Truest statement of the week

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).