The Media Want You Dead

“I’M MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

The Nightly News by Jonathan Hickman is a propaganda power point presented in book form that is asking us to question if what we know is true. Because we don;t control our lives, we live by what others want us to see and think, and they do not have our best interests at heart.

The Nightly News consists primarily of a main protagonist, John Guyton, a former newspaper reporter who has now become something of a domestic terrorist for a group called The Brotherhood of the Voice. John’s journey begins when he is first confronted by Alexander Jones. Jones is the messenger for the Voice and a “preacher” for the cause. This cause is more of a motivation, a thirst for revenge and a desire to end the false prophets of media and journalism.

The book is about a literal war on the media. The First Church of the Brotherhood of the Voice consists entirely of people who have been ruined by overzealous reporters in the media. Obviously, the book gets political, but Hickman stays away from the Left/Right, Conservative/Liberal divide and focuses on the media/government relationship. Things like corruption, bribery, collusion and censorship all play into the story. It’s interesting to see a comic tackle another form of media, and to my knowledge the only other book that comes close to the focus on a form of media as its subject is Phonogram.

Now, I didn’t find anything overly radical or shocking about what is portrayed in The Nightly News, but I guess some people could. The First Church’s goal is to kill everyone important in the news media and we find out more about the cult as we go along. In fact, the reveal of the identity of the leader of the cult and how well Hickman uses it is a testament to his skills as a writer and really helps bring the story together as a whole.

These two elements play off of each well, the media and The Voice’s goal, and connect to the larger theme of the media’s responsibility and obligation to society. They also provide some of the better twists and turns in the story as well as underlying the themes presented.

This is war, political, religious and personal.

The ammunition used in this war is propaganda, pure and simple. Throughout the book there are statistics presented in the book that counterbalance those the media tell us in the book as well as some that point out flaws in the real world’s coverage of events. Hickman is raging a war on fictional and real media news coverage.

All of the major news organizations in the United States are run by corporations. It’s not really of any news to anyone, that sometimes the political views, but in this case more the interests, of the corporations conflict with the ideals of reporting pure news. This book tackles the political implications of what corporation run news means and how they can cover up an event or body of data with the general population catching on.

The domestic terrorist is first committed by Alex against a newspaper reporter on live television. This is later continued by John and a small band of Fight Club like individuals (think Project Mayhem against newspaper companies rather than banks and financial institutions). This thread is interesting enough, but like the actions of Codename V in Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, the actions are really not the most compelling part of the story.

In this book, the political implications doesn’t involve the opinionating of news, but rather the moral concessions that the organizations have to make to keep governmental forces on their side and in their corner. It is truly a fascinating and quite realistic look at those basic implications.

The book itself reads like a propaganda power point for an anti-media militia. Hickman’s past and an architect and graphic designer come into play as we see in inclusion of art, statistics, logos, graphs and more all women into the pages. When combined with the dialogue and the moral dilemmas presented in the book we are presented with a whole new take on comics that makes us question real world ideas, not just some take over the world plot in a comic.

The real world has already been taken over, the media control what we see, hear, consume, want, buy and almost every other fraction of our lives. To bad they seem to want us dead. So ask questions and look into the “facts.”  So says The Voice.