Media propaganda, media life

This class about media is about to be the best in town for its intellectual brainstorming - at personal level, since there is no debate in class. The topics are propaganda and stereotypes in media.

I copy below my mid-term paper, it's too long for a blog, I know, but what the heck, it's Google who pays for the storage on this server after all...

I encourage everybody to do the same introspection on how media affects our life with this simple exercise :
- divide your past life in three;
- pick one major media event for every third;
- describe how it has influenced your life and perspectives.

A media life: individual media consequences over time.

I – Dream TV

The first media image I’ve got buried in the deepest layer of my memory is a cracking black and white TV screen displaying two white stuffed animals with globes instead of heads, jumping funny and slowly on grayish dust under a black sky.

Admittedly, I was most preoccupied with getting milk from my mother’s breast at that age of my life. However I know my parents spent a fair amount of passionate time in front of TV in the space-blessed month of July 1969.

This image, through repetition and association to the enthusiasm of my parents, propelled my desire for a career of astronaut – or cosmonaut, since even the moon has to wear flags. I studied engineering, with the claimed ambition to be part of the first colony on Mars – the NASA said it would be ready by 2010.

When you are a young kid, you are dependent from what serious people from serious agencies say on TV about the planned future of humanity, especially when your parents share the belief, too. I prepared for 2010.

II - Lying TV

I learnt in the second third of my life, in University, that others did not fall for these space dreams. « What proof do you have that men ever walked on the moon? », a Russian girl asked me, scandalized at my naivety about media news.

I realized she had not been submitted to the same set of messages as I did, but to the opposite one, the one that glorified a female dog and a sphere of metal in the sky, and at the same who doubted of a stripped shoeprint in the dust.

O great old days for media, when a ying message was immediately created in opposition to any yang message, and vice-versa, offering to our minds the only undeniable truth, that there is no truth in media but only political statements.

My country standing politically and geographically at the intersection of both propagandas’ radar coverages, and self-developing a glorious military-based legend of independence through systematic references in education, TV and movies (“the US never helped us, we helped ourselves”), my generation learnt rapidly to be mediatically[1] schizophrenic and selfishly partisan.

Communists say this, capitalists say that. Intellectuals disagree. Now debate. Then make up your mind, proclaim loudly where you stand, strike and shout in the streets if necessary. Manufacturing discontent, would say Chomsky.

No wonder that the New York Times dismiss European newspapers for their incapacity of giving a piece of news without an opinion. Our entire education is based on giving our opinion.

And yet, if the media do not give their opinion and bluntly copy the news provided by governments and companies, what’s left to the very basic right to know?

1991: the French government said they did not know about AIDS tests for blood samples in time, and declined responsibility for the hundreds of deaths by poisoned transfusion.

An independent newspaper published an internal report to the Prime Minister where the tests were described as saving life, but expensive. The decision was to ignore them. Ignore AIDS, for two deadly bursting years, 1985 and 1986.

Cry, strikes and outcry, the Prime Minister fell but a jury found him not guilty. The president escaped trial, thanks to rapid moves on TV to other topics.

The newspaper will be modified to a “cultural” newspaper, then will completely disappear in 1999, victim of media industry merges and consolidation.

Even the entry on Wikipedia does not give the exact number of deaths by transfusion.

Last year, the French President ate chicken in front of the cameras to demonstrate there was no meat disease to be afraid of. The following week the sales of meat in France dropped even more sharply. There are things my generation cannot forget.

III – No TV

End of the 90s, it became obvious that the ones who will go to Mars will be the ones able to pay for their tickets at the NASA booking office, not the engineers who build the space shuttles. A career change became necessary, a new life.

I went to visit New York City in 2000, as soon as I had my name on a piece of recycled whitish paper with eagles in the background, stating I had access to a new land of opportunities with the right to pursue a new path to happiness. To me like for all immigrants, the piece of paper was made of diamonds. Soon, blood diamonds.

Delightedly head up towards the top of the two most magnificent symbols of the combined power of art, technology and finance, the sky was the limit. There was no wall anymore, in Berlin or anywhere. The world could relax and enjoy peacefully the fruits of hard work and improved science. Enhanced education, quality of life and human rights will spread all over the world, at the same forever-growing rate as the Nasdaq’s stock options.

What went wrong?

We forgot that while the two powerful propagandas were fighting each other, they were covering all other voices. Convenient despotisms were setup as battlefields by proxy, and maintained at arms-length by one or the other power, in Albania, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan or Iraq. When the wall fell in Berlin, there was no more money and no more weapons left for dictators. An uneducated population, left ignorant of politics and basics citizenship rights first by colonialists then by cold warriors, was suddenly abandoned to the simplest and most accessible channel of propaganda, the religion leaders.

Europe had been through so many religious wars for centuries we cannot dismiss the phenomenon. The problem is, it’s only this year that I found such an analysis in a US newspaper, regarding the Middle-East detonating mix of politics and religion.

For weeks, months, years after what should have been a historical wake-up call and was just brainless screens, the US media have constantly repeated the same traumatizing videos, over and over again, without explanation, without analysis, without any “Why” or “What went wrong”, or any real debate about “What were the causes and what could we do about them”. Apart from the John-Wayne / Rambo gunshot approach. The most amazing example of media-initiated psychological traumatism through cultivation for an entire population, exactly as described by Chomsky.

I sold my TV one week after the media deflagration. It was the largest flat screen you could dream of, a beautiful shiny silver Sony sample of the brightest technology money can buy. Vomiting crappy and violent propaganda for one week. I detached myself from TV, for ever.

It’s now 6 years I have no TV. Of course I lack of information regarding Britney and Oprah – but believe it or not, I survive. In fact, I lack of conversation about meaningless topics with uninteresting people, a quite useful news-filter in an information-crowded world. What’s best, I am free of the forced display of violence and fear and sex that is the common lot of US TV.

Violence and sex in media have dramatically increased, I do not remember the same images from my childhood. As a result, I watched more violence and nudity that day in class where we watched a documentary on music videos than in my entire TV life.

If, as a grown-up Western woman, I was shocked by these videos, there is little doubt any traditional culture will defy the US model as satanic – using that same word, to make the enemy a beast. The other students seemed to be so unmoved by such display that it was for me a second wave of shock. My children will watch no TV.

I get the news from the internet, via analysts, columnists, all opinion-based, right and left and middle sides, in an attempt to extract some substance of truth. I have heard it’s interesting to listen to the Russian official TV, too. Just in case they say they walked on the moon again.

Our chance? Increasingly, from every country in the world, blogs expand points of views and embrace a new form of reflection, discussion, and citizen journalism.

Blogs are what provide us with ying and yang in our media life. In my opinion.

---