This week I watched two provocative documentaries on contemporary journalism, Vlado: 30 years later and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent. Coincidentally and much to my fascination these works intersected at an interesting crossroad of political discussion.

In 1975 a Vladimir “Valdo” Herzog, a young journalist in Sao Paulo, was abducted by military police, subjected to electro-torture, bound, gagged beaten to death. His death was classified as a suicide; military officials even staged his bruised corpse against a wall with a belt loosely dangling around his neck for a photo-op. The state run media reported that Vlado was a KGB agent who was using his progressive articles to subvert the Brazilian state. However, the soft-spoken reporter was merely guilty of exposing the hardships of the Brazilian people. How could these simple truths, these seemingly benign facts threaten a military dictatorship and ultimately cost a man his life?

These simple truths, as Noam Chomsky explains, are exactly what gum up the works of any political system and cause the casual observer to think beyond the mainstream media’s regurgitated messages.

How wide is the political spectrum in this country?

Think about it for a second

Does anything that falls outside of “Democrat” or “Republican” talking points ever headline the New York Times?

Every society in the world consists of a political hierarchy that privileges some ideas and disparages the rest. It is clearly the case that the de jure level of freedom of thought varies greatly from the de facto conditions a society places on ideas. Brazilian censorship laws of the 1970s, for instance, are examples of the state legally seeking to prohibit certain forms of expression. However, turning our focus to the United States we observe a nation of unparalleled legality to safeguard expression. Yet the upper echelon of political life controls expression on a national scale.

At this point, many of your heads are bubbling with buzzwords like “conspiracy theory”, “commie” and “socialist”. This is good. The system is working.

Now, pull yourself out of that mainstream media soup and think. Of course GE, Exxon, Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Newscorp, and Disney aren’t sitting around a table calculating the next move in their diabolical plot to charge 10% for potato chips. Rather the people who make the decisions on what to report and publish see the world through the lens of the upper 10% of society. Their life experiences make them uninterested in anything that comes from sources other than the ones they have come to trust and these trusted sources vary minimally in political ideology.

As for the rest of us, Chomsky explains, “You have to work. That is why propaganda is so successful. Very few people have the time or energy or commitment to carry out the constant battle that is required to get outside the mainstream media”. In other words, we are simply overburdened by our roles in the lower rung of the political hierarchy analyze the messages fed to us.

The other day someone asked me ; Why does everyone these days tweet, Facebook, or Blog about every single insignificant opinion that pops into his or her head?

Well, I think it is because we crave to be heard in a society that listens to so few. Just a Vlado hoped to stimulate debate in a time of dictatorship today’s Internet users want to reach out to others on topics that would never make front-page news.

Our society is not devoid of democracy the political power-structure tends to avoid democracy. The Internet provides us with the opportunity to share our ideas with more people and circumvent the major news outlets. However, this is a footnote of my discourse.

In the end the task of changing the status quo is on us.

I’ll leave you with this

To write is to think, to speak is to fight and to question is to embrace Democracy.