word of the week / may 5th, 2013

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A kind of mental weather composed of information.

Every night the overtaxed employees of news networks scramble to distill a few narratives from the innumerable events of the day. This would be practically impossible were it not for their biases and the agendas of their employers. One must not look at corporate media reports as “the” events of the day, then, but as strategic maneuvers on the field of public attention. Such broadcasts can still be informative, provided one approaches them as machinations to be decoded: efforts to lay the groundwork for repression, attempts to discredit or distract, admissions of fear and confusion.

To choose a single example—according to our own agenda, of course!—reports of a Swine Flu epidemic originating in Mexico dominated the media throughout 2009. Between 1918 and 1920, a bona fide flu epidemic killed well over 50 million people worldwide, and even today more than 30,000 die of flu-related complications every year in the US alone; Swine Flu, on the other hand, claimed only a few thousand lives worldwide. Fears about looming pandemics notwithstanding, the Swine Flu coverage would be nigh incomprehensible were it not for the implication that immigration from Mexico poses threats that must be controlled. More people have died trying to cross illegally from Mexico into the United States than Swine Flu ever killed; as usual, capitalist treatments are more virulent than the ailments they purport to cure.

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