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 Post subject: Beware the Totalitarian Silence of the NWI Times
PostPosted: Tue Apr 09, 2013 5:04 am 
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Joined: Wed Sep 23, 2009 1:29 pm
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Today the Lake County Council will cast its initial vote in what probably will be its first and second readings on an ordinance to enact a county income tax. After nominal public discussion, argument and analyses it will later return to cast its final representative tally - for or against.

In the past the citizens of Lake County, Indiana could turn to the NWInd Times for news reports to at least apprise its readers of the major developments or the basis and stakes of decisions to come. Of course in the past, any report could be supplemented or critiqued by input from readers, as part of a new social process refining the method and reliability of gathering, submitting and interpretively organizing information constitutive of news. This new process is based on the Internet and characterized by a collective dialogue posted on a system of linking interactive computer services (ICS).

The ICS has enabled the democratic-oriented voice of the People to be realized in the most democratic form to date, in the history of political man. And therein lies the problem for the stratum of ruling special interests. In terms of news content, the ICS is derived from and/or modeled on what literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) analyzed as a "dialogical" process by which he characterized the primary basis of community interaction as discourse. Bakhtin theorized that the centrality of significant questions in social life should be examined by the way in which language registered the conflicts between social groups. The key aspect of his language-oriented theory of social interaction was that linguistic production is essentially dialogic, that is, socio-political-artistic discourse formed in the process of communal interaction.

In turn, this directly leads to the recognition and representation of different social values, as communally registered by their intertextual reiteration or by allusions to them in the speech of others. This was the social space, the normative common ground captured and psychologically held by society's ruling stratum by virtue of the power to monopolize and posit a single discourse as exemplary. To be sure, in totalitarian societies or hierarchical-oriented organizations such corporations, silence is golden, as editorial writer Doug Ross of the NWInd Times recently put it.

He and his ilk, of course, desire silence in order to discern the call of their falconer, Lake County Commissioner Gerry Scheub and the special interests he represents. As for the history of news publications as the voice of the People, an anachronism, a museum artifact fit for the Smithsonian archive.

Today, we now fully realize that the NWInd Times no longer wishes to report the news. No, today it now aggressive seeks to decide it and wherever possible manipulate it by silencing any and all competing views, all for the range of political interests represented by its editorial board and/or that of the special interests needed to maintain the status quo.

This used to be the land of free speech. Today, we are witnessing, perhaps for the first time in history, in the open, the old established press corps and its once secret, unmitigated subversion of the People, flushed out into full view. Both the local newspapers and their sources in the local government have been spoiled by the moral hazard of one-way dissemination of information. Knowing we no longer trust them, and with good reason cannot trust them, they've resorted to cutting off critical feedback.

But their credibility is finished!

Witness the open unmitigated fear of democratic influence, of People enabled, especially in the face of government officials that consistently demonstrate a belief they were elected not to represent the People, but rule them. They were wrong and social media will prove them wrong. Gone are the days in which the People were simply pawns to be manipulated by propaganda techniques and biased slants on news developments ambiguously geared to distort.

Here the logic is simple enough. Where else ya gonna get your news? the flaw in the logic is that there are other places, other forums in which to post and critique both the Times' biased coverage and its news sources. There are other sources.


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