

I wish everybody the best of luck in coming to see how divergent the media narrative is from reality. It will always be thus because the media’s funding and power is derived from the very problems most threatening to the human species: corporate capitalism, consumerism, and militarism. It is a grotesque, alienated future that the media will lead us towards so long as we continue to view it as anything other than the propaganda engine it is. It is in the hands of those who do not want to inform us but manipulate us, and it is their most powerful weapon. They want nothing less than to conquer your mind, to exploit it as they exploit everything else.