by Dan Burns

Jun 3, 2019, 11:00 AM

It’s about gun violence, idiots

There’s some hyperbole in the title. They’re not really idiots. The people who make the calls for corporate media honestly believe that their #1 priority has to be not offending the no longer so very young, largely conservative-leaning people who make up the bulk of their subscriber/viewer/listener base. I get that, though I personally don’t think that if they did clean up their act they’d lose their base, who are still consuming the product because of the habits of a lifetime that are not about to change. Moreover, maybe they could earn the trust of a younger, savvier crowd and survive, even thrive, indefinitely. But we’re obviously not going to see that.

And that’s why we get “gun rights” instead of the correct “gun violence.” It’s why an insensate lump of protoplasm the size of a pea gets called an “unborn child.” And why every new package of handouts for those most grotesquely engorged with unearned privilege gets called “tax ’relief.’” And so on.

This false labeling is part of c. media’s overall, unyielding devotion to false equivalence. It’s an effort to even the perceptual playing field, because real-world facts don’t support that right-wing doctrines are anything but bad governing ideology.

False equivalence is the crack cocaine of corporate “news” media. They think their lives depend on it. They can’t get enough, and it controls everything that they do. This makes them a major part of a system that has become so degraded and corrupt that Trump is in the White House. Donald Trump.

And the really, really frustrating thing is that there doesn’t seem to be a damn thing we can do about it. I’ve wracked my brain for years, and am always on the lookout for a breakthrough idea from someone else. And c. media just keeps doing what they do.