The System Worked

Although I consider myself a rather jaded person, I still revel in my ability to be surprised by the shit certain people are willing to pull. I have recently been thunderstruck by how utterly propagandistic the mainstream news is.

I'm not talking about cable news. I'm talking about Nightly News with Brian Williams. That broadcast is as close as we come these days to a relatively detached telling of the facts.

Two events I'll mention here have recently made me feel like I was ten years younger, as if certain scales never fell from my eyes. The first was the coal mine disaster. The second was the failed truck bombing of Times Square.

First, for the coal mine. Upwards of 30 people were killed. The types of people who have no connection to the types of people who give us the "news". So 30 people were killed in a coal mine because the cost of making their workplace safe was far more than the government fine for failing to make the workplace safe.

Simple as that. Safety was more expensive than the fines for being unsafe. Case closed. The value of a human life, the cost of orphans and widowed wives, was reduced to an item on a spreadsheet. The government's fines were not enough of a deterrent.

And how was this reported? Most of the news was about the "tragedy", implying an unavoidable aspect. The follow-up reporting was about the victims, about how much Billy Bob loved God and his children. About how much Bobby Ray loved coal mining. About how much Danny Joe loved hunting and football.

THAT is propaganda. A crime is committed, and we are told that it was unavoidable and that the only thing we can do is patronize the dead as God-fearing freedom-lovers.

And forgive me for noticing that the Nightly News is owned by General Electric, which has a, how shall I say, vested interest in cheap coal.

Then we have the failed bombing in Times Square. I just saw an "expert" on the Nightly News tell me, and millions of others, that "the system worked". Let us count the ways that this is utter propaganda.

Firstly, an unmonitored man drove a truck bomb into Times Square in broad daylight. Secondly, he lit the bomb and walked away. Thirdly, he boarded an airplane the next day, despite being on the no-fly list.

The system worked? THAT is propaganda. The system most decidedly did NOT work. But, thankfully, neither did the bomb.

Let us pretend that the bomber in this case was not an idiot with firecrackers and gasoline. Let's pretend he knew what he was doing. Let's pretend it was Tim McVeigh who lit that fuse and walked away.

He drives a truck bomb unserveilled into the most public place in America. He lights the fuse. We walks away unmolested. The bomb goes off. 500 people are killed. In that scenario, would we say "the system worked"?

No. Yet this is exactly what happened, except that, thank God, the bomb-maker was incompetent. The system did NOT work. But neither did the bomb.

I'm not surprised that there is propaganda on the internet. I'm not surprised that there is propaganda on cable. But the network airwaves are common property. Everyone gets NBC. And when the lowest common denominator, the one common voice, is pure propaganda, it makes me think we'd be made wiser by boycotting all the "news".