One of my favorite movies is Paddy Chayevsky's Network. Like more than a few 1970's mass marketed films, it is a prophetic story about the way that power was beginning to be wielded in the brave new world of mass communications.

The story is about a network TV anchorman who runs out of bullshit and goes off the reservation and says forbidden words like "bullshit" on the air. His demented ravings garner a lot of attention, and ratings. This leads TV executives Faye Dunnaway and Robert Duval to reprogram the "news" as entertainment, calling the erstwhile dignified anchor man, "The mad prophet of the airways."

Said mad prophet, Howard Beale, stumbles over a "populist" meme regarding "The Arabs" and he urges his tens of millions of viewers to send telegrams of protest of the sale of important assets to those Arabs which, in that far more innocent time in history, successfully stopped the transaction.

In turn, this drew the ire of the corporate overlord of the network, Mr. Jensen -- in a jewel of a day-player performance by Ned Beatty. He summons the Mad Prophet of the Airwaves to a meeting:

Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Beale takes the message to heart and he changes his schtick from populist rabble rousing to corporate shilling. It makes for very depressing entertainment and the ratings go in the tank quickly. This harms the rest of the network schedule which had thrived in the ratings while the populist newscast was leading the lineup every night.

Dunnaway and Duval are in a panic over this, but their corporate ownership insists that Beale continue with his nightly hymn of praise for what was not yet called neoliberalism. Rather than sit idly by and watch THEIR segment of the Corpoate Empire go down the tubes, they arrange to have Howard Beale murdered -- the first known instance of a guy getting killed because he had lousy ratings.

I love the way the story does not ask the viewer to notice the irony of corporate insubordination.

Howard Beale has a lot in common with Donald Trump. Don't be surprised if he turns up dead some day.