The Orwellian US media

Noam Chomsky and I recently had a face-to-face conversation. Brooklyn for Peace, a grass roots organisation, honoured him with their Pathmaker to Peace Award. 

I had then asked him a question on today's media: “Is there any way we can do something so that corporate media is not really so overly powerful, and not able to brainwash the American people and the world's people so easily?”

Chomsky replied: "One way is by honest, dedicated participation. Actually, there are plenty of journalists who do courageous, honourable work. Another possibility is developing alternative media which can influence the major media simply by their critical exposure of things that are happening. Another approach is to change the nature of the country. Popular opinion may have an impact on the media."

His brilliance, depth of knowledge, and analysis marvel me. And then I realise that even though informed people all over the world compare him to Plato, Aristotle, Tagore or Gandhi, here in the US, The New York Times and CNN reject his analyses, and exclude him from the consciousness of the people, as if he doesn't exist. This is what I now often call Journalism of Exclusion. This exclusion of dissent from mainstream media's news and views, and marginalisation of leading voices of dissent have contributed a great deal to keep manufacturing the public consent that Chomsky talks about.

In fact, I have argued that today's US media is a cocktail of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and an Orwellian 1984. This is today's new Newspeak. This is where US and its Department of Defense and CIA get into a new war every year in all possible corners of the world in the name of keeping peace. Here, Big Brother watches everybody through surveillance cameras and phone companies and Facebook and Google, in the name of fighting terror. 

And they call it a free country!

Major media all over the world, particularly in the so-called democratic countries where a plutocratic, pro-1% system is running the country in the name of democracy, are following US lessons, and brainwashing ordinary men and women, and particularly the younger generation. India is a prime example, where big media is now playing the role of a US satellite. Here, global corporations such as GE, Exxon, Monsanto, IBM, and Disney, promoted by the IMF-World Bank-WTO trinity, have used their profit-only motif in an unprecedented way. 

I have argued that the corporate media has been a pliant cheerleader of the trinity's four-point, global economic programme of slashing regulations, taxes for the rich, welfare for the poor and working class, and muzzling labour unions and organised voices.  Big media is not any more about objective news and education. It's about using news for making a profit. Therefore, with direct ownership of multinational corporations such as GE, Disney or Westinghouse, or indirect diktat through advertisement money (or the fear of its disappearance), mainstream media have changed news -- from neutral and objective education to entertainment-driven sensation, sans history and analysis. 

For example, the recent, countrywide police brutality and protest incidents find space in major media as a commodity to sell, only as what is happening now, and not as why it is happening, or how. The big picture is always missing. The Ferguson "Hands-up, Don't shoot!" or New York's "I Can't Breathe!" slogans from the repressed communities under siege find no support from a media discussion on America's obscene rich-poor divide and socioeconomic inequality and hopelessness. There is no mention that USA is now the worst-place country among the rich nations -- on economic disparity, lack of social mobility, lack of education and health care, school dropouts, teenage pregnancy, drug use, obesity, or imprisonment. There is no discussion that the American Dream, based on the concept of social mobility, is now completely non-existent. There is hardly ever any conversation that in the U.S., the 1% elite now own 40% of the country's wealth, and 50% of its stocks and bonds. No wonder the ordinary people are suffering, and losing their homes and jobs, yet the stock market is booming.

People are confused, but they neither have the analysis nor the time to challenge the status quo. Their spare time is taken up by baseball and Beyoncé. 

There is also a purposeful media promotion of a rabidly individualistic lifestyle that actively discourages collectivism and encourages a self-assumed militant vigilante through gun ownership and other validations of violence. Chomsky said, "People are always kept on their edge with the fear that the country is under attack by intruders." I have myself seen pro-NRA posters in ABC's New York offices: I was stunned. The Ayn Rand libertarian way of life has found some of its biggest supporters not just in Milton Friedman-Greenspan-Goldman Sachs economists, but among the corporate owners of media. 

Consequently, there is relentless, biased propaganda against historically important, organised, people's voices. Labour unions, immigrant rights groups, peace and justice groups, food and anti-GMO environment movements, and any democratic movements of solidarity have faced the wrath of not just far right-wing TV and radio talk show hosts, but of the so-called mainstream TV channels and newspapers. Consent has been carefully manufactured in the US and its clone democracies such as today's India, against progressive and democratic people's movements, and any discussion on people's history of united struggles has been slanted with half truths, or outright lies.  

I have asked many of my labour union students while teaching them critical thinking, "How many of you knew that Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was not only a civil rights leader, but also a labour leader, and a strong critic of American global warfare?" Most said they didn't know. Many of these workers who represent one of the most progressive unions with futuristic leadership, are strongly against undocumented immigrants, and can't see the historical common struggles. Fox TV and Rupert Murdoch have overwhelmed them.

With the rise of ultra Right-wing Tea Party in the US that practically took over the core of the Republican Party, and forced the weak Obama-Clinton Democrats to move from the left to the center, a Democratic Party which Chomsky believes is really a moderate Republican Party, fanatic right wing media have found air space and bandwidth that we have never imagined even twenty years ago. Reagan and Nixon would turn in their graves.

"He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past." That was Orwell in 1984. Come, and see for yourself. US media have already done it. India is not far behind.

The author is a labour educator, media critic and immigrant rights activist. He lives in Brooklyn