The Media Makes Me Physically Ill

I was in high school in the ‘80’s. Back then, you could hear criticism of the media even in the media. Don Henley’s Dirty Laundry was on the radio and Albert Brooks’ Broadcast News was in the theater. Everybody knew how superficial and unreliable the news we received was…and yet, we somehow ended up believing what it told us.

In the 90’s, I had someone knock on the door of my apartment and try to get me to subscribe to cable television. I told him it didn’t interest me and it would in no way enrich my life. He tried to tell me that it wasn’t all mindless fluff like MTV, that there was The History Channel and A&E. I told him I’m sure many drug addicts have some very fine qualities, but I wouldn’t invite them into my home, and I sure wouldn’t pay for the privilege of doing so. Yeah, I actually came up with that on the fly and I still remember it 30 years later. Thirty years later, the drug addict he wanted me to pay to have in my home has only gotten worse, as can be witnessed by The History Channel and A&E.

For decades now I have been viewing the mainstream media less as a way of informing myself and more as a way of seeing how people were being misinformed. When people would open their mouths and let the media messaging come out, I would be prepared to poke holes in their arguments because I had already heard it.

But the grossness that is the mainstream media has become so bad in the last five years I become physically repulsed by it. In the last month, for the sake of my physical as well as my mental health, I have chosen to avoid it altogether.

You might assume that makes me eminently uninformed, but I assure you there are many other and better ways of receiving information than from corporate media. I still have access to every bit of audio and video I can receive from the television and more, it just doesn’t come with a narrative. Well, granted, everyone who relates a story cannot help but put a degree of spin to it, but it is not that overwhelming steamroller narrative I receive when I turn on the TV. Nor is it the condescending opinions of overpaid columnists from the New York Times that have been on the wrong side of every issue for decades. But it will have to do.

I have quit corporate media because I’ve decided a one-sided conversation with a schizophrenic, pathological liar is not a healthy relationship to be in. I have quit it as one who for long has known that he was in a cult and finally found the courage to leave it.

One only needs to have retained some small degree of what they were taught — or should have been taught — in school about how to create a strong argument to see all of the glaring problems with the narratives spun by the millionaire talking heads on the television. You can’t assert something in the first paragraph only to contradict it in the second. An 8th grader should know enough to present a balanced argument in order to make a point more forceful. If you leave out known facts because they contradict the argument you are making, you lose credibility. And for the love of God, you have to cite your sources, you can’t just write “according to anonymous agents”.

The media was obviously bad when I was young. But I never felt personally threatened by it until after 9/11 when the cult of war sprang up in the media. It was around that time that anti-war voices started to be expelled from mainstream media, people like Chris Hedges, Phil Donahue, and Jesse Ventura. It was then that I first fully felt the danger that went along with having opinions differing from the herd. People I had worked with echoed FOX News talking points that anyone opposing war was themselves a threat to the country and should be dealt with accordingly.

Exiled from the mainstream, Hedges, Donahue, Ventura, and many others could be heard for years on RT, (referred to in MSM as a Russian propaganda platform). But their voices have now been silenced there as well, since RT has been banned from most every platform it was once on.

FOX News was once the channel that demanded patriotism of their viewers, the other news outlets merely demanding it of their staff. Today, however, FOX seems to be the only outlet allowing any kind of dissent at all, and that only from a single personality. As for the rest, those outlets we could once delude ourselves into believing were less pro-war, they have taken the lead. MSNBC’s Ali Velshi is calling for direct intervention of NATO with Russia. When did news reporters’ job become not reporting the news but actively blowing the bugle for war?

I don’t know what the media is like to those living in Russia right now, but I pray it is better than the news we receive here. If that is not the case, I pray the Russian people are better able to see past the warmongering their media is involved in. My hope, my one hope, is that the people are able to see the media the world over for what it is, not a tool for distributing the information people need to help them conduct their own affairs, but as a weapon for those who profit off of war and for those who seek dominance not merely over other nations but over their own people, as well.