Our Jerusalem Laid Waste By Lies And Injustice

Great as the sea is your downfall;
who can heal you?
Your prophets had for you
false and specious visions;
They did not lay bare your guilt,
to avert your fate;
They beheld for you in vision
false and misleading portents.

Lamentations 

If you substitute "media" for prophets, both news and, more potently, entertainment, how it encourages selfishness and consumption and ignorance and sloth, pretty much the entire range of deadly sins, those old "bronze age goat herders" got our number right down to the last significant digit.

I am trying to remember the last time I heard the news on the radio carry a positive piece about Hillary Clinton or, really much of any piece about her.  As compared to Donald Trump she has been pretty much disappeared from coverage and what there is is never positive.  It couldn't be clearer that the Washington-New York media knows it is supposed to avoid saying anything good about Hillary Clinton and like the dutiful functionaries of oligarchy which they are, they follow the same lines laid down for them in the 1990s.

Instead it is covering the "reality" TV king, idiot, the shame of the Republican Party who they are trying to make the same of the nation, Donald Trump.

And that's only what our media does in politics, in encouraging self-destructive socially destructive attitudes and patterns of behavior they pretty much guarantee that a Donald Trump figure will arise and prosper.   The only real criticism of him I've found to be widespread in the media is his short-lived declaration that he was going to reinstitute libel and slander laws - so novel an idea, today in an age ruled by lies. rumor and gossip, that it freaked them out.  Most of them having absolutely no knowledge or skills in reporting fact, not even any appreciation of the difference between a lie and a fact that they'd, most of them, be out of work.   It freaked them out so much that they didn't seem to realize that there was no figure in public life who would have more to lose from that as Donald Trump so he was not likely the one who was going to do that.

I doubt that Hillary Clinton would either, the legal dogmas of the past half century are so wedded to deny the importance of the truth, of fact in most areas of life, especially politics, that the idea probably wouldn't occur to her or anyone likely to be appointed.   You would think that she might have a heightened appreciation for that distinction because she has certainly been the public figure most long and most lavishly lied about.  I could be wrong about her getting it, I doubt that she would think the effort to make lies have consequences for the media was a wise one politically.  For a start she would have to convince sitting Supreme Court justices that it was dangerous to democracy to allow media to lie for its owners profit.

No, the idea that there is no overriding and supreme legitimate interest in people in a democracy to have the truth told to them, and not only them but all voters, is an insane notion instilled, no less by officially liberal institutions and figures than it has been corporate-fascist subverters of democracy and the ability of the entire electorate to have the chance to cast an accurately informed vote.  The ACLU, such figures as Joel Gora, the trade groups of media and the publishing industry, etc. all bought into that and it is among their most cherished of secular commandments that the media shall be permitted to lie with impunity for any reason its owners and scribblers see fit.  Our inability to have a democracy, to keep what we have from descending into Republicanfascism is as much a result of the ridiculous faith that such notions as democracy were the product of natural law, that the truth will out - by what mechansim who knows - and that even a people fed on a diet of lies would be able to maintain democracy.   The first amendment, no less than the second one carries the foolish 18th century poetry that enables the destruction of democracy and ourselves because so many of the founders were addled by the idiotic notions that the government they thought they were founding was the product of natural forces.

If the men who wrote the First Amendment had been wise, they would have noted that superior to any right of the media  to say whatever they chose to was the right of The People to know the truth in order that they could secure all of the goods promised in the rest of the document, and, so any right of the media was to serve that end.  "The press" is an entirely artificial entity and a magnification of the power of those who owned it.  There is no natural right for "the press" it is an artificial privilege granted on the tacit expectation that they would tell the truth, idiotically granted without explicitly stating that, most important, role of the media as a condition of them keeping it.  I think it was their superstitious enlightenment notions that led to that fatal omission.

Democracy doesn't just happen by natural forces in the absence of coercion .  It isn't the product of forces like gravity that just come out in the right place.  Democracy is a product of moral choices made by people, many of which are not compatible with the adulation of the self and are certainly not in the immediate interest of any one person.  The first of those moral choices is to know the truth, even when it is in contradiction to false and specious visions that are gratifying.  It is that you must know the truth even if it lays forth your guilt in order to change your behavior to avert the results of that behavior  That moral choice is everything the media in the United States and in most other countries discourages and doesn't practice.  And that's true no matter what poetic words those fat-headed founders put into the truncated amendments to the Constitution.  If you don't know the truth, you will not be free because you can't make those choices necessary to face reality and chose it over "reality" TV.