looking for environments where we can be free from exploitation by an isolated, for-profit media?
These days I take that as a forlorn hope and a hopeless quest. There was a time when I wanted to believe that I had found such an “environment” by listening to NPR as a primary news source, as in for most of thirty years, all smug in the feeling of relief from advertising and all that. I suppose there was a time when one could reasonably (or at least comparatively) call NPR an “objective” venue of news-gathering, but in recent years and especially during the 2016 election campaign they too began to grate on me.
Between the endless giggly, feel-good segments hosted by women whose tone and diction made them sound all of about thirteen on-air, the continual exaggerated emphasis on “LGBT” and “transgender” stories along with all the rest of the topics du jour of the liberal suburban middle-class audience they pander to, and then finally the fact that no one there could even articulate the words “Donald Trump” without a palpable tone of scorn and supercilious disapproval in their voices, right up until and even after he actually did, you know, win the election. The naked Hilary partisanship went from annoying to intolerable around the day the “basket of deplorables” story broke, which of course NPR’s mouthpieces were jumping up and down cheering about right away, and I listened thinking, “so that’s what you people have thought all along of the regular working folks I have spent my whole life among?”
NPR and my final departure from it after three decades, along with the entire experience of the last presidential campaign, was what it took for me to realize at long last that I had never had the common cause with the urbane liberal base of the Democrats that I’d thought I had, and that pretty much all along that sort of people had been looking right down their little noses at the tradesmen and waitresses and schoolteachers and truck drivers and small business people I have spent my whole life around. Only after that did I begin to realize, in a sort of scales-lifted-from-the-eyes belated epiphany, just how polluted this country had been for decades with that hypocritical and disdainful elitist, university-indoctrinated big-government mindset that the Democrats pitch, and that I had really been a conservative all along and just didn’t recognize it.
Not that I have much use for the Limbaughs and the Alex Joneses either, though: propaganda is propaganda, and having studied the theory and practice of propaganda for most of my adult life I can finally say I know it when I see it. (In the case of NPR, I just hadn’t wanted to see it, but it had been there all along.)
Which is also to say, I doubt any venue or mechanism of news reporting is ever going to be able to sustain itself, ever, without its being simply a propaganda organ for whichever faction it seeks to entertain. And consequently I take every news item from whatever source with extreme skepticism, owing to the Three Lies Rule I outlined before: either the venue is willfully lying because of its political leanings, or the reporter is lying because that was what it took to make a deadline and get past the editors and get exposure for a story, or (so likely as to be axiomatic) the sources have lied because they can and because the only reason for anyone to even talk to reporters is to use them for a premeditated result.
So no, I’m doing no such thing as “looking for” such-and-such an “environment”. I’m getting a tad too old to waste time looking for things that do not exist.
