I think this poster has it backwards

Quite some time ago, San Francisco radio figure Wes Nisker said If You Don’t Like the News, Go Out and Make Some of Your Own. Apparently Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch, and other media moguls took his advice. I’ve been fascinated with the literally Orwellian evolution of media control in America over the past decade or two that began in earnest with the deregulation of the Reagan years and has resulted in ten or fewer media companies owning everything. Which is a bad enough thing in itself, but gets really bad when those same companies control the government as well. As a well-conditioned media consumer, I was so busy Facebooking about my emotional knee-jerk reactions to liberal and conservative media pundits that I had forgotten that this behavior of mine was all part of a vast Orwellian 21st century robber baron plan. That is, until I was reminded of this fact last week when I finally saw the 2005 documentary Orwell Rolls in His Grave. It’s a shame that the makers of the film didn’t package the product a little differently; the title gives off a paranoid post 9/11 vibe that detracts from the substance of the film, which is an insightful exploration of the corporate media dominance of what you see, read and hear as a result of influence peddling and Washington’s unprecedented revolving door policies of late. Much like Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, the film wallows a bit too much in what seems like academic hand-wringing, and plays the Orwell angle a little too hard. The fact is that Orwell wouldn’t be rolling in his grave, because the film effectively makes the case that we’re living exactly the way Orwell envisioned things. I’d still recommend the film, and if you’re interested in this topic, the totally unrelated book The The Elements of Journalism, which explores a similar topic, i.e.: the failure of journalism as a result of the purely profit-driven decision making that has replaced “real” news with entertainment. I sometimes lament that most whistleblower-oriented documentaries – like Food, Inc., Outfoxed, and virtually anything by Michael Moore – end up coming across as liberal whining in the end. It would be inspiring if someone managed to produce a less partisan documentary that just looked at the apalling truth of it all. Yes, the Bush White House that was brought to us by Project For A New American Century was indeed Orwellian in its lies and doublespeak, but the real evil is not the party they claimed to represent, it’s the pathological behavior of the media companies that seek control of government through agency capture. America *needs investigative journalism, hard hitting documentaries, and gutsy exposés more than ever right now. But don’t expect to see them in a major theater in an era when Disney blocks the distribution of a Michael Moore film for telling too much of the truth about George Bush. Fortunately, at least for now, we have the Internet, so you can watch entire films like Orwell Rolls in His Grave on line .