We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Journalism in the Obama age shows the real media bias

Click here to access article by Glenn Greenwald from The Guardian.

The author, who now writes for The Guardian, attacks a rival liberal media outlet, Rolling Stone, for a sycophantic interview with President Obama. His insight and criticism that (mainstream) media serves power is very apt, but he dare not attack the system that has produced this kind of "critical" media. Hence, by framing this and similar reporting as related only to the "Obama age", he is at the outer limit of what the ruling capitalist class will permit to be expressed in liberal media which includes The Guardian. Should he ever stray beyond that boundary he will find himself excommunicated from the church of capitalism, and from all mainstream media. I wonder if he is as naive as this paragraph suggests:
What makes this most ironic, and most destructive, is that this function is the exact antithesis of what media figures claim they perform and what pioneers of press freedom protections envisioned. The political media is designed to be adversarial because it is supposed to serve as a scrutinizing check on the claims of those in power, not serve as worshipful, propagandistic amplifiers of those claims.