One of my favorite journalists is Robert Parry. He has made a careful study of what he calls the false narratives of the last three decades and their deleterious effects on US democracy.
In the 1980’s, I worked as a journalist and witnessed the inner corruption of a newsroom turning toward neocon think-tank narratives while punishing journalists and editors for doing their jobs.
From the newsroom, I went back to university teaching and found as we moved through the decade of the 90’s and into the first decade of the 21st Century, that it was becoming progressively more and more difficult to teach in the humanities.
I taught journalism, literature, and rhetoric (argumentation techniques and strategies) and I found that the students had become so thoroughly indoctrinated with the neocon false narratives of history that they were becoming virtually unteachable.
For the large majority of students, facts had become unimportant and critical thinking was disdained. The accuracy of language and sensitivity to its nuances that are necessary to report a news story or to study literature was nearly impossible to develop in young people who were uninterested in others. They had become acculturated to an increasingly dishonest and malevolent mass media and generally held the notion that the rights and feelings of others were unimportant. Many were more comfortable with a violent computer game than with a book.
Literature was way beyond their reasoning abilites. Their literacy had declined to the point that they could not even read and understand a news article or editorial. Many could not even understand cartoons from newspapers.
These declines in literacy have been thoroughly documented by recent studies. It’s an alarming intellectual decline related directly to the saturation of propaganda within the mass media.
In short, the mass media has successfully indoctrinated a generation of young people into a state of ignorant brutality that is hardly amenable to the refinements of thinking that are the essence of what is learned in higher education.
As a journalist and educator, I realized the power of propoganda to corrupt the minds of the young had taken a terrible toll on our capacity as a nation to preserve our precious democracy. The neocons and the mass media had sucessfully produced a generation of intellectual thugs with a tendency toward fascism rather than tolerant and reasoned self-government.
I decided to go into independent writing because it was the only way I could practice my craft with any degree of integrity. This blog, Politics and Prose, will be dedicated to the best voices in journalism telling the stories that need to be told. I may also do some investigative reporting myself and post it here.
A good place to begin this project of mine is with a link to the Ace Reporter Robert Parry’s blog, Consortium News, and a piece called “Why We Write.”
I wish every university student in the country would read this piece and check out the facts for himself or herself.
For a painstakingly detailed account of how the neocons took over the media and have nearly destroyed democracy in the USA, read any of Parry’s books, most of which he has for sale at his site. These books will go down in history as the real story of our times.
