Bernie Sanders’ campaign has finally gone full-throat with the
obvious: the Democrat-aligned corporate media have thrown all
journalistic principles to the wind to impose a “Bernie Blackout.”
How can someone who was the most popular politician in the nation in 2017 be made into a non-person? It’s all intimately entwined with the multiple crises afflicting late stage capitalism.
In the absence of massive, grassroots movements, corporate voices
always drown out all the others. Capitalist ownership of the media
allows the rich to frame their own worldview as the political “center,” thus
relegating contending ideologies to the “extremes” of left or right. In
this sense, “centrism” is nothing more than the political position of
the corporate owners, who construct media versions of reality that make
corporate-concocted policies seem the most logical, commonsensical and
socially responsible approach to the world’s problems. As long as the
rich can sustain broad public trust in the “truth” of their
“journalistic” products -- newspapers, electronic newscasts, books and
other media created by professional operatives directly answerable to
rich owners – widespread revolt against the corporate order is
unlikely.
Most people in all societies want to be perceived -- and to see
themselves -- as sensible, responsible and knowledgeable. When polled on
political questions, they are eager to give the “correct”
(corporate-endorsed) answers. Only the most marginalized, alienated and
systematically demonized sectors of society will consistently buck the
corporate narrative. In the United States, the biggest historical
resistance to the corporate (rich white man’s) worldview has come from
Black America, a besieged people with a unique social perspective who
were compelled to create their own media in desperate defense of their
collective humanity. However, the demise of Jim Crow apartheid and
subsequent absorption of many of the “best and brightest” Black minds
into corporate service, has dulled Black defenses. After two generations
without a mass, grassroots Black movement – a politically desolate
period briefly interrupted by the “Black Lives Matter” mobilizations of
2014-15 -- African Americans are also more likely to give the “correct”
answers to corporate media surveys.
But not the youth of all races, who know that capitalism, as
they experience it, promises them nothing but endless austerity and
war. Majorities of young Americans now embrace a version of “socialism”
that is actually merely a less vicious capitalism, made kinder by a
comprehensive system of social supports – similar to the “social
democratic” order in northwestern Europe. But late stage capitalism is
relentlessly eviscerating the European model and has no intention of
allowing a replica to be erected in the United Corporate States of
America, the global headquarters and armory of the Lords of Capital.
-- Glen Ford, "By trying to Silence Sanders, the Corporate Media De-Legitimize Themselves" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).