Fuck the Corporate Media

"Fuck The Corporate Media" analyzes the tactics, both subtle and blatant, employed by the corporate media to control your mind. This video covers just one day in the lies of the corporate media. See for yourself how they sell us out in this startling comparison between what really happened on August 21st, 2003 in Portland, Oregon, and what they say about what happened. Fuck the corporate media!

The problem with videos like this one is that they're criticism is not interesting or well articulated. They try to make corporate media look bad by catching them in lies and distortions, but most of their examples are pretty subjective, like a news anchor changing a word from "backpack" to "equipment" supposedly in order to make protesters sound more like terrorists. My favorite quote from the video is when the narrator, a young woman with a bandanna covering the lower half of her face, says of a reporter in the middle of the protest, "What's really pissing her off right there is that people are saying what they want to say, without being controlled." She relies on an idea, I don't know where she gets it from, that television news is the only source of information available. People say what they want to say all the time, on blogs and news websites and movies and books. If anything network news is becoming more and more obsolete, and while the news they produce is certainly biased, narrowly focused and obnoxious, it's hardly in "control" of anything.



I touched on this in my post on Mailer's The Armies of the Night, but I think this video clearly demonstrates the empty immitation of 60s protest culture. I guess it's just hard for me to believe that "Fuck the Corporate Media" is as urgent a cause as civil rights or the Vietnam War. The claim that this video "analyzes" the techniques of the corporate media to "control your mind" is a bold one. Though it is divided into sections, the video pretty much lacks any structure. It's basically the same imagery and rhetoric for twenty minutes, which, believe me, gets really boring. I guess not everyone has the time to create their own Loose Change, but this isn't much more interesting than a long winded vlog.

Wrayer, who is the YouTube user that posted the video, and I assume might refer to the narrator as well, gets a little emotional at the end, after showing a clip of her accosting a reporter, calling her a liar. She then guiltily admits that the woman is probably a nice lady, and says "I wish I could have been more articulate at the time," before going into a sort of stoner rant about how she just can't control her anger in the face of the media's mind controlling distortions.