I went to see Amy Goodman at the Central Presbyterian Church in Denver on Friday evening. Her message is to challenge the mainstream media to give Americans the whole story. She travels throughout the country, broadcasting from colleges and small towns, and speaking at fundraising events for independent radio and TV stations.
Her mission is much the same as ours at Dreamways. She too is encouraging people to awaken from the collective trance of the American Media Dream and face the whole story rather than the neatly packaged, glossy translation that, no matter how horrifying or sad, is delivered by smiling faces with perfectly coiffed hair.
As Goodman noted on Friday, there have been exceptions to the standard broadcast news rules. Unembedded reporters in the wake of huricane Katrina had live, hand to hand, heart to heart contact with the displaced and the dead. For once American networks dared to show the whole story, of which each and every one of us is part.
Goodman reiterated time and again her confidence in the American people to awaken from this trance of complacency once they are shown the whole story. And as I listened to her words, I found myself shaking loose from perhaps the most powerful illusion of this media trance which is to believe that our country is divided into US and Them; while in fact we have never ceased to be a unified whole - just as the story we are living, though obscured, has ever been whole in all its goodness, badness, joyfulness, sorrowfulness, etc. Without access to the whole story, how are we to begin to deal with what is actually happening in our world? Without access to the whole story, how are we to make meaning of the lives we are living?
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