Mainstream corporate media is shaping the Russia-Ukraine war into a cartoon binary that infantilizes us all,” in which Putin and Zelensky are Tolkien characters.
He who pays the piper calls the tune is a saying I learned from my dad. He also taught me to never believe anything you read and only half of what you see. Direct experience is best, of course, but even when you’re living through an historical event, your perspective is necessarily limited and filtered through your own biases.
All my readers, I’m assuming, don’t currently have direct experience of the war in Ukraine. So how do we know what’s really going on? And who’s paying the piper to call the tune on the media coverage of the same?
I was thinking of all this as I watched Briahna Joy Gray talk to Abby Martin on Gray’s show, “Bad Faith.” Both women remind us that major networks like Fox, MSNBC, CNN, PBS and the like are captured by corporations and rely on advertising revenue from Raytheon, Pfizer, and similar powerhouses of the military-industrial complex, big Pharma (drug pushers and dealers), and of course fossil fuel companies. They pay the piper and therefore call the tunes that we hear daily.
The result, as Abby Martin says here, is that the Russia-Ukraine war becomes a “cartoon binary that infantilizes us all,” in which Putin is Sauron and Zelensky is both Gandalf the White and Frodo, sage wizard and plucky underdog, to use characters from Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
Anti-Russian hysteria has grown so common that my local liquor store was at pains to tell me that Stoli vodka comes from Latvia, not Russia, therefore I could still in good conscience purchase it without serving Sauron/Putin.
Mainstream media networks in the U.S. are owned by five major corporations, notes Martin, and their goal is to control the narrative while strengthening their positions and maximizing profits.
This is why it might be wise to remember not to believe everything, or anything, that you read, and to remember as well that the pipers we listen to on the air are not free to call their own tunes.
Anyway, I highly recommend Gray and Martin’s interview. Enjoy, readers!
Crossposted from BracingViews