Oakland Blues and the MSM Exposure

To start off: apologies for not blogging yesterday. I was with my wife celebrating our 6^th wedding anniversary. It was a day of mixed emotions: happiness as I am married to the most fascinating, lovable, quirky, sweet, wonderful woman and sadness as Oakland became the #OWS Kent State University moment. An American veteran was critically injured and is now in surgery. We wish him all the best and a speedy recovery!

At the same time, yesterday made a number of things crystal clear:

Mainstream Media (MSM) are increasingly exposed as badly informed, slow or even biased towards ‘ruling class’. I use the term ‘ruling class’ explicitly as I have already pointed at a high level at the conflicts of interest which seem to exist between corporate banking interests, government, education and media.

Yes, Media.

In the old days, HMV (His Master’s Voice had this great logo on old 78 rpm recordings.

It showed a dog listening to a recording of his master’s voice. If that voice would have said ‘jump’, the dog would have barked ‘how high?’

Woof.

Which is the construction that has been put in place to control MSM. It starts with advertising which is of course innocent and logical because business needs to put the message out to their public (‘buy X’) and MSM Y (news paper, glossy, TV channel needs the money). Then more ads appear, and money starts flowing, MSM is very happy, but also a dependency builds: MSM starts tailoring content to please the advertiser. Or the advertiser threatens to withdraw ads because of reporting unfavorable to ‘X’.

Over time, it may have grown to the point where a news channel will confirm with ‘X’ and gain approval before reporting on, for example Occupy  Oakland protests. Or it may take the safe course and rewrite the police statement (because the police are there to protect the people). After all, the Occupy Oakland protests were not happy with ‘X’.

Of course there still is the possible conflict of interest where the police receives its orders from the (local/federal) government, which received (sizable) campaign donations from ‘X’. It was pretty well known but again, MSM Y chose to not report about it. Better this way. Mum’s the word.

People have gone on record that during the police actions MSM crews chose to not record certain scenes…

Do not bite the hand that feeds you! Woof!

We make exciting movies about reporters uncovering such conflicts of interest (how does Watergate compare to having your finance department run by Goldman and Sachs linked people?) yet in real life we close our eyes to the scam that’s going on.

This has of course been happening for quite a while but there is now a difference: 


Internet Live Feeds and Mobile Devices with Camera, and platforms like Twitter.

As I said, Oakland was a night of mixed emotions: love and pride for my wife, admiration for these ‘freaky hippie’ kids out there taking it, making a stand and mostly keeping peaceful in the storm, sadness for what was going down…

And incredulous maniacal laughter when I saw CNN and various other news stations read the police report. I had to think immediately to these old records I used to play, HMV!


Woof!

It still baffles me that police, city government and national media have not taken into account that people are their own reporters, that Twitter is a real time medium where people will post their comments, pictures and videos immediately and that for each protester site live video feeds are in existence. 


Next morning was the morning of (hidden) retractions, spin and other BS though possibly Fox News may have maintained (to my shame, I usually don’t watch it) that throwing paint warrants a response of rubber bullets.

Though David Letterman will not yet disappear, I can see MSM taking serious credibility hits as a result of flawed reporting. If credibility sinks, in the end so will advertising revenues.


We have social media to thank for this and therefore have the challenge to keep social media corporate free and keep interest regulation out.

In the end the big story is about the web, how it was cleverly woven with strands of well balanced fear, hatred and greed. 


The spokes are Business (Corporate and Banking), Government, Education and MSM. 


Yes of course we were greedy and happy to live a dream of endless credit, afraid to lose our dream, our house, our employment. 


For this we were willing to keep others down with MSM fueled hatred (ever seen ‘Cops’ ?), betray our peers (the infamous rat race) and work three jobs to have a chance at the American dream. 


This way of live was carefully manipulated by Business through MSM and Education as carrot and Government as stick.

In a way the occupy movement is not so much about the inequality that is inherent at this model as discussed in this article. People used to ask me why Americans put up with a society that provides such few safety nets for its residents and I used to answer what I always heard from my US friends: “this society also provides chances for enormous upwards mobility”

However, it has always been a long shot. And in the past decade, Business has eaten the donkey’s carrot, and started hitting it with a much bigger stick more often. Government, Education and MSM have provided the means. And as we have seen in other places, when the carrot has gone there is a line where fear will no longer hold people back, especially when the game is clear and the bad guys walk free. In the end, the Occupy movement has one very clear message:

Enough