I keep thinking of that Canadian RVer that I knew a decade ago and who I wrote about a couple days ago. He was the guy who held the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.) in such high esteem that waiting for the nightly news was the highlight of his day.
At the time I was skeptical of CBC, figuring that it was susceptible to the same diseases as NPR in the USA. But today, the trust in the media that that man had seems naive to the point of being ridiculous.
Recall Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence: "that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
This was no new insight of Jefferson. He wrote some essay explaining that he avoided original ideas in composing the Declaration -- and that he tried to gather up and condense the ideas that were believed by most people in his era.
So 'consent of the governed' was an idea that floated around in the European Enlightenment. I'll bet Rousseau wrote something in similar words, but I can't find the quote right now. (Perhaps it was in his chapter on the 'General Will' in his Social Contract.)
'Consent of the governed' is crucial to the idea of self-government and democracy. And yet, if the Authorities have the power to manufacture consent in the governed through control of the Lie Machine, then democratic self-government is a farce. That sums up government news-broadcast channels as well as nominally independent news organizations that have come to be mere stenographers of the Pentagon, CIA, CDC, etc.
That makes it supremely ironic for Washington DC to roam around the world, looking for wars to get into, in the name of 'democracy.'
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| Trusting the Media, a long time ago. (From pinterest.com.) |
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