Pundit is not a word everyone knows.
Not surprising. Funny word: Pun-dit! Sounds like some
kind of really short joke. Hmmm. Might not be that far off,
when you think of it.
But, seriously now, the pundits are those funny men (almost
always
men) paraded before the eyes of America, on TV -- particularly news programs
and news commentary shows -- who are hired to tell us their opinions.
Usually it is political opinions.
They are not pollsters (only rarely), their credentials are spurious
-- they are an editorial or a political writer for a newspaper, they are
a TV journalist, perhaps they have been involved in the political campaigns
(or more rarely) the administrations of politicians.
Big Brother
But here's the things you will never hear about them:
1. They tell us how we're "supposed" to think.
2. They are hired guns.
3. Their main qualification for their job is that they are
"opinionated."
Now. let's take these one by one.
They Tell Us What to Think
The assumption here is that people are ignorant. It's true none
of us are informed on everything. But we need experts to inform
us. Why are we given opinionated, mean-spirited cynics! Hell,
if I want that kind of "information," I could just go have a talk with
one of my redneck neighbors (the one who thinks anyone who uses an illegal
drug should get life imprisonment and that all drug-dealers should be hanged
would qualify).
The two biggest examples I can think of where this has recently been
at work are the Lewinsky scandal and the Democratic National Convention
coverage.
Most recently, I watched the Democratic Convention and was astounded
at how little the major networks actually showed us what was going on.
While watching C-Span, I was allowed to see the speeches by people who,
very often, had been elected by other people to speak for them. These
were representatives of actual people. Whereas on the major networks,
these speeches were heard going on in the background (unintelligible) while
these "hired guns" -- elected by no one except the person who paid them
-- were taking up air time, having chit-chats, giving us their "takes"
on the hidden agendas behind everything that was being done and said (though
they are not psychologists, just cynicism is their credential) . . . without
actually letting us, the people, see what was being said and done.
We received second-hand information. Words and events had first to
be filtered through the corporate machinery; much the same way the old
Soviet Union would handle information: standing between people and the
actual events and determining what the official truth should be.
Not only did they tell us what to think, they even had the gall to
look into the future and tell us how we, the people, will
think! Though I doubt any one of these has ever so much as taken
one psychology course -- let alone done any self-inquiry or deep-feeling-therapy
-- they put themselves in the position of being prognosticators, of claiming
to being able to know what people think and what they will think!
Back to the convention coverage: It was astounding to discover
that the major networks had devoted only about an hour per day to broadcasting
what was being said on the stage, compared to C-Span, which was airing
something like ten times that amount of actual convention coverage.
The rest of the time that the major networks slated for "convention coverage"
was filled up with these "pundits" droning on to tell us what we should
be thinking about the speeches, without letting us hear the speeches ourselves!1
So there is this wall of cynicism that the media puts between the
people and our representatives, our politicians. This disrupts the
political process in a way never before known in American history.
The media is not informing, it IS the event. Commentators complain
about this all the time, complaining about people being glued to the TV,
thinking of reality as that which is portrayed on TV. It is the pundits,
of course, who do the complaining. How ironic that it is these very
same pundits, who -- having put a wall (of themselves and their cynicism)
-- between the people and actual events, who are the same ones doing the
complaining.
The wealthy elite, using their hired guns, the media, are making
a virtual reality (one that suits their own interests) to replace the real
experienced reality of everyday folks. And, smart and subtle as can
be, they arrange for their hired guns to voice token opposition to this
trend. As if by complaining, the spotlight can never be put on them
as the cause of it all.
One glaring hypocrisy in their not covering real events -- like convention
speeches -- is, they tell us, that speeches are boring, people don't want
to hear them. They claim that people will not tune in, or will turn
their TVs off. The arrogance inherent in this cries out to be spoken.
Specifically:
WHAT MAKES THEM THINK THEY ARE THEMSELVES SO FUCKING INTERESTING
(not to mention edifying) that people want to hear what THEY have to say
on every little thing?
The politicians they have labeled boring, and whose places they have
stolen, have at least been exciting enough to have been elected.
Those politicians each have thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions
of supporters who have backed their right to speak. By that I mean
they have each managed to be elected after all (by PEOPLE -- you're catchin'
the thread here, right?). Meanwhile, these commentators' only credential
for speaking, the basis of their right to broadcast their opinions, is
solely comprised of their ability to be enough of a "go-along," enough
of a suck-up and yay-sayer -- to be hired by the wealthy elite (the brown-nosed)
to be their spokesmen.
This leads me to point #2.
They Are Hired Guns
When the vast majority of the American people (over 60%), in poll after
poll, said they did not want to hear any more about the supposed Clinton
scandal, in which they said that the media was focusing on it to the exclusion
of the real issues of the country, what happened? If it's all about
giving the people what they want -- even if it's not about informing the
public -- then the media would naturally have reduced its coverage in order
to get better ratings. But this did not happen. This is proof
that the claim that they are giving people only what they want is B.S.
in the extreme.
There apparently was another agenda, an agenda not that of the American
people.
But this tendency of the media to force-feed the American people
did not begin with the Lewinsky scandal. Ever since "My Generation"
President Bill Clinton took office in January of 1993, he has been hounded,
attacked, and ridiculed at each and every opportunity on even the slightest
of things. If he is a feeling man and says "I feel your pain," that
is an object of ridicule. If he gets a haircut befitting a president
of the United States (never mind that Nancy Reagan spent huge amounts of
taxpayer money on changing the White House's china -- simply because she
didn't like the style -- without any media outcry), that is an object of
ridicule. If he is an ordinary American, like a neighbor next door,
and happens to like to visit McDonald's on occasion, that is an object
of ridicule. The list is endless. The list of detractors is
endless as well.
Now, it should be pointed out that it does not matter whether the
network is PBS -- the supposed "public" broadcasting station -- or the
major ones: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN et al. The reason is simple.
Watch PBS. How many times do you hear the "brought to you by Archer
Daniels Midland Corporation" supposed non-commercial. Is this not
the major agri-business corporation, which is partly responsible for the
decimation of the family farm as a livelihood, lifestyle, and way of life?
So, each of the networks have their "hired guns" to serve their corporate
owners. (The one exception I would make is CNN -- anything owned
by Ted Turner. For, anyone who would put up a billion dollars of
his own money to help the U.N. -- when even the U.S. Congress won't cough
up the dues it owes -- has shown himself to be a hero and humanitarian
who obviously has put principle above profits. So I would trust that
network.)
But of the hired guns: George Wills is one the most ubiquitous
and worst. This guy is so repressed he can't even crack a smile.
Is being so split off from your heart some kind of credential? Well,
if you follow the theme of this, then these people are only in it for the
money; they are willing to be lackeys for the wealthy. So not having
a heart would actually fit with getting hired by people who don't want
someone whose conscience might get in the way of their following their
script, their orders from "on high."
But even on PBS, we see "The McLaughlin Group." On this show,
except for the occasional appearance of Eleanor Clift, what we are served
up is an endless supply of media cynicism, especially around the Democratic
President.
I mean, who the hell are Morton Kondrake or Fred Barnes? Where
do they get the right to engage in the public "stoning" of our elected
President. Just what are their qualifications? Who elected
them
to do our thinking?
The Fox News Network has it, hands down, for being the most biased
and hypocritical. Their commercial about themselves: "We report
it. You decide." They must have known, when they came up with
that, how prejudiced they were going to be, to what extent they were going
to promote the agenda of the wealthy elite, so of course the best defense
is a good offense. "We report it. You decide." Rolling
on the floor, laughing! How about, "We decide it, We'll let you know."
Sure enough, who owns the Fox News Network? Why isn't it that
arch-conservative Rupert Murdock? Coincidence? I don't think
so. So Fox News has managed to come out with some of the worst of
the nutballs. Sure enough, they have hired Kondrake and Barnes to
do their own show (no pretense, even, of an alternate, more progressive
viewpoint), calling it "The Beltway Boys." About the only belt involved
in that program is the one that was probably used on them when they were
kids to turn them into such hate-filled cynics.
Fox News Network is rife with right-wing, anti-President, anti-Democratic,
cynical programming. Viz., "The O'Reilly Factor," and something called
"Hannity and Colmes." Second in line is CNBC with "Hardball" with
Chris Matthews. You get the point.
Having established they are hired guns for the wealthy elite, let's
look at point #3.
Their Main Qualification For Their Job Is That
They Are "Opinionated"
So, if they are biased, so much the better; the more mean-spirited,
cynical, the better.
They appeal to the common denominator in people; they always have,
but it has gotten worse lately. Our cynicism, our hatred, our tendency
to want to scapegoat, our normal apathy -- these are all stimulated, nourished,
amplified, and provoked by our media.
And then again the hypocrisy: Being the cause of the apathy,
they bring it out as an issue. Wondering aloud from where it could
possibly come (again staving off possible attacks against themselves with
a good offense). But they get a "two-fer." The apathy is used
as another attack on the politicians, and particularly the Democratic President.
Which of course in turn increases the apathy (does that make it a "three-fer";
and if you count in the fact that they are serving the interests of a wealthy
elite who depend on voter apathy to keep their Republican lackeys in power
. . . a "four-fer"? -- Now THAT sounds funny. Try using that in a
sentence!)
So, concerning voter apathy, just what the hell do they expect (when
they decry it)? Everything done by our Democratic President, Bill
Clinton, or our Democratic Vice-President, Al Gore, or any good deed done
by either of their families or any Democratic bill proposed in Congress
is analyzed, dissected, and dished out to us as being self-serving (no
matter how far the stretch) on the part of the Democratic participant.
It does not matter how obviously humanitarian is the act or effort.
Our action in Kosovo is a good example. Despite the obvious
relief given the refugees and the genocide and continued rape of innocents
we helped to stop, Clinton is accused of going in there to distract people
from his personal scandals at home. As if all the previous years
of media ridicule and scandal-mongering could somehow be offset by a few
weeks of attention to a major humanitarian crisis. Clinton had been
so (publicly) tarred and feathered by that time, did these pundits really
think he was thinking about such things as being the object of media mud-slinging
when he was considering such a major decision (concerning a problem that
we know he had been agonizing over for a much longer time, beginning many
years ago with ethnic cleansing by Serbians and the crisis in Bosnia)?
At any rate, according to these media commentators, there is always
a hidden agenda for anything good that a Democrat does or says.
Methinks they cannot see they are doing this because they are projecting
their own duplicity of nature. After all, they are hired guns,
suck-ups, who are in their positions of influence pretending to be otherwise.
At any rate, with all our heroes being dragged daily through the
mud -- the media using the techniques of "yellow journalism" and aspiring
to integrity no higher than the journalists of The National Enquirer
-- why would these pundits think, why would anyone think -- this having
been going on now on a daily, hourly, weekly basis for eight years now
-- that there would not be political apathy, that people would not
be of the opinion that all politics and politicians are corrupt, that voter
turnout would not be down, and -- most telling, considering these
hired guns' campaigns of confusion of issues, misinformation, and raising
of false arguments -- that there would not be such huge political
ignorance in this country, especially among our youth -- who've grown up
with these pundits and commentators in their faces, on their TV screens,
since the time they were children.
Conclusion: The Media Responsible for Political
Cynicism, Low Voter Turnout, and Mean-Spiritedness in American Culture
What it all comes down to: It's us versus them, folks.
Even old-time political icons, David Brinkley, for example, have
shown themselves to be mere pawns. In our innocence, many have thought
of him as the model of the respected, unbiased journalist, in the classical
sense. However, is he using his celebrity -- like Jimmy Carter, Susan
Sarandon, Martin Sheen, Daniel Schor, Barbara Streisand, Alec Baldwin,
Woody Harrelson, Amy Carter, Roma Downey, Sally Struthers, Paul Newman,
Robert Redford, even Mikhail Gorbachev (there are so many others) -- to
promote causes to benefit humanity? No, he is still on the corporate
payroll. We hear him as the spokesperson for ADM. In his kindly
voice, spilling out over pictures of rolling, homey and peaceful, fields
of grain, telling us how Archer Daniels Midland is bringing food to the
world's hungry. Oh, how sweet. Again, let's just forget the
reality of this agri-business monolith grinding and eliminating family
farms in this country, as they produce highly-chemicalized food products,
containing the barest of nutrients and the maximum of toxic herbicides
and pesticides. This example shows just how intimately the media
is wedded, at its core, to the wealthy and their interests, and to the
huge, overarching corporate-Republican establishment.
This is sad, so tragic. The media is considered The Fourth
Estate. It used to be considered -- along with the Presidency, Congress,
and the Supreme Court -- one of the elements in the balance of power in
this country. An element essential to keeping our democracy true
and honest and, most of all, in the hands of the people. However,
with the media being even more in the hands of the wealthy and the corporations
than even elected Republicans, what hope is there for us? What hope
is there for the real "voice of the people"! We have become the society
of George Orwell, as in his novel 1984. Where "Big Brother"
decides everything for us, including how to think. Currently, we
see that the media is the tool, the front, for the wealthy. It tells
us what to think, what attitudes to have, what to feel, and what events
are real. Our democracy -- ever since the coup of our government
by the Shadow Government by means of JFK's assassination -- has been hijacked.
Still, there is hope. It is the same hope that there was in
Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union and currently in Communist
China. That hope: technology. Specifically the rapid advances
in telecommunications that allow people like me to say my words to people
like you, without having had to kiss anyone's ass to do so. The Internet
in particular, the World Wide Web, is too vast, anonymous, and endlessly
duplicated to be able to be controlled by any elite of any kind.
So it is in places like this where you can hear the things that they don't
want you to know. And until they shut us down; until they shut down
the whole World Wide Web and once and for all take away the people's voice,
that voice will be available for all with ears to hear. And it is
my understanding that it is virtually impossible for them to take this
avenue of expression from us; indeed that even cheaper, more accessible,
more powerful, and more uncontrollable variations on this people's voice
are on the horizon!
So we have our chance to not be manipulated. And we are beginning
to show a resistance to media influence beyond anything known in history
heretofore. After all, despite the force-feeding of the Lewinsky
scandal and the impeachment, the American people resisted the pundits!
The commentators and supposed "experts" were positively aghast at their
loss of power as they saw, again and again, poll after poll, that Clinton
enjoyed an over 60% approval rating -- high for any sitting president,
let alone one that was the center of a scandal and the object of an impeachment.
So the people resisted what the Republican-corporate establishment wanted
us to feel about Clinton.
Instead of hating Clinton, the polls, throughout the scandal and
scapegoating of Clinton, repeatedly told the media that people thought
the supposed "scandal" was not of importance to them and that coverage
of the real issues of the country ought to be addressed by the media.
But the Republicans and the media -- arrogant and cocky with their sense
of wealth-purchased power -- ignored the people. To the contrary,
they assumed their wealth, power, and media dominance could force
this issue into the nation's consciousness.
We know what happened. They were wrong. Not only did
the American people detect the hypocrisy of Republicans like Henry Hyde
and other impeachment prosecutors, who themselves had mistresses; but the
people backlashed against a Congress who would make a mere sexual impropriety
a nation's top issue, neglecting all others. So Republicans fell
in the 1998 elections -- to the immense surprise of the Republican-corporate
complex.
And the people have continued to resist the bought-and-paid-for establishment
news. Point in fact: The media is now shrieking, like stuck
pigs, that network news viewership is at all time lows, and that apparently
people are getting their news from other places -- specifically the Internet.
Currently, we see more hope. We are now observing a huge backlash
against what the media wanted us to think and feel about Al Gore.
Now that the people are being allowed to actually see the man, as opposed
to just getting cynical, sniping criticism of him from pundits on talk
and news programs, Gore has turned a 17% deficit in the polls into a 10%
lead against Bush. This news, of course, comes out mixed with the
hew and cry of paid mercenary pundits whose job was to bring Gore down
and insure a big financial windfall for the wealthy with the election of
Bush.
So there is hope in the Internet, the World Wide Web. We are
coming out from under the thumb of publishers who will not publish books
that do not fit with the interests of their wealthy owners, out from under
the thumb of TV networks who will not broadcast material that will not
fit with the interests of their owners, from the thumb of corporate music,
likewise, and from radio-station owners, magazine owners, and all the rest
-- even cinema is able to be cheaply produced and broadcast on the World
Wide Web. And the first word of that -- World -- points to
another highly powerful aspect of this. The whole
world is growing together in this age of unrepression and unleashing of
truth. The possibilities are unimaginable.
In conclusion, we have the Internet, let's use it. We have
our strength in numbers, let's join together. We have this one last
chance to free ourselves from the mental straightjacket that the corporate-media-Republican
complex has been trying to hold us in. We can be free.
We can elect Democrats. We can make Gore our next President.
Get involved!
For ideas on how to get involved, go to "Election
2000 Alert." Even if you just want to sit behind your computer
screen, you can be immensely helpful. Our future depends on you.
1. To see at least two of the actual speeches
that were made at the convention, go to the Election
2000 Alert section and click on the links that indicate they are for
"streaming videos" of Jesse Jackson's
and Al Gore's speeches at the
convention. Jesse Jackson's speech is especially cogent and powerful.
There is no excuse for the network's not airing it. [return
to text]
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on: mickel@primalspirit.com
Mickel Adzema