One story I remember from that book troubles me to this day. It focused on the tribes of the first nations (indigenous Indians) living in what was the Northwest Territory (NWT) at that time, but is now called Nunavut Province in Northern Canada.. Since the stone age, these people had maintained their cultural bonds through the sharing of oral history. They entertained themselves and their children by telling stories about their ancestors, and by doing so, keeping their cultural roots strong while teaching the young important life lessons. After the second world war, the government run, Canadian Broadcast System wanted to bring television to the Northwest Territories. Local indigenous leaders resisted, but eventually in the 1960s, TV arrived in the NWT. After that, within one generation, television became an addiction that destroyed the tradition of indigenous oral history from one generation to the next.
Jerry Mander's book is about the power of the media to corrupt and numb minds when used with banal purpose. The mass media is the nervous system of humanity. It should be used with noble propose to educate, inform, and galvanize the masses in service of the public interest. With the exception of some of the programming on PBS, very little of what we get on television has that kind of redeeming value. These days, what we get, particularly in primetime, are mindless reality shows and six variations on crime scene investigation.
Broadcast television, much like newspapers, magazines, and radio, is not structured to serve its audience, but instead to manipulate it. The real customers for commercial broadcast media are the advertisers, the corporations that sell us their goods and services. Television is not about educating, informing, and inspiring public awareness. It's about demographics - delivering the specific audience most likely to be customers for a certain brand of coffee or car insurance.
The broadcast networks depend on corporate customers for their advertising dollars. To keep those customers happy, broadcasters purposely shape their programming to fit the conservative corporate world view. Take climate change for example. The reason why there is little or no thoughtful discussion of climate change on television is the people behind big coal and oil don't want the media focusing on the massive pollution of the atmosphere that their products create. There is little discussion on TV of clean, renewable sources of energy because big coal and oil want to suppress those alternatives.
In virtually every social, environmental, and economic arena, the mass media memes that shape public opinion are designed to serve the profit motive of big corporate advertisers and to discourage ideas that threaten their conservative agenda.
These days, the influence and reach of television, radio, and the commercial print media are waning. The internet is rapidly evolving and eventually will largely replace these older forms of mass media outreach. As this happens, massive political influence is being directed at the rules that govern the internet. Conservative corporate interests want to control the net so they can manipulate it for their own interests just as they already do with TV, radio, and the print media.
Jerry Mander's book, In the Absence of the Sacred, came too late to make a difference with the traditional media, but it's warning also applies to the still evolving internet. Every citizen has a stake in making sure the internet is not co opted by the same corporate forces that ruined TV, radio, and the print media by putting their profit-driven, self-interest before the common good.
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