The World Gossip Column

Are media agencies really reporting valuable news? It seems more often than not, stations like Fox News, CBS, CBC and CNN have more in common with the tabloids than bona fide journalism.

If their jobs were to be taken seriously, they would report the facts, not produce speculation based on rhetoric. Articles would be informative, but at the same time productive and objective. Sensational stories about crime, conflict and scandals would be passed over with detachment, in order to report without being inflammatory. What we have now is homogenized – reality for entertainment purposes only. Whether nightly or up to the minute: the hottest stories are being reported. Not because we citizens need to know, but because compromising journalists have masters too – and most of us bow to the almighty dollar.

It’s easy to shake a finger at the major media corporations for churning out all manner of stories in order to pad their ever-burgeoning bottom lines; but shouldn’t we, as citizens in a democracy, be demanding more honest reporting from our news? Or is this utopian? Are we, the few who actually want to hear the important stories, stuck to the fringe media groups for all eternity?

Why do we as North Americans allow ourselves to be lulled into a state of inertia in the face of covert government oppression? Covert because it is subtle and superficial individually, but the instances in our societies are innumerable. The condition of the news media is merely a necessary happenstance of capitalist-democracy. It is necessary for citizens in an advanced capitalist state to be pacified to the point of neutrality or support, in order to sustain its development. Pacification may come in many forms – religion, marketing and advertising (read: propaganda), the illusory freedom of choice, and so on. Our entire reality is such that solutions to the problem of unsustainable, destructive, anti-social (one could argue dehumanizing, but that’s another article entirely) capitalism which we’re familiar with, can only be seen through the addling fog of cynicism.

We must realize our duty as democratic citizens to be agitators – ever asking why. This is my shining light of optimism. Imagine the retribution when we unplug from the Matrix and collectively realize the magnitude of our discourse from true democracy... that will be something to gossip about.