This Matt Taibbi is alright

His latest New York Press article:

The flap over Janet Jackson and Howard Stern and that Florida Love-Sponge asshole really serves to conceal a much larger issue. We have a system of media domination in this country, but it operates according to a completely different paradigm than the traditional bald censorship of Josef Stalin. It’s achieved by drowning out minor voices in an overwhelming quantity of mainstream media output, and through the relentless mass marketing of a charade of political plurality and diversity that carefully excludes or consigns to the edges any uncomfortable content–like Kucinich and Sharpton.

Then there is the campaign of emotional body blows designed to ravage the ordinary person’s pride in his own humanity. The average American sees more than 30,000 commercials a year, most of which show human beings participating in a humiliating orgy of self-abasement. There’s the poor sap singing and dancing with joy over his OfficeMax supplies, the gushing woman at lunch with her girlfriends who confesses, "It’s not love–it’s my Crest White Strips!"

We have millions of those choices. We can thusly act like an idiot with any one of millions of culturally acceptable accessories. But in the area of acceptable political choices, we have two. Not one, but two. That is the kind of freedom the New York Times demands for Russia, and for us.


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