Oops. I forgot to even offer to pay.

I remembered this humorous-at-the-time, but telling, comment from a colleague the other day when considering how simple it is for those in positions of ill-gotten power to forget how those positions were obtained in the first place.

At CNN, it was sometimes difficult to pay for meals in the food court downstairs, so insistent was the resistance to accepting money from any of us at at least one large chain vendor downstairs that it could become easy to forget that some people paid for meals.

But should this have ever been the case?

I recognize how easy it would be just to keep quiet about my continued concerns about the concentration of power a small number of gargantuan media corporations have amassed in recent years by making an unannounced transition in function from reporting to suppressing news, but I don’t believe doing so would be right.

I love how, in Course in Miracles, the reader is alerted that “the ‘ideal’ of the unholy relationship … becomes one in which the reality of the other does not enter at all to ‘spoil’ the dream. And the less the other really brings to it, the ‘better’ it becomes. Thus, the attempt at union becomes a way of excluding even the one with whom the union was sought. For it was formed to get him out of it, and join with fantasies in uninterrupted ‘bliss,'” as I feel this is the role the public has assumed as targets of a corporate media machine that serves little purpose anymore other than to amass power for its own sake.

But there are so many easy ways this could be stopped. I have written about the topic at length before, but I still feel all corporate conglomerates, for example, should be required to disclose their ownership of acquired brands more explicitly as many of the more high-profit, low-quality additions to their content portfolios would be easily identified as such but for the application of misleading labels; and a revolver with the silencer on is arguably at least as deadly. (Wouldn’t it make sense for HLN, for example, to be required to go back to CNN HLN branding?)

A leading media figure (and someone I suppose could more accurately be described as a member of modern American royalty) recently characterized figures who received the greatest amount of attention from media corporations as being people with bigger souls than others – a description that I felt went beyond a view just warped by Wall Street but one that actually began to more closely approach a sort of psychosis treacherous to confront.

But isn’t at least attempting the difficult-but-important the reason each of us is here? His is obviously the most unique possible case, but if simple ease were to be our goal, wouldn’t Jesus himself have just set up shop by himself somewhere and lived on loaves and fishes for three years?

I believe one reason confronting the effects of corporate media business models on the world is worth trying is that, regardless of how they are defined legally, these entities are not people; and it is arguably the architecture of corporate media management structures that is one of the country’s principal collective adversaries.

And, even if it is despite themselves, some media corporations themselves seem to have begun dialogues on the topic. (I still find it both likely and difficult to believe that CNN’s Magritte campaign was an unintentional self-own.)

In any case, I continue to believe the solution of this problem, once it is appreciated and confronted proportionately and directly, will be found to have been inevitable all along.