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The mainstream controls us
Opinion: Take back your mind.
The mainstream media controls what the majority of us eat, watch, wear, drive, and buy. When we see celebrities with a new haircut or dress style, it suddenly becomes popular and enters the mainstream. But whose decision is it to mainstream something to the public anyhow? Is it the mainstream itself using mass media to get customers to buy what they want the customer to buy?
The mainstream is where something is extremely popular amongst the public and is positively promoted by the mass media to the extent of making some people extremely rich. But is the mainstream a good thing? Does it enjoy killing off difference and uniqueness?
For example, I am a big Bob Dylan fan. In my opinion, he is simply the greatest musician ever. I always say that had Bob Dylan been trying to make it these days he would never be successful or win shows like American Idol. To me, it is clear that the mainstream doesn’t like anything different or unique. If they did, nothing would be mainstream except difference. This wouldn’t work, as selling in smaller quantities makes less profit.
So, let’s move away from mainstream fashion and look at mainstream media. The TV channels supported by all western nations such as Fox News, ABC, CNN and so on are all cheerleaders for capitalism. If you watch American media closely, you’ll see that every time someone has a different view to that of the ‘Washington view’, they are verbally assaulted, degraded, called a lunatic and so on. Just look at the mainstream media’s coverage of the Afghanistan war, and especially the Iraq war, to see what I mean. It has become public knowledge that they hid the truth about what was happening in Iraq, for example. They also infamously called the tightly run Florida race between Gore and Bush a half hour before the actual call. Many people feel that this significantly influenced the outcome of that election, which resulted in George Bush being elected president.
The American media also try to dumb down the population by supplying useless information and overloading the TV schedules with reality TV, cartoons, and cop shows. In most cases, they openly support the concept of creationism over evolution. In my opinion, this a fundamental piece of knowledge that everyone should believe in, but they don’t because the mainstream media says it is wrong.
Now, let’s take an example from outside the United States. In Venezuela, there is a political and social divide between the mostly native and poor and the European settler descendents who became rich during the 50s, 60s and 70s oil boom. In 1998, an army general of the native and poor background called Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela, standing on a socialist ticket promising to nationalize the oil companies in Venezuela and to share the profit among the poor through social projects.
Well, this didn’t go down well with the minority of the mostly European decent population who had profited greatly by owning the oil companies and were left with no real ownership of Venezuela’s oil and political power. The two things that they held on to were their money and their ownership of 90% of Venezuela’s media. So, with this in mind, many of the political and trade union leaders on the rich side (led by Pedro Carmona) decided to plan a coup d’état against Hugo Chavez by using the private television media to falsely make it seem that Chavez supporters shot at Carmona supporters. This got the army involved and Hugo Chavez was arrested. Pedro Carmona was then installed as president of Venezuela. This was even supported by the United States who later released a statement of support.
However the media, Carmona and USA failed in their coup d’état after thousands of Chavez supporters protested about the coup d’état outside the presidential palace. Presidential guards rescued Hugo Chavez and returned him to power. Pedro Carmona went into exile with help of the United States. This is an example of how the mainstream uses Noam Chomsky’s idea of “Manufacturing Consent” to manipulate the public into supporting what the rich and powerful want the public to support.
Remember this, don’t believe what the mainstream says, research for yourself and find the truth; believe what you see, not what you’re told; and don’t live and think like everyone else because the mainstream wants you to. Instead, be your own person and think for yourself. We are all human, but we are all different.
By: Darren Myers
