The hundred largest circulating newspapers in the United States are owned by just sixteen or eighteen corporate conglomerates that also have their hands on broadcast media as well. Media sell sets of values, this is not a point I care to debate. It is a basic tenet in all Media courses at the university level. Media control perceptions by controlling the stream of images or by manipulating the ideas that are received through their conduits. Control any medium of information and control the stream of images as well as the received ideas of the culture at large, and you can control what gets thought in that society, what gets passively received by the masses consuming the media products, which are fore-mostly, information (and recall another essay herein among the treasure chest; information is in formation; to inform is to put into form, to shape, to mold).
Manipulation of opinion is key; selling audiences to sponsors paramount for profit guide the sensationalist bent of most media. A media culture has its mentality shaped by the media, of course, it seems as if this does not need to be said, yet we act as if it weren’t paramount in how we think or how we contrast the limits of what is thinkable, the definition of what is thinkable. Controlling images and ideas is to control what the truth is, to control how Truth is defined. Most post-structuralist critique of Truth is rooted in how much the media control our reception and perception of the truths of our world, they themselves, though, confusing the facts of the media for a kind of nature that determines.
Influence and manipulation is not in itself nature, although we can talk about a virtual nature. Post-Structuralist critique of the idea of Truth has become a mainstream idea, received, swallowed and digested. We only have to examine the 10 largest cities in the U.S. and look to their print media and broadcast media and see who the CEOs of the corporations who run them are, and what they all have in common, politically, rhetorically, financially– all of a piece, Zionism. However, it is not just Zionism, but almost entirely Right Wing Zionism, with a considerable number who are of the Reactionary bent.
Now Zionism is not the problem at the core of America’s media controlling the ideas we receive, as much as is it the kind of Zionism that has reached hegemony among Zionists in the media that has become problematic? There is no balanced presentation of Zionist positions–carefully read the plural form here. Zionism in reality is variegated, but in out media presentation, only a right wing version of it gets presented. This of course has everything to do with America’s virtually monolithic shift to the right, that is, of all positions in the American political spectrum. But I am sure that a considerable shift to the right has happened in the west, entirely.
Where do the largest donations from those who control our media go? To what organizations do all or most of them belong? A pack of wolves, I would assume, if the reactionary bent present in the overarching right wing hegemony among American Zionists is examined?
I have no illusions about print media or broadcast media being the harbingers of Truth–the Brian Williams fiasco is only indicative and not in itself proof positive–but oh! what an indication. Yes, it is important to know what kind of people control the media in America, if we want to understand the branding that gets put on truth. We want to know whose money backs our candidates at election time, don’t we? This is a legitimate concern, no? Of course it is. I want to know whose money backs what news gets disseminated and what news gets suppressed, what information is filtered through the prism of Truth and which bits or streams of information are filtered as propaganda.
If all the owners and publishers were white men, we’d have something to say, or so I assume that something as indicative of a previously instilled idea of white hegemony or white male hegemony would be offensive to our sensibilities. If they were all communists–that’s almost absurd to entertain. If the money behind our news were all of it Muslim money–this is also absurd because if it were all Muslim, the bent would be decidedly in a different direction. If it were found out that the publishers or the CEOs of the corporations that own the newspapers in the ten largest cities in America were all socialists, Socialists in the form of John Stuart Mill–what do you imagine the response would be? I can imagine, here in everythng-has-moved-to-the-right America. But when the corporations and the publishers of the print and broadcast media are virtually all of them Zionists–and I reiterate here, right wing Zionists–there is no outcry, except from the marginalized Al Jazeera.
It is in America, with the help of the Media, that Zionism gets disseminated in its most right wing brand, never far from endorsing, certainly never outraged by, its reactionary currents. Moderate Zionism rarely gets entertained; Zionism from the times of the British Mandate virtually does not exist. Any assertion that Israel should be a bi-partite state is today contradictory of what Zionism means and stands for–of course. It did not used to be this way.
Now we must know that Zionists are white and black; they are Jewish and Christian, as well as Muslim; they are men and women and even children. They can be Latinos, they can be Russian, Polish, French, or British. Zionists are in the State Department and in the Oval Office–this I have already asserted in other essays. They are in our schools; they are our next door neighbors; they are on Capitol Hill, and they are in the Pentagon, to name only a very few other places where they are to be found. But a Zionist is not in himself a reactionary Zionist, the latter fast becoming the only acceptable kind of Zionist in America. Zionists are also in our media, in high offices of administration and control; Zionists are also among the monied elite that make the policies that inform Americans and send us to war around the world.
As I have said already several times, the nearly monolithic shift to the right of all bands in the American political spectrum has been evident for some time now. Zionism has not been exempt from this shift to the right. Ironically–or maybe not so ironically–in Israel, there seems to be more diversity from among Zionists than we see in the United States. This should be interesting for us to note the next time reactionary Zionists in the media try to hoodwink us into believing their Right Wing extremist views are the only correct views; and it wouldn’t be offensive if they tried this, but it seems close now to the time when this will be the only position. Zionists in the media have learned their Orwellian lessons well, as they have the lessons to be learned by media managers from totalitarian propaganda.
Ad Men, Mad Men–yes, madness, everywhere in the media? Advertisers on Madison Avenue have more in common with ministers of propaganda than they do with any harbinger of Truth or Justice. Mad men, all of them the ministers of propaganda, the American media is a tool of propaganda as is Hollywood and Madison Avenue, as was Pravda in the Soviet Union. When news and editorials meet with police PR in rhetoric, then I know I am living in the new Soviet Union. But, but, but listen to the news on the networks and cable; read a variety of the newspapers from across the country. . . all of piece.
Here in NYC, the hottest bed of lies and deceit . . . who runs the media but those whose vested interests lie in keeping Israelis and Palestinians at odds; but also forestalling the very peace they say they want?
Today, you cannot assert yourself to be a Zionist and not come out in some way, with one or another rhetoric, in support of the State of Israel–and I have carefully said ‘State,’ and not ‘country.’ This is the common ground for all Zionists–the survival of the state of Israel; for some of these Zinoists, the survival of the Jewish people is what is most important; living breathing Israelis. Of course, this takes on decidedly different overtones when manifest in rhetoric and policy and politics and state actions. Sympathies, if you must take notes, almost always lie?
The survival of the state, the country and/or its people–and I have carefully manipulated the awkward and confusing aspects of what Zionism represents–is paramount in importance when any discussion of Zionism is entertained by Zionists or from anyone entertaining any critique of Zionism (which does not mean opposition to Zionism). The focus on survival has made most of what is Zionism, survivalist, which is what feeds its reactionary bent in its growing Right Wing.
Survival is not living, though. This has to be understood. To survive is to go beyond living, but beyond it in the sense of being outside of it.
The media in America and in the Soviet Union have had a lot in common for many years. The State Department is nothing other than an American Totalitarian Capitalist Politburo–too extreme? have the analogies herein gone awry? Perhaps; but there’s method in my hubris. And it is hubris, so relax. Truth in reporting has gone the way of Truth or truths in Soviet State sponsored Pravda–super states use media similarly; all super states have one or another thing in common administratively with the totalitarian design for state politics.
I wish we had more viable critique of the right wing position–which is not to say we do not have any. Actual and virtual are exclusive. But the People are fast becoming a Public without any notion of individual responsibility to the role of the People as counterweight to the density of the State–I have said this before and I am likely to say it again and again–we need to hear it; we need to listen to this.
To critique any form of Zionism is not to offer a rebuttal for Zionism in itself, Zionism in its totality, in its multivalency; to critique Zionism as a form of nationalism is not in itself to critique the existence of Israel, nor is it to offer a rebuttal against Israel’s validity as a nation among nations. To critique the practices of the State of Israel is necessary in a democratic world; all ideas competing for acceptance should–no, must–have no censor. But we do see media censoring of individuals who speak up or out on the military practices of Israel. Any or all of these critiques are not a critique of the Jewish People, World Jewry, or any Jewish person of influence or authority–no, of course it is not. And repeated retorts to any critique with accusations or claims of Anti-Semitism are tantamount to crying wolf, and this is a real danger in a world where Anti-Semitism lies dormant like TB.
It is not Anti-Semitic to critique the Jewish People or any Jewish man for their or his politics–and a People do have a politics, even if it is multiple and variegated. Anyone’s personal opinions are fair game for criticism; anyone’s rhetoric may be critiqued–should be critiqued without fear of accusations that come with the weight of conviction and guilty as charged–much the way we see in America, most often in Social Media, when the charges of Anti-Semite, or let’s side-step and say the word Racist, is used. We have to be able to tell it like it is no matter how it is where it is when it is, by or to whom it is. I see this ability to tell it like it is waning in America–it makes me afraid as much as it makes me sad.
The Falling Leaf Review 