In 1992 I attended a lecture by Noam Chomsky at a high school auditorium in Los Angeles. During the Q&A Professor Chomsky was asked what televised news sources he recommended and he said said none of them. He had particularly biting comments to make about how CNN “packaged” the (first) Gulf War as infotainment with clips of military jets taking off, waving American flags and footage of targets being hit that looked like video-games with a martial beat soundtrack. How can you expect the public to have an objective view of the country’s foreign policy and military actions, he asked the audience, when they’re fed images from the military itself via a tightly controlled press pool designed to foster an “us vs. them” mindset by a for profit news outlet who find their highest ratings in the midst of war, scandal and crisis? And NBC was at this time owned by General Electric, the #1 company in the world to make money from war. Who could you trust?

I used to be an absolute TV news junkie, but after his words sank in, I found the more and more I drifted away from it. I did most certainly feel manipulated whenever I was watching CNN. It became really fucking annoying to me once it had been pointed out so bluntly what they were up to and how far up the White House’s asshole they’d climbed. It’s worth mentioning that it was four years prior to the launch of Fox News when Noam Chomsky made these observations. To satiate my infomania, I was soon subscribing to five daily papers and 70 monthly magazines that ranged from far-right and far-left conspiracy theory zines, to Vanity Fair and everything in between. In addition to things like In These Times or Z magazine, I also subscribed to The National Review (before it became absolutely worthless on every level) and Free American and various libertarian publications. I picked up anarchist monthlies, eco warrior magazines and just basically everything. Extreme perhaps, but at least my information sources did not have an emotionally leading soundtrack and ludicrous music video montages of saluting soldiers, missiles being fired to slaughter people at a distance and red, white and blue flags flying in the wind.

Much of the time, TV news just felt like I was being shouted at by idiots. It was infuriating. By 1996—the year Fox News launched although I was barely aware of it at the time—I cancelled cable because I never ever watched it and it was just a waste of $70 bucks a month. If it wasn’t for my wife, I’d have never had it since (and I still never watch TV news unless there’s something really significant happening).

The brilliant and sardonic British writer and TV presenter, Charlie Brooker performs a parallel service for BBC viewers that Professor Chomsky once did for me, to illustrate a similar point he made recently—with well-chosen clips—about the despicable way the news media is treating the crisis in Japan. Watch this, it’s really good.
 

 
(via Cynical-C)

Previously on DM:
Charlie Brooker’s How TV Ruined Your Life.

 
A fine example of the Banksy-esque artwork of fictional artist 15Peter20 from the Nathan Barley TV series created by Chris Morris and Charlie Brooker, who described the character like so, in a February 12, 2005 article from The Guardian:

Either a genius or a dazzling genius, depending on which way you look at it, 15Peter20 (real name Ian Phillips) has made his mark in the world of contemporary photography thanks to a series of shocking, gimmick-heavy exhibitions in which the gimmick quickly becomes attached to the underside of the art, then scuttles up its back, hops on its shoulders and screams which direction it should go in, while simultaneously flashing its bum at passers-by. His new collection, Piss Bliss, consists entirely of photographs of celebrities urinating, thereby expertly capturing their animal vulnerability while exquisitely forcing jocular postmodernity to commit taboobicide. These pictures are at once the most revealing portrait photographs ever taken and an absolutely bloody flabbergasting waste of the world’s time.

This piece appears in the book Fucking With Your Head Yeah? that came with the original Nathan Barley DVD release.

Via Kraftfuttermischwerk

 
Charlie Brooker’s Screen Burn columns in The Guardian are always funny, but this week’s is especially hilarious. Brooker writes on a new British telemovie that imagines the trial and death of Britain’s most notorious pedophile, former popstar Gary Glitter, whose 1972 hit “Rock and Roll Pt 2” is still to this day played by the unwitting at sports events big and small across America:

Don’t know about you, but sometimes I can’t sleep at night for wondering what it might be like if Gary Glitter were executed. I just can’t picture it in quite enough detail for my liking. Would they fry him? Gas him? Or pull his screaming head off with some candy-coloured rope? I can never decide, and it often leaves me restless till sunrise. Thank God, then, for The Execution Of Gary Glitter (Mon, 9pm, Channel 4), which vividly envisions the trial and subsequent capital punishment of pop’s most reviled sex offender so you don’t have to.

I can’t believe what I’m typing: this is a drama-documentary that imagines a world in which Britain has a) Reinstated the death penalty for murder and paedophilia, b) Changed the law so Britons can stand trial in this country for crimes committed abroad, and c) Chosen Gary Glitter as its first test case. It blends archive footage, talking-head interviews with Miranda Sawyer, Garry Bushell and Ann Widdecombe, and dramatised scenes in which Gary Glitter is led into an execution chamber and hanged by the neck until dead.

He’s not just swinging from a rope, mind. The Glitterphile is all over this show, like Hitler in Downfall. There are lengthy scenes in which he argues with his lawyer, smirks in court, plays chess with the prison chaplain, weeps on the floor of his cell, etc. Visually, we’re talking late-period Glitter, with the evil wizard shaved-head-and-elongated-white-goatee combo that makes him resemble a sick alternative Santa. It would be funnier if they showed him decked out in full 70s glam gear throughout, being led to the gallows in a big spangly costume with shoulder pads so huge they get stuck in the hole as he plunges through. I assumed the Glittercution would feature dry ice, disco lights, and a hundred party poppers going off as his neck cracked. But here there’s not so much as a can of Silly String. This is a terribly serious programme.

 
Read the whole thing at The Guardian