What “Fahrenheit 451” Got Right, and What “Fahrenheit 451” Got Wrong

“We’re living in the global corporatized media village that is Fahrenheit 451.”

We keep on hearing about “fake news.” Everyone blames the media. It’s always the media’s fault.

There’s some justification for our widespread anger and mass outrage. No matter what your political viewpoint, we can probably agree that the media has changed significantly in the last few decades.

Things weren’t always so divisive and confusing. We don’t have to go back all that far to remember when the most respected icons in the country used to be television news anchors. Walter Cronkite was repeatedly voted “the most trusted man in America.” Sure, the media sometimes had an inherent bias, and a few news outlets were more overt in their persuasions than others in the ways they covered current events. However, most of the time, the things we saw on television news or read in newspapers really did happen just as they were reported.

Then, things began to change. Something terrible happened. Powerful people not only recognized that media could be used as a tool; but it could also become insanely profitable.

Over time, media became a commodity to be exploited for profit. To those who plotted in corporate boardrooms, they saw the news was no different than hamburgers and diapers. It became something to be used, sold, and recycled. And if portions of the news weren’t popular with the consuming public and news failed to produce profits for the moguls and the corporations, then it was erased. The news was reinvented, spun, packaged, and replaced with hybrids out of thin air by something that would sell better and be watched and read by more people. Truth isn’t only the first casualty of war. It’s the first defecation of business.

Corporations (and ideological moguls) rushed in like swarms.  They gobbled up television and radio stations.  They bought city newspapers.  They acquired online media outlets. Then, they turned major cable networks like Discovery and the History Channel into blathering cesspools of “alternative entertainment” for the masses. Now, there’s essentially nothing much to be *discovered* on Discovery nor anything *historical* about The History Channel, that is, unless you like shows about space aliens, the love lives of dwarfs, and popping pimples. Even National Geographic, a sacred institution that was once a pillar of exploration and knowledge, has shit-piled science and succumbed to more popular programming like Nazi War Diggers and Kentucky Justice.

Profit wasn’t the only objective. In any society, propaganda has a place and there’s always a receptive audience for fear and hate. Moguls — the late Rupert Murdoch, being the most noteworthy propagating for-profit pioneer — even found out that pimping half-truths and stoking crazed conspiracies could also be profitable. Mass media turned into a bacchanal of evangelical hogwash.  Entire networks became weaponized propaganda machines. This is so blatantly obvious now, that it requires no evidence nor supporting documentation. It just is — so I’ll leave it at that.

When Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451 was released as a book in 1953 (and later made into an excellent 1966 movie), that was an early glimpse of the dystopian world to come and a preview of the power of groupthink. The story correctly forecasted the decline in reading. It warned about the dangers of substituting detachment for depth. It showed us a world of interactive television, contemporary shallowness about complex issues, and mindless cartoons in place of the news (memes, anyone?).

As many things as Fahrenheit 451 got correct about our future, it also got at least one thing terribly wrong. In Bradbury’s novel, all media is government-owned and -run. But the media in 2022 is anything but a leashed big-government dog wag. In fact, there’s almost none of that. Rather, it’s a gaggle of giant for-profit corporations united in nothing but their own self-interests. From its 24/7 bombardment of constant advertising, to its ceaseless self-promotion, to its gaslighting and then stoking of controversies for ratings, to its polarizing but titillating programming, to its peroration of things largely superfluous, to its infectious cannibalism of competition—-big corporate media is every bit as scary as the diabolical monster Bradbury described, and in some ways far worse, since we are powerless to stop it.

Yes, we’re living in the global corporatized media village that is Fahrenheit 451. Media — once a public good, an essential community need, and a trusted resource where profits weren’t the main objective — is now just like the rest of them….big oil, big pharma, and the insurance industry. Everything’s for sale to be squeezed and exploited for profit.

That’s the scourge of predatory capitalism and the consequence of lacking public awareness for letting this travesty happen.

Thanks for reading this rather lengthy article. Perhaps, it was a task. This noble effort on your part puts you in the minority who still take the time to read. Closing with the first line of the book, which does seem our destiny:

“It was a pleasure to burn.”

WHAT BOOKS WOULD YOU BURN, IF ANY?

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