The popular TV show 24, which many argued was a conservative, pro-war and pro-torture program, had its finale this week. Barry Eisler, who used to work for the CIA, argues that the Right has done a better job of seeding its ideology into American pop culture, from television and movies to books. Eisler is now a novelist himself, and his new book Inside Out is based on real events involving the disappearance of videotapes documenting American torture of suspected terrorists.
Eisler joins us in studio to discuss the way that the media is complicit in issues of war and torture, and how progressives can use fiction and art to fight for our own ideals.
So happy to see this. Can’t can’t wait to read this book.
We need to systematically dissect this 30-40 year process step by step so we understand exactly what was done by whom and when to get us to where we are today in case law and precedence that allows all of this used against the Marjority by the Top 1% Minority.
Of course, the Conservatives say that through mid-20th Century the Liberals and Conservatives promulgated their own social ideology.
That’s why they had to “lose the Vietnam War in the Streets of the USA”, got Clean Air and Clean Water Acts passed under even Nixon. Yikes! Or, even Civil Rights. Very bad to take away a tool of derision like Jim Crow from the Ruling Elites. That’s like taking away sectarian Religion. W. F. Buckley was incensed about all of that in the 1950s, and played a big part spinning the ideology for this Corporate Controlling Shareholder War on the People and Families of the USA!
Of course, the Media are co-opted. The media is central to the 30 year assault on freedom of information and open competitive marketplaces of ideas the Conservatives and their Businesses can never live with. They were bought by the Military Shareholders starting in that 1980s M&A run that consolidated all our business into fewer and fewer hands associated with these families. Congress under Reagan wiped out “fairness doctrines” that Viguerie, Buckley and others had been working to get rid of since they lost the Vietnam War. Clinton paved the way for even more consolidation under these owners by signing the 1996 Telecommunications Act. He knew what Murdoch was doing in this country by then with his bought US citizenship to get around the ownership restrictions.
Too many people act like it’s a foregone conclusion and are so depressed without tactical ideas to turn this mess around through Mass Majority Muscle. Plenty of progressives see no game plan to reverse all of this perversion of democracy.
By planck on May 26th, 2010 at 2:41 pm