Chuck Todd and David Gregory, two overpaid clowns representing the awful mediocrity of corporate television. Exchanging inanities on a similarly useless program, Meet the Press.
Editor’s Note: The Western left, and the American left in particular, have been scandalously myopic and inadequate in organizing against the corporate media. The goal from the start should have been to neutralize the effects of the corporate media, since without that the great battles to win over the American majorities would be impossible. This of course required the patient building of a parallel and powerful structure entirely controlled by progressive organizations. What passes for leadership on the American left thought otherwise. Without heeding the obvious truth that you should not seek battle unarmed, it has wasted its time in scores of campaigns whose triumph ultimately depended on the grudging sympathy of the corporate media. Those who blackballed the notion of building our own media should have realized that media power is today inherent in the dialectics of class struggle. Without media power any type of mass organizing becomes ten, a hundred times more difficult, and later, any kind of popular action—be it a strike or huge demonstrations— can be disfigured and slandered by the corporate propagandists at their pleasure, to the point of almost complete criminalization. Friendly media power is in effect a key aid in the birthing of radical movements and a protector of their development. More so in the age of expertly manipulated societies.
Thus, influencing the business-controlled media is and has always been a useless and moronic quest, a fool’s errand: the plutocracy will never let go of its main ideological support, its chief propaganda weapon. Choosing the “influence” approach, besides putting the left in the role of mendicant, has been tactically and strategically an inexcusable error allowing the ruling circles to literally get away with murder for many decades, dictating the social agenda at home, and implementing a criminal foreign policy that brought misery and devastation in scores of nations, from Indochina to the Korean peninsula, to Iran, to Central America, South America, and, of course, now and always the Middle East. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and now Syria are but the latest examples of this unchecked orgy of mass murder and cynicism, all of it permitted and abetted by the corporate media. What’s more, showing the ethnically indifferent character of capitalist rule, CIA machinations were also responsible for terrible political outcomes in Europe itself, in Greece and even Italy, where we meddled successfully to derail the arrival of a progressive coalition in the immediate postwar, and left behind one of the largest—still extant—networks of Western supported subterranean terrorism (see Operation Gladio). Now some glimmers of hope are finally and haltingly sprouting over the horizon but this could well be a case of too little too late. —PG
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