By Eric Wamanji
The post why the media is not the immaculate prince did not amuse my friend Caro. In fact Caro lashed at me for losing the point and that the media has power to create and destroy, blah blah blah…
True. Caro, there’s no denying the power of the media. It’s potent. Its capability to invade our psych and influence our behavior cannot be overstressed. There is also no denying that (at times) the media has supported societal desires toward civility, democracy, enterprise, human rights, and just for entertainment.
My discomfort is that with all the power the media wields, still two things control it – money and political power.
Yet, my friends in the estate brook no criticism as if they are deities, all pure and belonging to a priestly system that is absolutely right.
Ask Samuel Lopez the author of Media Manipulation of the Masses: How the Media Psychologically Manipulates “Who makes the media accountable? No one. They are free to destroy anyone they choose.”
But the console for the destruction is principally laired at sleek offices and coffee shops where external forces are at work controlling copy. You see, he who controls the media, control the masses, as the maxim goes. And through our media, we have been stupefied. We’re subservient to the elite, we don’t think or question.
Yet, folks, when journalists rant about independence, objectivity, freedom of the press and expression…you laugh. Those canons and the media are like water and oil.
Cash and creed
Indeed, the media are owned by the elite with who have agenda – profit or ideological. For profits, the media will slant content to suit the paymasters, read advertisers. For ideological, their content will incline to the dogma could be political, cultural, religious or economic.
Folks, the masses interest is the last worry of a media house. We’re a means to an end in the game of numbers. The mass is an object to be packaged as statistics and then tendered to the merchants of commodities or ideology. But be sure the media to shout from rooftops that it is in town for public interest. They portray themselves as the only savior in a society under the clutches of greed, and other evil. The media is lying. It’s a fake messiah.
Yet, even some of the actors in those newsrooms are unaware of this reality. Sometimes I’m in stitches as some clowns mock the art of punditry trying to analyse the media whose nuances they hardly fathom…their lack of intellectual rigor to unpack this complex mammoth is just another unfortunate strand in our society. Yet, we believe them.
Dare any journalist to write an injurious truth about a big advertiser, and you will get a jobless dude wondering the streets. So, media independence my foot!
Indeed, what independence when too often we ride in politician’s cars, we partake in the bliss of free cocktail parties where we binge and dance, we lack the capabilities in going to the depth of issues at hand, we have our personal vendettas to square with enemies, real or imagined?
Aware of societal dynamics, largely journalists would play ball with content engineers. The media house of today has become a multipurpose institution. It’s a character assassination machine, character laundering apparatus, and manipulator of minds.
That’s why, with an agenda, the media would stubbornly repeat lies until it becomes the truth, a tactic so beloved of the Nazi. In fact, it is Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister who famously noted that if “You repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” And the content engineers outside the media houses know this too well. They will constantly plant lies against enemies in news products to sway the public perception and cloud the truth.
Ask John Swinton. He retorts: “You know and I know it that there is no such thing as an independent press….the business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of the mammon…what folly is this toasting to an independent press? We are tools and vassals of rich men behind scenes…they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents…and our lives are the properties of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”
Battle of bums
The TV is even worse. It’s a circus and competition has been grossly reduced to the battle of the bums. You see, cleaves and curves dazzles the pervert mass more than news. And the peddlers of this bodily non-essentials know to just too well – that your primal sense of the body will attract you to the screen.
But the biggest folly of our time is the gullible, docile mass, unwilling to invest in critical thinking, in a quest for truth and to question what the media churns out. The latent agenda seem to be too sublime to be deciphered by our media illiterate society.
So Caro, yes the media is powerful. And no, the media is largely a mannequin; those who pull the strings are not the guys we train in the university, but those with money outside the newsroom.
Wamanji is a PR&Media consultant and teaches media studies at Daystar University ewamanji@yahoo.co.uk follow @manjis