Re: news media and social soma

["Mason A. Clark" <masonc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:47 AM 3/4/97 -0500, you wrote:
>Bill,
>
>*Current* coverage is not independent of *current* advertiser
>interests. While I doubt the influence is as pervasive as some
>on this list have suggested, I take the existence of influence
>to be easily documented and sometimes important.
>
>As I said to Doug, however, we should not mistake the symptom for
>the disease.

  I know I'm getting tiresome about this, but it keeps
  happening again and again.

  The world is built of feedback loops: "symptoms and diseases"
  in which the symptom feeds the disease and the disease causes
  the symptoms.  Which came first? Which is cause and which is
  effect?  At what point to apply a remedy?

  Society influences the content of the media.
  The media strongly influences the nature of the society.

  Just to be as tiresome as possible, I'll now quote my
  good friend, Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby on the how ideas
  can influence our minds:

    "Those ideas are in your mind like little leaven.
     they will work till the whole mind is changed."

  Or Albert Schweitzer:

  "The organized political, social, and religious associations
   of our time are at work to induce the individual man not
   to arrive at his convictions by his own thinking but to
   make his own such convictions as they keep ready-made
   for him.  Any man who thinks for himself and at the same
   time is spiritually free, is to them something inconvenient
   and even uncanny."

  It's a feedback system, a loop.

       Mason

  Grandfather project as of today has settled on:

    1. A bit of Michael Moore to shake the brain.
    2. The Misunderstood Economy (Eisner)
    3. The Truth about the National Debt (Cavanaugh)

  the latter two to confuse the main problem: the
  Debt and Deficit.  Limbaugh is not in the picture -
  Grandpa's no dummy.  Next problem: BIG government.

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   Mason A. Clark        masonc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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