This website regularly refers to the Media Class as the dominant class in Western society and gives frequent examples of how it pursues its agenda in everyday politics. We maintain that this Class came to prominence on the back of the TV revolution of the 1950’s and 1960’s and has been consolidating its power ever since. Prior to the TV revolution there were only the disconnected components of radio, newspapers, magazines, theater, arts, advertising, pro-sports, fashion and film-making. The most powerful of these and the most politicised were newspapers, radio and Hollywood. The latter was the most centralised and drew to it many from the world of the arts and fashion industry. The Soviet Government understood the power which Hollywood was gaining and infiltrated it with communists from the 1930’s onwards, with great success. To this day, it remains a bastion of Leftists who use its products to carry propaganda. Film makers were in a position to take control of TV production as soon as TV gained pre-eminence as a news and entertainment medium, so we should not be surprised that Leftists dominate the TV industry, too.
As with all classes that have risen to pre-eminence and power in history, the catalyst for the Media Class has been technical innovation. Most of the technical innovation has been developed by people who were not amongst the subsequent beneficiaries, but this is typical of all technical revolutions, except perhaps the computer revolution (which has not yet produced a ruling class). It is simply luck that a number of random technical discoveries happened to benefit the news and entertainment industries, drawing them and other associated groups into a distinct economic and social class which finds itself in a position to dominate all other groups in society.
All powerful groups in any society at any time in history exercise the power they have for self interest. Landowners, Churches, Guilds, Militarists, Industrialists, Mercantilists, Trade Unions and Public Service Bureaucracies have all enjoyed such power somewhere at some time in history. All have been able to rule only by forging alliances with less powerful groups. Only in Socialist totalitarian societies like Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia have political parties with no economic power been able to discard all internal alliances. In such societies, the secret police become the ultimate rulers.
The Media Class of our time has forged effective alliances with Big Business, Academia, Trade Unions and Public Service Bureaucracies, Minority Racial Organisations and certain Political Parties. It has also formed a kind of alliance with what Hannah Arendt would have called “the mob” i.e. the disaffected of the big cities who are willing to stage political riots. These are not alliances based on secret meetings and written agreements, but are “work in progress” based on common interests and sympathetic treatment. The Media Class has two ongoing and unaltering drives and all ruling classes pursue them. One is to further its economic interests, maximise its wealth, become more secure and more economically powerful. The other is to reshape society in its own image.
A Military Junta would try to make society more heirarchical, more disciplined and more nationalistic. A ruling Church Bureaucracy would attempt to make a society more pious etc. The Media Class is trying to change society to reflect its own characteristics. At this point I am not going to describe some of those characteristics, but I leave it to the reader to speculate as to the social characteristics of Hollywood people, entertainers, those in fashion and advertising, TV news and entertainment and the Arts world. When you have done so, it will not be hard to understand why the current culture war in the US and UK is as it is.