CNN Blackballs a Statesman
October 10, 2007 by M. Frederick Voorhees
If you’re running for president in this country, what does it take to get a major news network to STOP acknowledging you as an official candidate ?
First, announce that you refuse to make major decisions on behalf of corporations to the detriment of the American public. This will ensure that you see exactly none of the money that goes to Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, etc.
When this happens, unless you pretend to be completely oblivious or indifferent to your situation, you must point out on national TV that, as a result of being blackballed by the corporations you are being snubbed by the TV stations you can’t afford to pay off.
This will pretty much get the job done, as Mike Gravel has discovered. Today when five Democratic candidates announced they were blowing off the Michigan primaries and two (Chris Dodd and Clinton) announced they would stick it out, CNN made no mention whatsoever of Gravel’s plans. At first I thought Gravel had withdrawn altogether and I’d simply missed the announcement while wasting time in the intellectual wilderness that is academia. But, of all folks, FoxNews came threw with the news that Gravel had chosen to leave his name on the ballot for now.
I may write later about how this situation, whether you are Clinton, Dodd, Obama, Gravel, or the state of Michigan, represents a demonstration of calculated American opportunism at its best. But as C. Wright Mills might remind us, the political posturing of “The Power Elite” is nothing new. What is new is CNN suddenly doing a shittier job than Fox at hiding its shadiness and corruption. Are they really that pissed about his comments at the YouTube debates that they’re trying to convince people the guy doesn’t exist?
The power wielded by the American media never fails to sicken and frighten me. Australia isn’t that much better of course!
Given the media are part of the Big Business Wolves us chickens don’t stand much chance, eh?
Not sure if you mean (a) the Wolves are the U.S. and the chickens are other countries like Australia, or if (b) the Wolves represent capitalist elites everywhere and the chickens are the rest of us. Both metaphors make sense in their own way, and I believe that in both cases the chickens will prevail.
Call me a dreamer who’s living in the clouds, but I still believe in there’s a piece of everyone that’s inherently good; that some obstructed, sleeping instinct inside of us never stops yearning to replace hate with understanding, and that we’ll make it happen in the (soon-to-be) post-Bush world. But those of us that already see through the dog & pony show need to resist our urges to become cynical or apathetic or violent again. The greatest weapon of the rich & powerful elites is their ability to divide us, to fold the world population over on itself until individual citizens become so overwhelmed by the wrongs of governments that we’re all too eager to take it out on each other.
But we can’t give up on one another. If the cycle of corruption is ever broken it will be ordinary citizens who break it–not governments or the media or capitalists or militaries. Eventually the day will come when everyone sees the corruption and questions it. And that’s when the rules will change, and business will be fair, and government will be balanced, and the media will be “fair and balanced,” and the soldiers of the world will fight for just causes rather than on behalf of lucrative investments.
See I seek Utopia, too :)