Sometimes you have to give up things without which you think your life would be incomplete. That it will be hard to bear. How the hell are you going to manage without it?
This can happen with other things too, but it usually happens with things which have become so much a part of your routine that you can’t imagine life without them. You become, in a way, addicted to them. When you are somehow compelled to give them up, life seems hard. For a while, at least. After a while, or more than that, you might become used to living without them.
Having got out of the addiction, the feelings that you might have may differ. Sometimes you might still look forward to the day when you can have that thing back in your life. Sometimes you might adopt a sour grapes attitudes and just pretend that you don’t want it anyway. But there are times when you can say, with all truthfulness, “Good riddance!”.
That is how I feel towards Corporate Media now. I have been an addict, in some cases a hard core one, of all (or at least several) kinds of Corporate Media: of radio and T.V., but most of all of newspapers. Radio and T.V. were lost long (several years) ago and the loss was not so big. The hardest was newspaper. I was one of those people whose day is spoilt completely if they don’t get their newspapers, not just everyday, but with their morning tea. And who simply have to read almost all of that newspaper. Even if it is a pain for the eyes and the back and the neck.
Therefore, when I had to stop reading newspaper everyday (whatever may have been the reasons), and here I mean hard copy, not the online version, it really was a hardship for quite some time. It was as if a part of my life was taken away. Still, I continued reading it online, not exactly everyday, but quite regularly. Then, the frequency of reading it got reduced and gradually there came a point where I totally stopped reading newspapers.
This complete stoppage, though from the chronology it seems to be the sole result of not being able to read the newspaper in hard copy, was a conscious choice. Because, by that time, I had come out of the addiction and when I thought about it, I found, very much to my surprise, that I could heartily say, “Good riddance!”.
Note that I am talking about newspapers in general, but with the implied assumption that all of them were basically instances of Corporate Media, and am not talking about a specific newspaper. In fact, the last one, the one that I finally stopped reading was definitely better than most others and perhaps with the least Corporate characteristics. I might also add that I have been an addict of at least three major (Indian ‘National’) newspapers at different times during the last (more than) thirty years. And even in case of T.V. and radio and some other forms of media, I have the experience of regularly following many sources or outlets.
Of course, not reading any newspaper daily has its drawbacks. For example, these days sometimes I find out about some major event several days later. For a person like me (who is marginally involved in the dissident media), that can be problematic. Still, it is not exactly true that I don’t read any newspaper at all now. I do periodically check Google News and read some of the ‘stories’ linked there. But that is mostly in the sense of, “What are they up to now?”.
What I do read, and where I get information and even ‘news’ that matters, is the ‘dissident media’. And I find, with only a few reservations, that this (much) more than compensates for the loss of my daily newspaper, as far as being aware of what is happening in the world is concerned.
In spite of the many usages of the first person pronoun in the preceding paragraphs, I hope the reader will have already understood that it is not about me. Because this kind of thing, even for me, could not have happened independently of what is happening in the world today. For one thing, there was no online newspaper just 15 years ago (neither did I have access to the Internet). There was no online dissident media, no blogs, no subscription in emails etc. For another thing, Corporate Media was never so blatantly, shamelessly Corporate as it is now. And being that, what it produces now is such trash that, when your addiction is gone, you can only wonder why were you addicted to it in the first place?
But then there is another thing. Since I have been consuming the produce of various kinds of Corporate (as well State) Media for such a long time and in such quantities and with such critical concentration (bordering on obsession) that given an event, I can predict most of the things that a particular newspaper would say. I have learnt their mechanics. I can see through them. I can read the subtext. I could do that even when I was still addicted, but what I mean is that this understanding of their methods (and I don’t mean behind the scene goings on, but only the text-subtext-message itself) makes the loss only the loss of an addiction, which is not a bad thing.
There was a time when the media, in spite of being owned by corporations, had something real to offer. You could get some truth out if it. That is now history. Yes, in a crude sense you still can get some information, and if you know how to read the subtext and to guess the unwritten, you can still be in touch with the global and national goings on by following this same media, but only to a small degree. Earlier, blatant lies were a rarity in the prestigious sections of the media. They could be exposed, and when exposed, they could cause major scandals and embarrassment. That is not the case now. Blatant lies are now quite common even among the more responsible newspapers. Let alone the distortions, omissions, spins, deliberate distractions etc. And exposure doesn’t rattle them much. The skins have become much thicker.
So, whatever may be your ideology, if you want to get a good idea about what is going on in the world, your best bet now is the dissident media. Even blogs are better than the mainstream media, if you know how to pick the good ones.
I am not kidding. I am not exaggerating either.
How can that be? There must be a catch somewhere. The bloggers and the dissident media people simply don’t have the infrastructure to gather news from all parts of the world everyday. That can only be done by Corporate Media.
Yes, there is a catch. The thing is, the bloggers and the dissident media people can take all that they want from different sections of the Corporate Media, clear out the trash, put the non-trash things together, and produce something much better than what you get from the mainstream media. There is another catch. Due to the ideological differences and some other factors, one dissident media source alone may not be enough. You might have to more than one of them. You don’t have to do that all at the same time. You can rotate between these sources. Read one source one day and a different one the next day. On the Internet, it is not very difficult to do, provided you don’t become addicted to just one source.
There are problems with the dissident media, some of them the same as with Corporate Media, but they are much less. The major problem is that there is still (as far as I know) hardly any dissident media at levels smaller than at least the national level. For example, if I want to know about the local politics of a particular state in India, there is little of that to be found on the global dissident media sources. There may be some blogs, but they still don’t (at least in the Indian context) provide a real substitute. This is a problem if you want to give up following the Corporate Media altogether. But as long as it is there, there is no harm in using it for some purposes. In fact, one reason I occasionally still follow it is to get an insight into the workings of the minds behind the Corporate Media, from their own sponsored words. (By the way, in that sense, even the advertisements can be helpful). They can also help you in predicting what they are going (or planning) to do, regardless of the surface meanings of what they (and the media) are saying. Crudely put, the Denial Principle works here, i.e., Peace means War.
But we can look forward to the day when the dissident media will be able to collect all its news on its own, probably (and partly) through what is called ‘citizen journalism’, though I am aware of the difficulties.
Meanwhile, there is a life of awareness after Corporate Media. And I can say that it is better than what it was before, leaving aside, for a moment, the other aspects of life.
Not to mention the saving of paper and, therefore, the reduced need to cut trees.
Viva la Dissident Media! (Excuse my Spanish).
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