Strategically Communicating

At this point in reading McChesney, we are all painfully aware of our society’s dysfunction specifically in relationship to our media system. Still, McChesney raises a valid and provocative question.

Why is discourse and debate about media missing from our dialogue? If you want to answer that we, as Americans, don’t care: guess again. McChesney asserts that, “apathy, cynicism, and ignorance that have typified U.S. politics can hardly be explained as some aspect of ‘human nature’ or the innate ‘American’ instinct.” I agree.

McChesney outlines three hypotheses to address this question:

1. Criticism of capitalism in general is off-limits in our political system.
2. Media cultivation of the idea that the status-quo is the best and only option.
3. Media corporations are such a powerful and privileged Behemoths, no one can challenge them.

McChesney concludes that “the centerpiece of any viable political movement in the U.S. must be the shared belief that contemporary capitalism is working effectively for only a minority of the citizenry and, moreover, that its core tendencies are frequently at odds with democratic ideals.”

This is happening now with the Occupy Movement.