I just watched today’s Meet the Press. What a head fuck. It’s a guilty pleasure, a naughty escape from wholesome independent media news sources and lengthy internet lectures given by professors who work for universities that I don’t attend.

I used to think that Meet the Press was somehow more prestigious than shows like, say, the late Crossfire. The truth is that it follows the same ADHD, pack-shit-in-before-the-next-commercial mentality. I don’t feel more informed after watching, but more confused.

My brain has been assaulted by armies of unexplained arguments, my logic made more perplexed than a homosexual teenager growing up in Alabama. And it reminds me of an interview that Noam Chomsky gave several years ago. He was explaining why he’s not allowed on mainstream media television:

“The structure of the news production system is (such that) you can’t produce evidence. In fact, there’s even a name for it. I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It’s called concision. He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn’t have me on Nightline…He says, ‘he lacks concision,’ which is correct. I agree with him. The kinds of things I would say on Nightline you can’t say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you’re expected to give evidence. And that you can’t do between two commercials, so therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can’t talk. Actually that’s terrific if you think of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again and that nothing else is heard.”

So although the United States may be the pioneer of free speech, its business mentality has created a sort of self-inflicted censorship. We are not denied freedom of speech by the coercion of our government, but we deny ourselves that freedom by submitting to a system in which everything must conform to marketability, even “informational” news sources.

word.