Together, money and the media means propaganda — and that’s what controls the political process at this time.
Originally published 2005
I just gave this reply to a comment made by Bill Harding, in response to a post I made at Democrats.com. He made a good point that I expanded on a bit further…
Bill Harding is 100% correct when he opines that money translates into propaganda:
- A huge amount of money goes into finding out what sounds good to the electorate — regardless of what the actual intent and purpose of the proposals are.
- Another huge chunk of change goes into creating the kind of polished materials that deliver the visceral, emotional appeals in a way that is truly effective.
- Even more money goes into running ads, printing brochures, distributing things, and paying people to run “surveys” that are thinly-disguised sales job.
The cost goes even higher when broadcast airwaves — which are “licensed” to giant conglomerates for free — become more expensive at election time. In other words, we give the airwaves to those corporations “because they’ll use them in the public interest”. But they then effectively extort massive sums of money from anyone who wants to participate in the election process (except for Arizona, where they put a stop to that kind of thing).
In short, money, the media, and propaganda all work together at the present time to determine the outcome of elections. But if we can provide another avenue of information that people can use to get advice they trust, we can make that entire process irrelevant to election results.
When we do that, we’ll have made corporate money irrelevant to politics, and we’ll have put a thoughtful democracy in the hands of its citizens.
Copyright © 2005-2017, TreeLight PenWorks
