media and power

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> Right-wing politicians and big business persecuted by the mainstream
> U.S. media? Hardly.  The New York Times doesn't tilt quite so far to
> the right, quite so obviously -- but you'd be hard-pressed to find
> many significant distinctions vis-a-vis Fox in their cheerleading for
> Bush and his corporate sponsors.

Remember, The New York Times knew that Ike was lying to the
public
about the U-2s. For a year solid they printed his lies and
denials w/o comment. 

When they were confronted with this they said, "In this time
of half-war and half-peace that old principle of
publish-and-be-damned, while very romantic, bold and hairy,
can often damage the national interest." 

When a nation, even a nation that holds to the principle
that an informed public, truth reporting, is essential to
its being a nation, is at war, censorship may  accepted w/o
argument. 

The Times also knew about the Cuban Missiles and the Bay of
Pigs and did not report what they new, but reported the lies
of the government w/o comment. Are the truth and the
national interest at war because the cold war, the warm war,
the hot war, the war on drugs, the war on bums, the war on
immigration, the war on Iraq, the war on Columbia, the war
on the press, the war on the hald-wars everywhere is a state
of half-war and half-peace forevermore? 

To make Money
To Influence
To Entertain
To Inform? 

McLuhan claims that the mass media has far-reaching effects
on society. Some of those effects stem from the nature of
the medium themselves, irrespective of content. But the
"global village" is not simply about TV, it's about
European Imperialism, Colonialism, a class society that
Tears  people apart, and the Techniques that generated this
and sustain it are not the Tube or the camera but something
pre-electronic, the GUN, and the space of the gun os 
Private Property and the ACTUAL use of the Tube or media is
not as McLuhan saw it, as an instrument cool, pushing us
together, healing the cuts  of tearing people apart, but
reinforces acceptance of that tearing and separation.

I am
I protest some fundamental unbelief 
an evolution of coincidence, chance,  and chaos 
standing in no man's land between an existentialist and
humanist neo-stoicism
and historic narcissistic fantasy of God and immortality
I am
where Dead god and alien culture god are not
I am
Where Toynbee writes for the dim Cathedrals
I am
Where T.S. Eliot is drowned neo-romanitcly in the
Mississippi
I am
In Castle on Trial a Cockroach
I am
On grant Street with Papa
I am
On Main Street with Fitz
I am 
Enduring  one more time the maundering death of yet another
another senile-psychotic Murphy or Molloy or Thing
I am
Senescent, malingering, gone westward and back to NYC
and Waiting For No Exit, for The Flies
and I am switchblades rumbling with Rebels and Delinquent
Beatniks
where love never matures in Tennessee  but is always beset
with crippling fear
On A Street Car brooding over his espresso in the Village
shop
reading a savage parody or parable about girls half his age
I am with you Elena....