Progress Has Been Made.

Remember the heady days of the mid-seventies?
When Britain had just three tv channels?
When the BBC first started to see itself as the campaigning guardian of the public safety?
"That's Life" with Esther Rantzen, righting the wrongs and defending the underdog; more recently, "Crimewatch" and "Watchdog".
It all seemed so promising, such a sign of rightness in this benighted land, a reason to hope that the future would promise the future we were promised.
Watchdog.

The word is so commonplace today one would be forgiven for thinking that a revolution of popular defence had really occurred; every corner we are likely to turn is under the eyes of some 'watchdog' or other, but why?

Well.
The rebel, the renegade, that which seeked to right wrongs and overturn the stifling status quo of that time has been subverted.

Watchdogs don't start barking when horrors are perpetrated any more; they are the horror and the perpetration, the tools which watch us and not just when we want, but from cradle to grave in an inversion which rejoins that which was stifling us to that which had promised hope.
Watchdogs abound, all the while attacking anything they can libelously project as our enemies, all the while putting us to sleep by the power of our own disgusted indifference, once the vague sense that it's all upside down again infects our perceptions.

Jill Dando was murdered, but where was the outrage? Where was the shock? Where was the cooperation?
She was shot in an outrage even outraged criminals approved of, in a twisted, uncertain way, as if they were the real victims; she didn't expect it. After all everybody was asleep in Noddy-Land, nobody had an axe to grind, crime isn't real, criminals do not really exist or wish to do the things they do.
Everybody has been playing the public interest game for so long, who could have predicted such an end?
And yet, once it had happened, why were so few people genuinely surprised? She was the victim and tool of a neo-establishment drive to neuter the populace, something they are variously too tired or too satisfied to notice or resist, after seeing so much misguided and malicious resistance to change in the past.
The automaton of 'progress' has been created and set loose in the public imagination, all the while appropriated by the agents of enslavement, as they do and have done for a hundred years.

The BBC is losing control.
After all the private watchdogs that proliferated in the eighties began to fade in the disintegration of the televisual audience monolith, they were replaced with all the 'public' (state) versions, which will fade from sight like yesterday's socks or soldiers, becoming disreputable at the next shedding of the juggernaut's skin, which doesn't by any means have to be electoral.

The new watchdog is the blogosphere, the internet, and the reason that so many of the usual suspects make so much noise about our freedoms is that they know it too.