Has Mao Become A Role Model For Our Media?

When that bible of business, the Economist magazine, put Mao Zedong on their cover in a red Santa Hat, I thought it was their way of suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party had become the new stabilizer and bearer of gifts for a western-capitalist system in distress.

Mao fought a revolution for independence from the West, which now seems to have become dependent on loans and finance from his People’s Republic.

Mao had always preached, “no investigation, no right to speak,” so I investigated further to find an article inside the issue suggesting that “for all his flaws” – like maybe 60 Million or more deaths, 30 million from famine alone — “Mao was inspiring.” An article on “Mao and the Art of Management” calls him a “role model, of sorts.”

In what could be read as grudging testimonial to Mao’s revolution, the Economist lauds his strengths including “ruthless Media manipulation.”

“Mao knew not just how to make a point but how to get it out… his message was constantly reinforced… it’s hard to distinguish from the modern business practice of building brand value.”

What? Has the Great Helmsman returned from the other side to guide us?

This Economist article suggests that Mao’s media practices have also been adopted in the US and Britain through the use of syncophantic reporters, media management strategies and repetition.

Have the Chicom-commisars been watching Fox News to see how Rupert Murdoch, a big fave of the politbureau there, has marketed his own party-line news?

And what about CNN?

Similar propaganda techniques are driving news presentation here and there. Yes, alas, we too have ideological correctness and sloganeering all over the media spectrum.

Consider the coverage of the Iraq war—what there is left of it. We have all seen how it has mostly disappeared.

I was watching CNN’s Wolf Blitzer report on all the “progress” being made in Iraq. No, he didn’t go to a reporter in Iraq or seek out critics, but turned instead to the CNN’s Pentagon correspondent who relayed the official view.

CNN noted (how surprising!) that the Generals are glad the war is no longer a key issue in Presidential politics. Yet no assessment is offered on how a fall-off in coverage is letting politicians off the hook.

CNN reported - for the upteenth time - that the “surge is working.” How many times have you heard that? This focus assumes that the main problem is military, when everyone one who has looked closely recognizes that stability requires an equitable political settlement and the withdrawal of US forces.

Yes, casualties may be down but the Washington Post reports that Iranian influence may be more responsible than US military patrols. That story has not seeped into much TV coverage because like Iraq before it, Iran is now the boogie man and a target in the crosshairs of neo-cons urging a military attack. Balanced coverage is as rare on that front as it is from Iraq.

Conn Hallinan writes: “The narrative in the media these days is the success of the U.S. “surge,” which has poured an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into Iraq. Last month, war critic and close ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa), said, “I think the surge is working.”

Polls indicate that concern over the economy has replaced the war as the major issue for voters, and, that while a majority of Americans want the troops out, those saying that things are going better jumped from 33 percent to just under 50 percent. Are they going better? Car bombings, sectarian violence and attacks on U.S. troops are down, although 2007 has been the deadliest year of the war for the Americans. But does the reduced violence have anything to do with the surge?

As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent points out, Americans and the U.S. media tend to “exaggerate the extent to which the U.S. is making the political weather and is in control of events there.”

Even as voters express concerns about the economy, is economic coverage getting any better? The Economist says that “laudatory” reporting is still the norm here as in China.

Our media is barely keeping up with the economy’s free fall. We were told Christmas shopping was setting new records. Now we learn that it was a dud, the worst in five years. Many business programs seem more concerned with whether CEO’s will lose their jobs than exposing the fraudulent practices they encouraged.

One day, the Treasury Department makes news by encouraging big banks to put up money to bail each other out. A week later, we learn that the banks are about to chip in billions to form something called M-LEC (Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit). And then, as more banks take bigger losses, the Fund is dissolved. Poof. Gone! At least that’s one acronym we can forget about.

One person wins a $151.9 million Powerball ticket in Rhode Island and that is big news. Tens of thousands lose their homes and it’s a footnote

The crisis may now be on the radar screen of big media but the reporting remains superficial and managed. How different is all this from the way China’s CCTV covers scandals involving their government?

The major media was late in covering the mortgage crisis and let the government off the hook, writes Dean Starkman in the Columbia Journalism Review: “it failed to understand the crisis for what I think it really is: a regulatory failure of mammoth proportions.”

What should readers and media consumers do to read between the often fuzzy lines between hype and journalism? Journalist Pepe Escobar has some suggestions:

First, he says, read the news from the bottom up and from the back of the paper to the front, “the crucial info most of the time is in the next to last paragraph, and the story is buried in the bottom half of page A-21.

Next, he says, seek out alternatives: “My suggestion is that readers forget about reading serious news on mainstream/corporate media: stick to the sports and entertainment pages…. In the case of weeklies, stick to the actual reporting and forget about editorials (well sometimes even that is impossible; in Time magazine ideology drips from every report). The Wall Street Journal or The Economist may carry excellent reportage, but frankly no one has to swallow as fact Wall Street and the City of London’s wishful thinking.”

In a season when people ask, “What would Jesus think?” we might wonder: how would Mao react to his new acolytes in the western press?

– News Dissector/filmmaker Danny Schechter of MediaChannel.org has written “SQUEEZED,” an e-book on the economic crisis. (Download from coldtype.net) Comments to Dissector@mediachannel.org

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There can be fewer worse stains I suggest upon the honor of the United States’ citizenry than their acceptance of the degenration of their once proud free press into a claque for imperial presidential pyblic-interest totalitarianism. Rabid hatred of “regulations” by Republicans, whose concept of “power” is statist and morbid fear of scientific definitions by Democrats have led the fifth estate into what I nominate as virtual thralldom. The comparison to Mao’s misuse of force and media might have been overstated in the present article; bit the principle is clearly all-too-apt. Until we have regulations enforced upon those making non-fictional presentations, controls which afford full rights only to those who provide attested facts and not myths, standards-based evaluations and not discontexted attitudes and full scientific categorizing proofs and not mere beliefs, we can never have objective coverage or information from any news source whatever. Only the former providers of truth, the realists, earn the right to use words such as ” fact, I think, I know, this is good or bad, excllent or terrible, this is true or this proves”. These are words that must be DENIED to those who offer nothing but lies and brainwashing in various forms. The real problem I assert is not where their erroneous ideas are coming from after all, be that government or non-government sources; the problem is the nature of the disinformation, outright lies, arrogant denials and falsified arguments, evaluations and omissions which that faulty information contains, presents and repeats over and over again. No single action undertaken by postmodernist neocons in this century has ever worked as advertised; and becaue they are anti-reslists, none ever will. The de-Americanization, de-individualization, of the Constitution has been perpetrated, culminating in 1994 with the de facto
setting up of an imperial presidential and pseudo-theocratic destruction of citizen rights claimed under regulations–this under the noses of willfully blind so-called newsmen. They complain about specifics but never about the categorical threat to realistic thought,to life, to liberty and to the pursuit of priorities of selfishly chosen happiness. The scandals of Enron, Florida’s vote count, in 2000, Ohio’s in 2004, Halliburton, Iraq, the FCC, the destruction of balance of powers, paranoid secrecy, destruction of proerty rights, the conomy’s tank job, diseducation, nonexistent or doubly expensive health care, the alienation of 75–80 percent of the nations’ wealth by an elite class of corporate-bureaucratic insiders, the degeneracy of the arts, the institutionalization of bossism by gate-keeper thugs of privilege and power at every level
and in every field of thought and endeavor…Where are the reports of these treasons in the press? Apologists for Bushite Big Lie, suppressed and sirtoted data, and Kantian false headlinings, dirty tricks and dirtier governance are now trying to smear John Edwards. Why? Because he is the only man who is standing for real change in the way the U.S. has been misgvoverned. If that malperformance isn’t Maoism, I suggest it’s enough like it to warrant the attention of a publiic of hundreds of millions of dangerously indifferent victims. After all, these minds will soon be voting for change–except that they will be receiving information about the candidates and the state of the nation/empire filtered through the distorted lens of a press which is 80% pro imperial presidential right-wing pretenders to the once estimable name of “a free press”.