How deep we have sunk. How backward we have regressed. All the way down, all the way back to the black abyss of Orwell's 1984.
You can now be fired from your job for speaking the truth, in private, to your colleagues at work.
Vivian Schiller was forced out Wednesday as CEO of National Public Radio -- one of the last bastions of occasional truth in American media today -- because some slimeball wing nut came up with another entrapment video.
This one captured Ron Schiller -- an NPR executive who is not related to Vivian Schiller -- describing the so-called Tea Party movement as "racist" and "xenophobic." Anyone who is not utterly deluded by Frank Luntz-Heritage Foundation bovine excrement knows that these terms are perfectly apt descriptors.
The chairman of the board that fired Vivian Schiller said, "I recognize the magnitude of this news."
"News?"
What's "news" is that a Big Brother network now operates in this country with absolute impunity to constitutional protections of privacy.
Watch what you say around the water cooler. The Juvenile Spy Klan is everywhere.
"Don't tell Momma I'm a journalist; say I play the piano in a whorehouse."
At one point in our society existed a media that helped inform the public mind rather than purely shape it. NPR would not be my first selection of news media, but certainly would not be my last. The current right wing attack on liberal speaking persons who happen to disagree or more importantly shed truth on the political, economic, and corporate puppetry occurring in our society finds itself immediately stamped out, eliminated, put to rest, and shut down. However, conservative viewpoints on abortion, gay and lesbian rights, healthcare reform, education, and that little war across the pond continue. The barrage of racial, homophobic, and bigoted comments by these conservative pundits is greeted by public silence. Silence is deafening.
ReplyDeleteThere was a time when ‘democratic’ nations relied solely on propaganda and publically engineered thought to maintain order aka silence. Brutality was reserved for savage nations not the good old U.S. of A. Brutality is a term that in the past decade has been worked and reworked through clever media and PR acrobatics to disguise itself and continue to (quietly) strip the people of their rights.
No longer do we have an unpopular estate tax for the rich….instead we have a fantastic death tax for everyone (but mainly the rich). No longer is the War against Al Qaeda, but on terrorism. Torture is no longer brutal, it became an advanced interrogation technique. I won’t even get started on the PATRIOT Act.
Speech is no longer free, but silence is a cheap commodity. In economic pressing times much like the one facing the American Public we are forced to make cut backs and reduce our expenditures, much as the republicans are trying to do for public broadcasting. Should their attempts be successful, most stations would succumb to the financial stresses and cease to exist. This would only further support the managing, manipulating, and silencing of public opinion by the chieftains in their ivory tower.