I think I’ll quote Kent Brockman now. "Democracy simply doesn’t work."
Let’s face it. In any democratic country, the passionate ignoramuses will always outnumber the passive intellectuals. The majority of a population will always be uneducated due to the consequences of a capitalist society. We can’t possibly have a society in which all people possess doctorates and still have sanitation workers, bus drivers, or burger flippers to do all our shit for us. Due to economic factors, at any given time there will only be a select few privy to the true nature of the nation and the world, while others are spoon-fed "knowledge" through carefully filtered media outlets. This "knowledge" can be sensational, due to a network’s desire to bolster ratings; it can be heavily biased, due to the political leanings of the network management; it can also be proactive in acting as judge, jury, and executioner for controversial figures or events.
The vast majority of the uneducated public will fully focus on present views in mass media for its news or "knowledge". But what we are spoon-fed everyday on CNN or TVBS (in Taiwan) is nothing but a facade of sincerity masking or conveniently censoring controversial issues.
Orwell said: "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."
Mass media is nothing but a power mad monkey with a huge fucking eraser that consistently erases and reshapes the past, so that your average citizen will have no idea what events truly preceded the 9/11 attacks, or why the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Parties of Taiwan are such bitter enemies. When presented with a convenient MSNBC timeline, a citizen can expect to see a sterile, spliced, and censored timeline depicting why Palestine hates Israel, and why Osama Bin Laden is Satan. The intelligentsia who control mass media outlets are shrewd and have limitless foresight; they know you, the average Joe, won’t bother reading thousands upon thousands of pages of contradictory documentation regarding the true history of the world that led us to the quagmire of today, instead opting for a pretty timeline in pictures (since words are too strenuous to read) fit conveniently in a little pop up window.
To quote Lionel Hutz, "I saw Matlock in a bar last night; the sound was off, but I think I got the gist of it."
Thus democracy can never work, unless mass media is constrained by a neutral party, to only provide facts, never opinions, and to devote equal time intervals to all stories – whether it be the newest fashions for canines or the presidential assassination. Only then can any election work – without the jamming signals of mass media echoing through the soft brains of the general populace. But then each voter would have to read the entire background of each candidate or issue, and recognize the jigsaw piece in the grand puzzle of a google things, many of which are obscured by the shadows of history. Then voters would have to magically discern the important from the useless, the fact from fiction, and the weight of all that remains. Would that ever be possible? Not in a million years.
Thus we are faced with an eternal Catch-22: mass media will always be driven by network profit, and continue to sensationalize and exaggerate issues to garner ratings, effectively brainwashing the average, less-erudite citizen (which will always constitute any nation’s majority) and disrupting the democratic process. If any attempt is made to control or silence the uncaged vultures of mass media, then they will cite it as an "undemocratic" attack on the "democratic" rights of free speech.
Thus, democracy can never work without a restrained, neutral-party controlled, non-profit media. Possible? I think not.
