I don’t know if I can even stand to listen to another minute of talk radio or talking head news punditry. At what point, in America, did the population stop thinking? Look at McCain and his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate. Look at the boon of support it gave to his rotting campaign? Just take in for a minute the mountains of bullshit the media unloaded in to the cars and living rooms of the American People.
Suddenly, pundits who were saying that if Hillary couldn’t take the blows from the men candidates she should drop out of the race, are saying that the cruel media make it hard for women politicians to get a fair shot. Those who dismissed Senator Clinton as a candidate that pandered to the lesbians and the feminists were quick to point out that in 2008, it’s unfair to make such stereotypical claims about someone just because of their sex.
I know it sounds cliched, but in just watching the gears of our new system turn, I feel like the exchange of ideas is becoming the consumption of ideas. People have completely given up on forming their own opinions. They opt, instead, to adopt someone else’s philosophy, for the sole reason that they are on TV, and that they claim that they’re right.
Long, Long ago, the idea was that in order to get on TV and lecture about how right you were, that somebody has checked to see if the things you say apply to the same reality that we all live in. This is no longer the case. Out of the hundreds of people that CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS, Ad Nauseum, would call experts in some way or another, are only experts at looking in to a camera and talking for two minutes straight. They have about as much business talking about politics and policies than Clayton Bigsby has talking about white supremacy.
Take FOX News. They have a show called Hannity and Colmes, a ‘fair and balanced’ debate show featuring the greatest manipulative mastermind in the known universe, Sean Hannity, and some idiot who couldn’t argue his way out of a french bathroom.
I guess the Competitive Media look at it like this. They have 24 hours in a day, the entire time they are expected to be on the air talking about the news. Since you couldn’t possibly objectively report the days events for that long without losing market share to the weather channel and that one channel that plays a local radio station and a PowerPoint presentation promoting local events, they are forced to make the news interesting by making the discussions adversarial in nature.
I can sort of understand the logic behind that. Ideally, Discussions equal discourse, discourse is the cornerstone of democracy, and your news station is no longer bland and neutral, it’s exciting and patriotic.
So, they come up with the two archetypes of American politics; the Neo-con and the Flaming Liberal. They put them in a room together, they turn on a camera, and they throw some money in the middle and film the bloodbath.
So, you get extremists on both sides, both of which have to make legions of yes-men want to watch them. Neither of the two are capable of understanding the first thing that happens in our government. Nevertheless, pick your issue. One of them is fanatically in favor of the topic, the other is fanatically against it.
I used the term Competitive Media, and I think it works in the purview of this topic. The American People asked the Corporate News Media to inform us. The Corporations decided that they would take on this stupendous responsibility, and then - after a track record of doing a decent job with it - finally decided that it’s duty to our society just wasn’t making them enough money. So, they decided to dedicate more time to the news throughout the day, and exponentially piss all over the quality of the journalism to make it entertaining.
The result? Nancy Grace, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and every author and bobble head that makes it in one of those little camera output squares. You know, the ones that are being interviewed by the CNN anchor you’ve never heard of who was hired because he could read a teleprompter and banter during the segways.
It’s been a glacieral process. It started when the American People decided that TV news was good enough and felt secure that religiously watching 24 hour news channels was a sound method of staying informed. It’s inevitable result? A population that will accept any answer you give it. A castrated America that couldn’t make an informed decision if civilization as we knew it hung in the balance.
That’s the real irony here, isn’t it? Even the atheists are starting to worry about the apocalypse. Yet, we have one political campaign telling us that we need bumper sticker quotes and lackluster legislation, and we have another who’s telling us that we do, in fact, need bumper sticker quotes and lackluster legislation, just from a different tent.
We have hour and a half debates where candidates are encouraged to keep their responses to short blurbs, and even then, all they do is call each other liars and cheats. The issues are swept under the rug, if you were reading a transcript, you wouldn’t even be able to tell the two apart.
Yet, when people step up with opinions which go against the two usual talking points, those people tend to be censured.
These people, who arbitrarily make up the sides to the opinions of the day, poll the population on which of the sides they came up with they agree with. Then, they use that polling information to justify what they’ve been saying all along.
This is what passes for news in my country. This is the main reason my country will be in a recession for the next decade, and probably taken over by the British in the decade following.
