The corporate media, Gaza and the death of television actor Matthew Perry

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the establishment media is an enabler of endless wars and illegitimate oligarchic power


Kevin Reed, David Walsh
WSWS.ORG


Editor's Note


I recall coming to the exact same infuriating conclusion as the authors when I first observed how the mainstream media—especially television— consumed inordinate amounts of time reporting on and memorialising Matthew Perry, properly classified in this article as a minor actor whose death could hardly match the world-historical genocide of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, with the full military, diplomatic and media support of the US government and its usual accomplices. This is a cultural critique whose main talking points should be embraced by the (true) left and widely shared on all available platforms. —PG

 
The corporate media, Gaza and the death of television actor Matthew Perry
First posted on 31 October 2023

Television actor Matthew Perry, best known for his portrayal of the sarcastic-cynical character Chandler Bing on the sitcom Friends, died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 54 years old.

The actor was found unresponsive in a hot tub behind his house, according to law enforcement sources, who spoke to the Los Angeles Times.

 

Matthew Perry, 2013



While no drugs were found at the scene, sources told the Times, “prescription medications were recovered at the home and hence toxicology will be part of the investigation.” The Los Angeles County coroner’s office, which has deferred its findings pending further testing, will determine the cause of death.

Perry was nominated for several Emmy awards for his role in all 234 episodes of Friends (1994-2004) on NBC and for appearances as an associate White House counsel in the fourth and fifth seasons (2003) of the popular The West Wing political drama for the same network.

Perry, born in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1969 and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, spoke publicly for many years about his struggles with substance abuse and addiction. In a memoir published a year ago, Perry recounted that he became an alcoholic at age 14 and later became addicted to pain killers following a jet ski accident at age 28. At one point, he admitted he was taking 55 Vicodin pills per day.

The actor suffered many health problems caused by opioid abuse, including spending two weeks in a coma and undergoing 14 stomach surgeries. Perry explained he could not remember three years of his life while appearing on Friends. He also revealed he had had 15 stays in rehab and 65 attempts at detoxification. At one point during an emergency treatment, Perry’s family was told by hospital staff that he had a 2 percent chance of survival.

By all accounts, despite his serious illnesses, Perry was a decent and caring man who admirably dedicated himself and his estimated $100 million personal wealth to helping others with similar addictions.

In a 2022 podcast to promote his memoir, Perry said, “The best thing about me, bar none, is that if somebody comes to me and says, ‘I can’t stop drinking, can you help me?’ I can say ‘yes’ and follow up and do it.” Perry then added, “When I die, I don’t want Friends to be the first thing that’s mentioned. I want that to be the first thing that’s mentioned. And I’m gonna live the rest of my life proving that.”

While Perry’s demise is certainly tragic and shocking, it is not entirely surprising. He is one of a very long list of Hollywood and music industry celebrities who have met death as a result of alcoholism or drug abuse, or both. That phenomenon is so often part of the lifestyle or associated with the devastating ups and downs of stardom in the cruel, rapacious multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, which specializes in damaging human beings. Nothing is so destructive in American popular culture as success.

In this context, however, readers should consider critically the inordinate attention, airtime and front-page column inches given over by the corporate media to reporting on the life and death of Matthew Perry, who was, by any objective measure, a relatively minor figure in television acting.

The evening television news programs Sunday devoted a third or more of their time to Perry’s passing, with anchors reading somber, pretentious obituaries and “on-the-spot” reporters chiming in with superficial and predictable biographical details. The coverage was vast, omnipresent but thoroughly shallow, with the usual media combination of titillation and moralizing about such celebrity deaths. The emphasis given to the actor’s death seriously suggested that this was the most important development going on in the world this past weekend.

In the first place, this is a conscious attempt to black out the horrifying genocide and ethnic cleansing being conducted against the Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli military, with the enthusiastic support of the White House and Congress and every Western power. Moreover, the news media in the US is engaged in deliberately concealing the size and significance of the massive demonstrations occurring on every inhabited continent against the Israeli mass murder. The death of Matthew Perry, from the point of view of the American media, largely an arm of the Pentagon and CIA, came as a godsend—Here was something they could truly sink their teeth into!

The disproportionate attention paid to Perry was a transparent effort to divert public attention from one of the greatest war crimes committed since the end of World War II, a war crime being carried out in the manner of the Nazis. The political and media establishment is terrified of the widespread public opposition to the mass death and destruction and that opposition’s increasing depth and breadth within the population. The establishment is desperate to find ways and means of keeping the reality from reaching the public.

The news media is not interested in or capable of telling the public the truth about what is happening in Gaza, even though workers and young people are finding out about it anyway, especially through the social media activity of those not controlled by any state apparatus or “authoritative” news source.

There are other issues here as well. No doubt the great financial success of Friends, some of whose leading performers were talented, but which, in the end, was a banal and lazy series, resonates with the people who run the entertainment industry. They are perpetually obsessed with finding new means of packaging unchallenging material to the public in “unusual, edgy” ways. The dull and apathetic presented as sexy and hilarious—how can the Friends formula be repeated?

Many of those who run film and television belong to Perry’s generation. In some fashion, they identify with him, possibly what was weakest about him, or at least they are drawn to the drama of his life as a central and vital one. To such people, frankly, Perry’s story is more weighty and compelling than the death of 10,000 Palestinians and the threat to hundreds of thousands more.

Drug addiction is a mass phenomenon, but its association with wealth, privilege, boredom and having too much time on one’s hands, is not the story of opioid addiction in the working class and among the most oppressed. 

Again, we point to the appalling fact, which needs to be remembered, that in the midst of a bloody war awash with crimes of a world-historical character, major US television news programs and newspapers devoted much of their time and energy to treating the death of a minor television actor. To the extent that the mass murder in Gaza is not reported and exposed, the liars and scoundrels who own and run the media become the accomplices of the murderers.



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The Jimmy Dore Show • Fiorella Isabel — Craig Pasta Jardula (The Convo Couch) • Mike Prysner & Abby Martin (The Empire Files) • Lee Camp's Redacted Tonight • Caleb Maupin • Jonathan Cook • Jim Kavanagh • Paul Edwards • David Pear • Max Blumenthal • Ben Norton  • Anya Parampil (The Grayzone) • Caitlin Johnstone • Alex Rubinstein • Alexander Mercouris • Alex Chistoforou • Margaret Kimberley • Danny Haiphong • Bruce Lerro • Israel Shamir • Ron Unz • Andrei Raevsky • Alan Macleod • Eric Zuesse • Ed Curtin • Gary Olson • Andrei Martyanov • Jeff J Brown • Godfree Roberts • Jacques Pauwels • Max Parry • Matt Orfalea • Glenn Greenwald • Rick Sterling • Jim Miles • Janice Kortkamp • Li JingJing • Margaret Flowers • Brian Berletic (The New Atlas) • Regis Tremblay • Bruce Gagnon • Scott Ritter • Aleks • Big Serge • Simplicius The Thinker


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PARADIGM SHIFT

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Paul Edwards

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An astonishing thing has happened in America that has never occurred in the lifetime of anyone now living.  No, it’s not the crushing win of Trump in Iowa, nor the absurd determination of Democrats to run the senile ninny who has made a joke of our Presidency for another term.  These, in their way astonishing, are mere trivialities in this time of universal lunacy and deceit.


The CIA remains one of the main manufacturers and disseminators of US/imperialist propaganda—disinformation, false flags, demonisation campaigns, etc.—around the globe.


I mean an honest to god paradigm shift everyone can see that official wise men with public platforms and megaphones have not announced, or perhaps even noticed.  I’m talking about the first clear, undeniable instance of the failure of the American Empire’s Propaganda Machine.

It has been clear for decades, generations, that the American political elite has no regard for, and no sense of responsibility to,  the actual needs and desires of the ignorant, disorganized public.  It has always dealt with their inchoate hopes by indoctrination, by arousing and enlisting their imbecile enthusiasms in a mythology of tawdry, tribal patriotism based on the premise that they are a glorious, superior people whose leaders courageously embody and implement their magnificence all over the world.

The techniques of propaganda are refined, but their effect is entirely due to grotesque pandering to the worst susceptibilities of the human ego: the desire to assert one’s superlative worth as a  member of a powerful, violent, conquering nation.  The force of that tactic, endlessly repeated, rendered American citizenry, with rare exceptions, one solid, deluded, unthinking mass, devoted to whatever vicious, imperial ends the political elite intended.

Their trained mass response, sure as that of performing seals, has, for the first time ever, failed in regard to the Gaza genocide.


"By an overwhelming majority Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the Israeli genocide..."


Both parties in Congress are solidly behind their putative leaders in full support of whatever violence Nazi Zionist Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people.  This is true across the spectrum, from the pathetic halfwits and defectives in the MAGA sump to mock-noble, self-declared moral poseurs such as Bernie and AOL.  Tlaib is the one outcast who has dared to affirm the humanity of Palestinians, while the rest join solemnly to prevent a ceasefire, which would, they say, balk the Zionist’s “right of self-defence”.

With this level of unanimity, solid from the addled, babbling, derelict President down, presented forcefully, continually, to the nation from every organ in the Propaganda Machine, the certain positive response was confidently awaited.  It has not come.

In spite of all our corrupt, Zionist-owned government has done to enlist its support for the wholesale murder of a people, the American public has not bought it, and is not coming around.   By an overwhelming majority Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the Israeli genocide.

Try to recall a single moment when the diktat of the Machine was not ingested and regurgitated by the whole American public.  It took years and thousands of body bags to sour them on the Viet Nam horror.  The whole country was galvanized behind the lies that led to wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and its nonexistent WMDs, and it embraced the obscene “War on Terror” with all its follies.

Recall the wildly dishonest demonization of Qaddafi, Assad and Iran that Americans swallowed.  When Putin was Hitlerized for exposing U.S. treachery in expanding NATO to Russia's borders, and defending ethnic Russian Ukrainians from attacks by rabid Ukronazi Banderites, Americans ate it up and roared approval.

Xi of China is the next candidate for diabolization, but this first failure of the Machine will create doubt as to the ability of our rotten government to manage its victim people.  The question now is whether The Empire’s iron grip on their minds has been permanently impaired by its total, and totally despicable, support for the criminal brutality of an evil and illegitimate state.

It will be a delicious irony if the billionaire Zionists who bought our Congress find that the felon state it has supported against American interests has destroyed itself, and broken the death grip its money has exerted in subverting and betraying us all.

Depending on the endgame of the Zionist genocide—chiefly, on whether their murderous barbarity results in a deadly regional war—the effect on The Empire will be either crippling international infamy, or perilous, punishing engagement in a war that has the potential to utterly destroy many nations, including ours.

The American Empire has not represented the interests of its people for decades, if it ever did, and has only kept them in a kind of mental and emotional lockdown through controlling their perception of reality.  Nothing has been done for the generality of Americans since the last great threat to Capitalism in the Great Depression, which resulted in Social Security and Medicare.

It is intriguing to wonder what grand advancements might come for The People if the state were to be run for their benefit.  That, of course, will never happen under Imperial Capitalism which will fight to the end for its absolute rule by any means possible until it self destructs from massive and insoluble financial fraud, or is hammered and obliterated in an intentionally provoked war.

T.S. Elliot predicted long ago that the world would not end “in a bang, but a whimper”.  This seems unlikely now when the likely ends are implosion or explosion.  How profoundly sad it will be if the American people have thrown off the terrible strait jacket of imperial mind control just when it doesn’t matter any more.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Associate Editor Paul Edwards is a genuine Renaissance man, gifted with many talents and participant in many events and struggles of our tormented times. Our colleague Jeff Brown, who did a fine interview with him, sums it up thusly: “Paul’s life story is worthy of a biography: a rebel youth growing up, traveling and working around the world and then a long career as a Hollywood writer. Through it all, he has never lost his lifelong wrath against US imperialism and global capitalism, while seeking social and economic justice for humanity’s 99%…”


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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality. Put this effort to use by becoming an influence multiplier. Repost this material everywhere you can. Send it to your friends and kin. Discuss it with your workmates. Liberation from this infernal and mendacious system is in your hands. We can win this. But you must act.
—The Editor
—The Editor


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AMERICAN FASCISM – BIDEN? TRUMP? THE NEOCONS???

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Garland Nixon

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The Paths of a money obsessed culture lead but to the mass grave...

ABOUT THE AUTHOR / SOURCE
Garland Nixon is a radio and television talkshow host & vlogger, and leading anti-imperialist geopolitical analyst residing in the Washington, DC area.


Print this article

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

Since the overpaid media shills will never risk their careers to report the truth, the world must rely on citizen journalists to provide the facts that explain reality. Put this effort to use by becoming an influence multiplier. Repost this material everywhere you can. Send it to your friends and kin. Discuss it with your workmates. Liberation from this infernal and mendacious system is in your hands. We can win this. But you must act.
—The Editor
—The Editor


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Just saying: Who runs Hollywood? C’mon

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the establishment media is an enabler of endless wars and illegitimate oligarchic power


JOEL STEIN
Los Angeles Times


Who runs Hollywood? C’mon

Casablanca poster

A mainstream Hollywood product: The director, the producer, the writers, and half of the cast (including Conrad Veidt, who played a Nazi) were Jewish.

I have never been so upset by a poll in my life. Only 22% of Americans now believe “the movie and television industries are pretty much run by Jews,” down from nearly 50% in 1964. The Anti-Defamation League, which released the poll results last month, sees in these numbers a victory against stereotyping. Actually, it just shows how dumb America has gotten. Jews totally run Hollywood.

How deeply Jewish is Hollywood? When the studio chiefs took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago to demand that the Screen Actors Guild settle its contract, the open letter was signed by: News Corp. President Peter Chernin (Jewish), Paramount Pictures Chairman Brad Grey (Jewish), Walt Disney Co. Chief Executive Robert Iger (Jewish), Sony Pictures Chairman Michael Lynton (surprise, Dutch Jew), Warner Bros. Chairman Barry Meyer (Jewish), CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves (so Jewish his great uncle was the first prime minister of Israel), MGM Chairman Harry Sloan (Jewish) and NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker (mega-Jewish). If either of the Weinstein brothers had signed, this group would have not only the power to shut down all film production but to form a minyan with enough Fiji water on hand to fill a mikvah.

The person they were yelling at in that ad was SAG President Alan Rosenberg (take a guess). The scathing rebuttal to the ad was written by entertainment super-agent Ari Emanuel (Jew with Israeli parents) on the Huffington Post, which is owned by Arianna Huffington (not Jewish and has never worked in Hollywood.)

In the Producers (1967), Mel Brooks' irreverent sendup of Jews, Nazi Germany, and Broadway, the director, the main cast, the producer, etc., were all Jewish. Including (again) the guy who played the Nazi, Kenneth Mars. (Wonderfully).

The Jews are so dominant, I had to scour the trades to come up with six Gentiles in high positions at entertainment companies. When I called them to talk about their incredible advancement, five of them refused to talk to me, apparently out of fear of insulting Jews. The sixth, AMC President Charlie Collier, turned out to be Jewish.

As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you’d be flipping between “The 700 Club” and “Davey and Goliath” on TV all day.

I called ADL Chairman Abe Foxman, who was in Santiago, Chile, where, he told me to my dismay, he was not hunting Nazis. He dismissed my whole proposition, saying that the number of people who think Jews run Hollywood is still too high. The ADL poll, he pointed out, showed that 59% of Americans think Hollywood execs “do not share the religious and moral values of most Americans,” and 43% think the entertainment industry is waging an organized campaign to “weaken the influence of religious values in this country.”

That’s a sinister canard, Foxman said. “It means they think Jews meet at Canter’s Deli on Friday mornings to decide what’s best for the Jews.” Foxman’s argument made me rethink: I have to eat at Canter’s more often.

“That’s a very dangerous phrase, ‘Jews control Hollywood.’ What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood,” he said. Instead of “control,” Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry “happen to be Jewish,” as in “all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish.”

But Foxman said he is proud of the accomplishments of American Jews. “I think Jews are disproportionately represented in the creative industry. They’re disproportionate as lawyers and probably medicine here as well,” he said. He argues that this does not mean that Jews make pro-Jewish movies any more than they do pro-Jewish surgery. Though other countries, I’ve noticed, aren’t so big on circumcision.

I appreciate Foxman’s concerns. And maybe my life spent in a New Jersey-New York/Bay Area-L.A. pro-Semitic cocoon has left me naive. But I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.

--

jstein@latimescolumnists.com

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Integer


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The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of  The Greanville Post. However, we do think they are important enough to be transmitted to a wider audience.

If you find the above useful, pass it on! Become an "influence multiplier"! 

Indecent Corporate Journos Won't Do the Job, So Honest Communicators Must. Support them by helping to disseminate their work.

The Jimmy Dore Show • Fiorella Isabel — Craig Pasta Jardula (The Convo Couch) • Mike Prysner & Abby Martin (The Empire Files) • Lee Camp's Redacted Tonight • Caleb Maupin • Jonathan Cook • Jim Kavanagh • Paul Edwards • David Pear • Max Blumenthal • Ben Norton  • Anya Parampil (The Grayzone) • Caitlin Johnstone • Alex Rubinstein • Alexander Mercouris • Alex Chistoforou • Margaret Kimberley • Danny Haiphong • Bruce Lerro • Israel Shamir • Ron Unz • Andrei Raevsky • Alan Macleod • Eric Zuesse • Ed Curtin • Gary Olson • Andrei Martyanov • Jeff J Brown • Godfree Roberts • Jacques Pauwels • Max Parry • Matt Orfalea • Glenn Greenwald • Rick Sterling • Jim Miles • Janice Kortkamp • Li JingJing • Margaret Flowers • Brian Berletic (The New Atlas) • Regis Tremblay • Bruce Gagnon • Scott Ritter • Aleks • Big Serge • Simplicius The Thinker


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Know Thy Enemy (er… Ruling Class)

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editors log bluePATRICE GREANVILLE


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Surely you don't think this man is actually crafting US foreign policy? (TGP design)

Well, without further eloquence as Mr Dooley might say, here's Gui's commentary. I hope you find it as insightful as I did:

What is not discussed and what is evident to anyone familiar with the ‘ruling classes’ is that they all have a personal court of an immensely powerful mass of flunkies who direct and even dictate to their bosses how and what they should decide on. Every wealthy household has its bankers, lawyers, accountants, doctors, butlers, chauffeurs, etc. who not only flatter but also imprison their owners by their input. In Roman times this was the ‘Familia’, the household where the pater familias ruled ‘assisted’ by his slaves and freedmen. Just so the US president is told what to think and do by his staff. Those are the people that truly rule and as a class they are very dangerous to any social program because they enforce the status quo. The directors and presidents of large corporations are equally in charge controlling their large shareholders. It is like a huge social conspiracy which they all strive and believe in, because they all feed on it.

—Gui F. Rochat (January 8, 2024)

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