The
"Disappeared"
people
and events that popped up
...and
then vanished from the news
The dark
shadow of a "Black-Out List" in the media.
John Kenneth Galbraith was appointed head of the
Office of Price Administration (OPA) during WWII. His name was a
household word. He was an outstanding promoter of the public interest:
"Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." After the war
he seemed to vanish into the Black-Out List.
Consumer Reports is one of a very few publications
which is strictly in the public interest and which assiduously
avoids PAP and influence by advertisers. In the 40's and 50's CR
and its parent organization, Consumer's Union, were vilified as being "communist"
and an enemy of the USA.
Pete Seeger was, in the 50's, a very popular entertainer
who had a public conscience. He appeared on the mass media for a
very brief time. Then he disappeared, black-listed.
Daniel Schorr was once a major electronic media
journalist. His journalism was genuine, but that offended the perceived
interests of those who paid for the news (through advertising—one TV news
manager describes the news as "something to fill the space between the
ads"). He lost his job and is today heard only through "public" broadcasting.
Public broadcasting was instituted to provide a
mass media conduit for the public interest. As with Consumer's Union,
this necessitates being free from the influence of advertisers and any
of their clients who might want to act against the public interest.
Those clients have now effectively nullified (privatized) public-interest
in public broadcasting. While still called "public," it seems to be,
in function, a conduit for primarily private interests. (For example,
the program "Talk of the Nation" recently changed its programming to include constant
interruptions—for commercials and promotionals, often interrupting mid-thought
and not allowing subtle ideas ever to get coherently expressed—and lengthy
"musical" interludes which, to many complaining listeners, are highly irritating
monotony that might be named "Mindless Frenzy" or "Frenetic Mindlessness."
These are prescriptions for encouraging the most shallow and uncritical thought.)
Ralph Nader became famous through his book-in-the-public-interest,
"Unsafe at Any Speed." General Motors was offended and attempted
to smear Nader using private investigators looking for dirt, and with news
releases designed to discredit his analyses. Then his opinions became
less and less sought by mass media news coverage, and finally he disappeared
completely. When he became politically active, most of his news coverage
was ridicule. (Until the 2000 presidential campaign, in which he
was given just enough coverage to attraction attention of his more ardent
supporters—while Pat Buchannan was complaining vigorously that he could
get no coverage at all.)
Noam Chomsky is a renowned, and highly-respected,
linguist who takes an interest in the public interest. His name is
virtually unknown to those who get their knowledge from the highly filtered
mass media. Chomsky's linguistics is based on the logic structure
of language, a subtle web of very abstract knowledge. Chomsky studies
rationality at a deep level. Some of the conclusions that flow naturally
from such abstract thought offend many of those who don't "see."
Smothers Brothers hit the TV screen in the 60's,
and offered truly innovative programming. We saw new forms of visual
and musical arts—and we heard a few public interest and other subtle viewpoints.
They even resurrected Pete Seeger from the anonymity of the black lists.
Then they, too, disappeared and were replaced by the funny, but largely
inane, "Laugh-In."
Movies starring Ronald Reagan disappeared from
the TV screen when that well-known actor from the land of simplistic scripts
(we suspect psychiatrist Helen Caldecott would say "moronic") began to
be groomed for public office.
Music, on the air, shifted away from any trace
of social issues or public interest, or even tenderness and mutuality in
interpersonal relationships. Sex reigned supreme. Aggression
and violence dominated in ways that far surpassed Nazi Germany's relatively
mild militancy in music. Raucous racket ruled, and deafening percussion
blared out relentless, hypnotic commands to mindlessly obey the beat.
Centuries of thoughtful development of counterpoint and polyphony melted
away: subtlety was abandoned. The thought-provoking rock and roll
Smother's Brothers introduced went the way of Pete Seeger. And complaints
get ignored.
M*A*S*H became the most popular TV series in history.
Unlike the movie, the TV scripts succored the humane side of human nature.
The abstraction "death" was treated with the abhorrence due it. The
irrelevancy, "which side are you on," was treated with the scorn due it.
Mutual reciprocity ruled the world of Hawkeye Pierce, and the absurdities
of Senator McCarthy, Sergeant Deadhead, and Lt Kiji were lumped together
in the person of Major Burns. But the program's sponsors from the beginning
insisted on insulting the intelligence of the audience with a mandatory
giggle track. Then, after several years, they apparently directed
the writers to inject pettiness and bickering, shallowness and silliness,
and the program was abandoned at its peak, apparently by its creators.
200 Researchers in a back room, reportedly searching
newspapers, court records, rumors, and anything else that might find dirt
on their political opponents were described in an interview on one of PBS's
news programs. Their main target of interest was Bill Clinton, who
had just been elected for his first term. This particular back room
("Clinton Watch") was only one of several across the country, it was
reported. No more such reports came out.
Butterfly Ballot Cartoons popped up all over the
Internet after the 2000 presidential election. Using several search
engines, I could not find the Mike Collins cartoon, or any similar one,
in over an hour of searching. Instead, cartoons such as this one
showed up—plus some professional animated cartoons suggesting that Democrats
are too stupid to follow arrows.
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Culture
design
through
the mass media
When
news is entertainment:
Action! entertainment is the rule. Competition is
the name of the game, and in society, becomes synonymous with "good."
Cooperation seems to be a too-subtle abstraction relegated to some trash
bin along with "bleeding hearts."
Action
entertainment sets a social norm that makes it even more difficult to see
the moral wrongs in egocentric and ethnocentric behaviors in real
life.
The anti-toy gun, anti-killing norm of the 60's was nullified and aggressive
"warrior" role-models became the rule.
Simplistic "either-or" relationships are emphasized, while the subtler,
finer details of real human relationships are smudged out. (Of
course, whole cultures can be smudged out, too: we repeatedly witness real
genocides and ethnic cleansings.)
On PBS radio, news is richly interspersed with what for many is highly
irritating, almost infinitely monotonous, "music," the ultimate in dumbed-down
entertainment. (Several years ago on PBS, a rock composer pointed out that
the function of monotony in rock music is to put the listener into a trance.)
When
news is an attractive commodity:
"Attractive commodity" is what advertising is all about. However,
advertising is, at its best, simply PAP, and at its worst is misinformation
and absurdity.
Unattractive news is something we don't want to hear. If our country
arranges assinations to make room for military dictators who will give
us advantages in his country, or if our military burns alive 200,000 people,
or if we return refugees to fascist countries to face torture and death
while accepting refugees from communist countries who primarily seek the
very high standard of living we have arranged...these are things we don't
want to hear. So TV news, like TV entertainment, is designed to be
attractive. That's ostensibly to attract more viewers, but it can
have much wider consequences. We are discouraged from national
self-criticism, and encouraged to see patriotism as blindness to improvements
in our country. That will ultimately lead to disaster, if PAP and
mutual reciprocity are unrecognized—because other countries are doing
as we are doing unto them.
When
news is dumbed down:
News frequently treats pseudoscience and superstition with credibility
equal to that of science, and often puts an anti-intellectual slant on
good science, which is most often not recognized as the rational structure
that it is. The anti-science, post-modern, and New Age elements of
the non-science academic world similarly fail to recognize those structures
and abets dumbed-down news. Self-deception has little to oppose it
in this world where no "reality" exists against which we can test our ideas.
But the concept of increasing the odds that outcomes will be more predictable,
and to our advantage, also disappears.
A PBS current political events discussion is
The McLoughlin Group. However, these discussions are shallow,
doctrinaire (seeking confirmations), and noisily argumentative (trashing
disconfirmations). Participants are prone to interrupt each other
and seem only rarely to be listening to each other, even when in agreement.
Lines of reasoning come out chopped up into little pieces and scrambled
into an anti-intellectual blur. (Subtle smearing of opponents not
present is all too common.)
Dumbing-down goes with encouraging unquestioning reliance on others
for decisions, a component of "authoritarianism." Encouraging dependence
on authority is a useful tool for aiding persuasion by advertisers.
Toll-gate
economics:
blind
to multi-dimensional ordering
We usually presume that if a person "earns" in our economy, he has contributed
to society proportionately to his earnings. The "toll-gate"
element in economics is an observation that sometimes his "contribution"
is actually negative: it's more a taking from, than a giving
to, society.
Our confusion comes from failing to see multicomponent measure and from
oversimplifying by selecting some one scalar component to represent the whole.
Monetary value has many orthogonal components. Some
contribute to society; some take. Some are essential for maintaining
life; some represent luxury. Some represent intrinsic value important
to everyone; some represent preferences, positive for some but negative
for others. Etc, etc.
These contribute:
invention (a software algorithm; a gadget)
labor (farm products, manufactured goods)
art (music, painting, mystery novel)
services (sales, repair, fast food service)
These have a toll-gate component:
toll booth collector—when his take just pays his salary,
it's pure toll-gate.
domain-name collectors—when the Internet became chic,
many entrepeneurs bought up many domain names that might
become valuable to companies who own the names as trademarks. Many
entrepeneurs became millionaires simply by inserting themselves
as toll gates into the information Web.
float trip providers—on an easy river such as was Glen
Canyon. If Glen had become famous, float permits would have been
required, as they are for Grand Canyon. Free permits for private trips would have
had years-long waiting lists; however, immediate trips with commercial guides would
have been available for a few thousands of dollars.
natural resource distributor—it's a little like the air
we breath in that the source is nature; the distributor does add some value
by distributing.
mining—another kind of distributor, but one which adds
a lot: digging and processing ore. Mother Nature, not the toll-gate
operator, however, is the source of most of the value.
insurance—a service for distributing costs of hazards
over a wide range of people at risk, but can be partially converted to
toll-gate, by diverting money to people who haven't contributed.
On the other hand, Rochmont plans (the insured are the "stock-holders")
and Social Security (about 0.5% operating costs) are free of toll-gate.
HMO's were designed to be toll-gates. Most insurance companies
take at least 30% for operating costs.
Toll-gates raise the GDP without adding to the quality of life, and
probably lower quality of life by adding "middle men" who could be doing
something more productive. Toll-gates redistribute quality of life
away from the poor to the wealthy. If they take essentials for life
from some, by creating luxury (DeBeers' diamonds and Hollywood's "star
system," for example), they commit an outrage through their confusion of
components.
Toll-gates are a form of "privatization" and are one exemplar for the
flaws of that process.
The
antithesis of privatization is
public
domain
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