The Shill Game: A Government-Media Conspiracy

The Shill Game is in the repertoire of every street hustler worthy the designation. It is deceptively simple: The hustler shuffles three shells on a smooth surface, like a juggler juggles balls, stopping occasionally to reveal the one shell that hides the nut. Once the hapless sucker is convinced that he can spot the nut with ease, a wager is placed and the shells are shuffled until they are brought to rest. Inevitably, the sucker confidently identifies the nut where it is not: The hand is quicker than the eye.

Beneath the surface of media reports resides a pervasive fear that the burning issues and stories of the day are mere shills, designed to steal our focus from events and developments that will profoundly affect our lives and sculpt the shape of our future.

Among the obvious distracters are the stories that fall under the category of Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame. When the details are particularly titillating, as in the Scott Peterson murder trial, that fifteen minutes can be extended to fifteen months – interrupted only by a little matter of war. What was the name of Peterson’s masseuse lover? Fame is fleeting for the parade of characters caught in the ever-revolving media wheel of fortune. The prescription drug using child killers, the mature woman with an adolescent lover, the mentally retarded condemned to death, the defrocked pedophile priests, and the dissident applying a Nazi metaphor to 9-11, may all be symbolic of profound social and cultural issues but the media regard them as side shows at a county fair, never piercing a story beyond its titillating surface. The stories are thrown out in flash images and sound bites, sandwiched by tortured pro-and-con analysis, leaving whatever meaning that might have been deduced to those who are compelled to linger and connect the dots of their own accord.

In the story of a twelve-year-old who killed his grandparents under the influence of a mass-market prescription drug, the word Columbine is never mentioned though the Columbine killers were also on mind-numbing prescription drugs. Suicide rates are alluded to but the data is never cited. Similarly, revelations regarding the heart attack and stroke risks associated with pharmaceutical drugs delivered to millions (including children with attention deficit disorder) lead us to wonder if the most dangerous drugs in America are not the legal variety, yet these stories float through the news cycle with the same here-and-gone coverage of a car chase on a California highway.

The profound dangers of an unregulated pharmaceutical drug industry, governed only by the principle of maximum profits, is one of the great scandals of our time yet Americans remain blissfully unaware because no one is counting the dead, because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is not interested in its regulatory function, and because the drug industry is a leading sponsor of both the media and the government – particularly that part of the government that is ideologically dedicated to deregulation.

Here is a story with hundreds of thousands if not millions of faces, deserving the mass media attention of the OJ Simpson case, yet it is relegated to a 60 Minutes II spot, sandwiched between Jose Canseco and the admittedly wonderful Annette Benning. CNN’s coverage of the story was a cost-benefit analysis, featuring the testimony of a gentleman at high risk for heart attack and stroke, who pledged to continue using his drug because (among other things) it improved his golf game. A few strokes for the risk of a stroke.

The pharmaceutical drug scandal is a classic example of the media shill game: Look here, look there, what was that story about? Did they even mention that a single drug (Vioxx) was estimated to have killed fifteen times the number who tragically died on September 11, 2001, while the FDA looked the other way and pressured its scientists to do the same? Did they mention the mounting evidence that similar drugs still on the market are having a similar deadly effect?

The scandal of the killer pharmaceuticals will soon fade from coverage and the relentless commercials will soon replace our vague misgivings with images of contented people leading happy lives who owe it all to the magic of modern medicine.

Media have no shortage of shills lined up for our viewing pleasure, not the least of which is the upcoming, highly anticipated Michael Jackson trial. Meantime, they will make do with immigration (the rage of Europe), steroids in baseball, the hockey strike, gay marriage and crimes of the day. Meantime, the issues of earth-shaking importance – Global Climate Change, Outsourcing and Free Trade, Genocide (Darfur), and War – are given the treatment of a daily briefing, allowing them to recede into the forgotten spaces of our minds.

As I consider now, I realize that even Social Security is a shill. Whether or not this president is able to pass some version of his subversive reform package, the nation will have forty years to undo the harm. The same cannot be said for climate change or war.

In the event that anyone out there did not notice, the war in Iraq is expanding. The warlords in the White House have fired the opening salvos at Iran and Syria. We should have no doubt that covert operations (like the predator drones over Tehran) are already under way. Less than a month from Inauguration Day, the administration is fulfilling its vision of Vietnam on the Persian Gulf. Iraq is South Vietnam (where the war began). Iran is North Vietnam, while Syria and Lebanon are Laos and Cambodia respectively. Russia is increasingly open in its opposition to American plans for the Middle East and China is ominously silent.

As we watch these events unfold, we must not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the never-ending parade of media-generated images and issues. We must endeavor at all times to remain focused on the most critical issues of our times.

The world remains in grave danger. We must not be lulled into a sense of complacency or hopelessness. We must not allow the media to settle for the mundane when our people are still dying in an unjust and immoral war, a war that would still be unjust and immoral even if the infamous weapons of mass destruction had been found. We must not forget that Iraq is only the first step in a master plan for global dominance.

On March 19th, the second anniversary of Shock and Awe, every solitary individual of conscience who is able, must take to the streets to remind the leaders of the world that we are still here, that we will not be silent, that we will fight until our soldiers come home and the vision of an American Empire is forever buried with the shame of the needless dead.

Jazz.

JACK RANDOM IS THE AUTHOR OF THE JAZZMAN CHRONICLES (CROW DOG PRESS) AND GHOST DANCE INSURRECTION (DRY BONES PRESS).