Sgt. Pepper, Herman and Chomsky

I was the editor of my high school newspaper for two years, and as a staff we were always taught to pride ourselves in our integrity and our objectiveness. Other high schools didn't have as much freedom, our teacher told us, so we made sure to stretch our limits as far as we could and to cover everything newsworthy we could get our hands on. As time went on, and as we consistently covered the controversy in my high school's administration, our staff continued to lose freedoms. The patrons were local businesses, so technically the school didn't own our paper, but since it was printed and delivered to the people in a building they own, they had control over it. I didn't realize until now that what was going on, the schools controlling what is printed, was just a smaller scale of national newspapers and the controlling forces of advertisers and the government. Advertisers, mega-mergers, and other wealthy corporations are the only means for funding, thus they can pretty much decide exactly what gets printed every day. As Herman and Chomsky explain, the birth of the free press was such an exciting time. Newspapers were printed with objective news to anyone willing to read it. There were no external forces controlling what was said, and the many different newspapers for many types of people truly defined and embraced the idea of freedom of press. The working man read his news. And the old-money business man read his. As a journalist in high school, being able to speak for the many troubled voices of my high school was a liberating experience. I was given the opportunity to write completely uncensored for (what seemed like) the whole world to see. To know that true journalists with an actual career don't do this is really heartbreaking to me.

What Herman and Chomsky (and I) are getting at is that we should take action toward how controlled our mass media is. We should wage a war on totality (Lyotard) and take hold of our individualities. And like Marx and Althusser suggest, let's start thinking for ourselves. We can't let the formed ideologies of these advertisers and big business executives decide who we are.