Every Country Gets the Media it Wants

The story is here.

The media is not giving the public what it wants in political discourse. It is instead echoing memes devised by political spokesmen. The media is not a profile in courage. It is, though, a profile in stenography, geared to recapitulating the cant of elites it favors (and since all the heads of the major networks are Republicans, it tends to skew in that party's direction).

The public doesn't consciously want a big heaping helping of fear and racism. Yet, that is what we have had thrown at us Jackson Pollack stylee during this election cycle. The idea by campaign handlers is that utilizing a Bernaysian propaganda mishmash oriented toward playing to atavistic impulses within people affords their side an advantage and the media has been all too glad to be the amplifier for that.

Furthermore, like it or not, most people still get their political information from the big four networks. Bloggers are largely reactive entities and their readership is relatively tiny. The big media creates context and the blogosphere attempts to reshape it, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Most folks use their computers to play games, exchange emails and view or listen to entertainment anyway. So when it comes to the greater U.S. public, the participation in politically oriented discussion on the web is extremely limited

As for the public getting the media it wants, I wonder what the folks in North Korea think about that. This is, at best, a deluded notion to begin with.

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