Earlier this week in front of his weekly board meeting in the San Diego office, AP chairman, Dean Singleton, cried foul.
In complaining about the unlicensed use of AP stories all over the blogosphere, Singleton actually conjured up the old Network tagline: “We’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore!”
Well, let’s visit the original context of that quote for a moment…
Why Singleton would want to conjure up the mental image of this speech, I have no idea. The ‘mad as hell’ speech came at a revelatory moment when one commentator realized the effect the mass media was having on society at large. Newscaster Howard Beale implored the audience to leave the television set and face the reality of their living room windows. He asked them to look outside and see the real world for what it is.
The whole thesis of Network was that corporate controlled media is a scourge upon free society. You cannot have a democracy, nor freedom, nor autonomy without a free exchange of information. Having one (or a select few) sources of centralized news is a direct and imminent threat to liberty and the evolution of thought.
Several responses have already cropped up to denounce the APs new official stance. And I need not pile on any further. These old world journalists are doing nothing more than re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Their world is over, and not soon enough if you ask me.
We are inexorably moving toward a much freer, nobler, more efficient system of educating ourselves about the world. We’re organically developing a system in which independent investigators and commentators can be found interspersed in every population, in every government, among every people on the planet, immune to retaliation and censorship through their sheer numbers. The old gatekeepers are dying off. The information will flow freely to anyone who wants to access it. No archaic laws or regulatory bodies can impede this movement.
To loosely quote Network again:
Mr. Singleton, you are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of information. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!
