This new TV series provides an excellent illustration of how our ruling One Percent uses entertainment to indoctrinate us into supporting their agenda. Dixon reveals what this new TV series is really designed to do:
Chicagoland nimbly ignores our capacity for rational thought, aiming instead at our guts and feelings. It shifts rapidly from gritty, compelling image to image, from sports stadiums as economic development tools, to Isaiah Thomas, Magic Johnson & Duane Wade as token sports figures offering “inspiration” and mentoring as the answer to job and education opportunities that don't exist. It depicts implacable urban violence as an existential fact kept at bay by the thin blue line of the city's police. This vision of urban life has a name. It's called neoliberalism.If you think that this is an extreme example or that you wouldn't encounter this on "public TV", then you are very naive. For example, read this piece entitled "Why Is Public Television Against Public Schools?" in which the author, Peter Dreier, only provides liberal hints to the answer:
Under neoliberalism, the problems of poverty and the poor are deemed unsolvable. The neoliberal vision calls upon us all to instead to retool and reform our individual lives, to pull ourselves up by bootstraps or whatever, seek or be role models, mentors and mentees, to adjust our expectations of society and solidarity downward and our positive attitudes upward. That's the unspoken vision Chicagoland is selling.
PBS once received a significant amount of money from the federal government. But conservatives saw to it that Washington gradually slashed much of that subsidy from what used to be called "educational television." To keep going, PBS stations around the country have relied more and more on financial support not only from "viewers like you" but also from big corporations and their foundations. The people chosen to run PBS and many of its local affiliates are no longer experienced broadcasters but sycophantic fundraisers.The fact is, there has never been a real "public TV", that is, a TV organization that supports the interests of the 99 Percent. PBS is under the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and as such is very well integrated with the ruling One Percent. Although local TV stations have some independence, they are run by boards of directors made up of local One Percenters.
So when it comes to assigning reporters and camerapersons to poke behind the wall of billionaire backing for school privatization, public TV has been, for the most part, missing-in-action.