TV and Culture Control

The great orator and statesman Cicero, sent to take up a political post in distant Asia Minor, begged a friend at home in Rome to send him all the news - but what he got wasn't exactly what he had in mind. The professional scribe, his friend had hired, filled his new packets with accounts of funerals, gladiator contests, local gossip, stage successes, and other "tittle-tattle" that "no one", Cicero huffed, "would have the impertinence to repeat to me when I am in Rome."

Two millennia later, with the amazing resources science has developed, the lords of the air waves have chosen to send us more "tittle-tattle" and mind manipulating junk food into every private crevice of our daily lives.

We should not be surprised at how the profit motive collides with the crucial need to accurately know our world and what is really going on. It is as journalist Walter Cronkite tells us in the Media Studies Journal of Summer 1996..."the CEO's of huge conglomerates direct the operation. The buck stops there, for it is they who ultimately control our "free" press. It might be said that the press actually is as free as they permit it to be."