On Views,

While I still know relatively little about it, I’ve been intrigued recently by the idea in Course in Miracles of so-called “special relationships,” or, as I understand them, relationships meant less to uplift and to free than to try to create zones of ego-led governance, usually fueled by some form of predation, and away from God’s guidance.

Recently, I’ve been pondering concepts in organizational design and, specifically, what applications there may be for this apparatus of special relationships to the notion of the corporation; and it’s felt relevant to consider any systems by which unnecessary distance is built-in between cause and effect. And the practice, in prisoner executions of all things, by which groups of executioners simultaneously press buttons that may or may not release poison without needing to know whose action dispensed the lethal dose has felt particularly relevant.

It continues to feel, to me, as if this strategy of distributing some forms of responsibility, and especially for harm, while understandable, may be key to seeing how it is that corporate leaders, who may consider themselves (and who may well be) good people, have seemed to maintain dominance while being involved in so many atrocities over the years – practically risking executing the planet, one could argue. The design of corporate structures arguably permits them to too-easily not only deflect individual accountability in public (especially as news organizations have largely become corporate entities) but, in some cases, in private, too.

I wrote at length in February of 2021 about what I believe to be a need for a greater emphasis on market design flaws, rather than only on individual people as part of the phenomenon now termed cancel culture, in order to address large-scale, systemic problems built into the relationship between media companies and American citizens given that, as was the case in the eventual identification and prosecution of the role of a large cohort of cigarette companies that had pitted public health officials and tobacco farmers against one another decades ago, I believe such a shift may help illustrate where opportunities for problem-solving today may have so far gone unnoticed. In the older case, once it was discovered that it was the group of corporate entities producing and distributing addictive toxins en masse (not unlike media corporations today) that was the source of much misunderstanding and many harmful incentives, from what I understand, it became easy for the farmers and public health officials to change course where needed and reconcile.

As then, particularly given the externalized masses of seemingly destroyed careers left in the wake of media corporations’ collective efforts to perpetuate their business models despite many women’s attempts to expose failures to uphold ideas of equal opportunity arguably endemic to those models (especially given the extraordinary concentrations of unaccountable power they tend to prioritize amassing), strewn across the landscape without such companies ever seeming to bother recycling them, it may be worth wondering what kinds of systems may be at work and why they have been designed to operate in this way.

In architectural lectures one often hears about what is frequently referred to as “prospect-refuge theory,” which posits that people may tend to be most comfortable in spaces where they are able to observe others easily while maintaining privacy for themselves. And, of course, it makes sense that this could be the case in a culture in which flawed human beings may have been taught to feel that vulnerability renders them unsafe (although I feel it bears repeating how beautifully researcher Carlina Rinaldi once expressed that “children cannot bear to be anonymous” as I still believe a sort of childlikeness independent of age may be the answer). In public discourse, it stands to reason – particularly in a society so heavily dominated by corporate media forces that are, arguably, inherently predatory entities – that prospect-refuge theory would help explain how so much information seems to be collected and used by media corporations to reinforce dominance rather than to meaningfully uplift or helpfully inform the public.

It seems practically everyone these days touts the advantages of engagement via proxy – whether this be in war, in corporate governance, or in national governance via media corporations themselves. But there are times when the disadvantages of engagement by proxy also require attention.

I’ve felt inspired to revisit my 2019 article, Paper Parks, recently, given how much attention this seems to have received since being sent to the Free Press org last year (I would still be very glad to know how this has been distributed, why, and to whom), and how much time and effort I’ve invested over the last four years to clarifying the idea explored within it regarding the potential value of advances in human rights championed by organizations even when this is done for wrong reasons, as it still feels important to me to emphasize that I do not believe it right for corporations to falsely be cast as leaders in the realm of advances in the social justice arena where they have only acted in compliance or in order to preserve their collective relationship to the stock market – arguably the ultimate externalization tool. (A main idea of the paper was that only organizations that center the idea of human equality – in terms of their outward-facing posture as well as their approach to human rights internally – should be allowed to be involved in the stock market, and this, if any organization at all should be funded in this way. And, while I do believe news organizations have made significant strides on the former front in the last several years, without reforms on the latter – including acknowledgment of the problem of unequal treatment of men and women – I still personally feel these orgs’ involvement in the stock market is wrong.)

New Prospectors,

But even private and nonprofit orgs, of course, trade on brand value and, even with the advent of a new class of media outfits built, rather than on any form of innovative or genuine value-adding proposition, instead, on the liquidation so-called legacy media corporation brand equity, I feel the country is left no better.

But why? Such organizations are arguably just more of the same and employ a strategy of advertised claims to be empowering journalism outfits when their dominance arguably derives from performing the exact opposite function.

If it is true that, as these orgs proliferate, they constitute little more than an extension of the malady of corporate media dominance that has seemed to destabilize the country so fundamentally for decades now (I still believe it may not have been until 1996, with the founding of Fox News, that the media sector turned cancerous; but the problem has spread and, I believe, needs to be handled at a systemic level), why is this so?

Even if everyone’s ideal scenario is to be able to access news without needing to hear reporters’ opinions unless they want to (and there are without question times when people do), silent consensus is arguably not enough to effect change absent policy modifications that address more than just obvious, underlying profit-motives, but power-motives as well that, increasingly, seem to fall into a number of readily-identifiable categories.

As I’ve written at length before, in media corporations, ignorance is power, and plausible deniability is king. And this is where I’ve often wondered whether media organizations’ capitalization on the tool of the proxy – in most cases, on-air personalities and public-facing executives – may be key.

So many times, when an organization begins engaging in improper, if not harmful, behaviors, it seems increasingly likely not just to promote corrupt leaders but what seem to be more and more inept ones. I believe this is because these are most likely to be willing to look the other way, so shocked they seem to be to have been seemingly handed so much power. They can hardly believe their luck.

But this is not always the case, and, sometimes, ignorance seems more enforced. Back when it appeared one possible way to attempt to share that I’d had concerns about equal rights for women at CNN was to reach out to women expressing their support publicly, I tried to contact the most prominent, like Reese Witherspoon, Megyn Kelly, Gretchen Carlson, and Christianne Amanpour, and, while the first did appear to look over my website, which I appreciated, it was what I noticed in reaching out to the current anchor that stood out most. While I normally received no response when trying to speak about my experience at CNN and eventually almost expected that, I noted just after attempting to leave a comment on an Instagram post of Ms. Amanpour’s that there suddenly appeared to be an extremely long series of nonsensical ones that followed; and I wondered whether this was the company’s attempt to prevent communication.

In any case, I do believe modern media organizations attain and maintain power through the promotion of ignorance perhaps more than any other one thing.

Still, not everyone can be kept in the dark, and it appears an increasingly wide variety of means designed to muffle budding dialogues about these organizations’ hegemony are being utilized, with blunt intimidation, payoffs for silence, perceived enemy-cancellations, and ego-boosting media deals seeming to be the most common.

Even if unacknowledged, it still feels important to attempt to continue to articulate that, in every case, there is arguably a better outcome for everyone that continues to go unexplored – simply having a dialogue, as a country, on the effects that corporate media business models seem to have had on the world over the last approximately three decades.

In the meantime, I still feel it important to underscore how essential I believe it is, in an increasingly loud mediascape, to prioritize time spent quietly listening to my own heart for a greater sense discernment and to perhaps encourage others to do the same. For many people, I believe this may involve engaging in regular, creative activity – be that writing, in the production of visual artwork, or some sort of movement; but whatever that looks like for each individual, it may be an important key to ensuring more voices are both ready and able to be heard as needed as I do suppose the phenomenon of corporate media domination gets at where the buck must stop – with each one of us taking accountability for what we actually believe and taking the time and space every one needs to listen to her or his own heart in order to defend against blindly leaning on – or wrongly being used as – a proxy. (Absent a journalism sector, all action would take place via proxy; and, I suppose, that is one way of describing the current scenario.)

And Possibilities

Of course dominant media corporations fraudulently claiming to be information sources today seem to be practically the only ones with an overview. But like numerators in a fraction condition it seems an ever-growing cohort of citizens can only ever reduce, and never eliminate, what is to be done to restore right relationship on level ground but address the dividers?