The Media Is The Massage
I hate to be the Prophet of Doom N' Gloom (who am I kidding? I love it! I roll around in it like a dog rolling around in a dead animal's carcass!) but I was just flipping through some blog posts and news articles detailing the meteoric fall of Dubya's approval ratings. Don't get me wrong; this is a good thing, a very good thing. But the first thing I thought when I saw one of those graphs that show him at 51% approval in January and 36% approval today is : "Hey, what's different? What's happened to make his numbers plummet? What awful thing has he done in the intervening months to cause this?!?" The answer is nothing. Nothing has happened since January that didn't happen in the 3 years prior to January. In fact, it's fair to say that it's pretty astounding that he could have pulled the shit he did in those 3 years and wind up with 51% approval, and that things only started to go bad when, well, when nothing happened.
Soldiers keep getting blown away for no discernible reason but they don't even make single-line links on news sites anymore. And no one remembers who the fuck Saddam or Osama are. And even the British bombings were covered like a hurricane forecast that turned out to be overcast with a few showers. Okay, something did happen : Karl Rove. And when he stopped being Flavour of the Picosecond, Cindy Sheehan. What do these two have in common? The media. In the last few months, the media has smelled blood in the water and has shifted gears. Why? Because they can see the tide turning better than anyone and when the balance tips, they're front and center with poison pens ready to strike. Not because they too have suddenly understood how horribly they've been duped... they've never been duped. They just go with what works to sell newspapers. Doesn't anyone remember the extreme political correctness wave from 10 years ago? Wasn't that just the liberal equivalent of the shrieking "Save the Family" right wing crazies we hear about now? There was no end to the coverage on that crap and it wasn't Republicans pushing it.
But what does it say when 15% of the U.S. public can just change their mind for no more reason than the media is telling them to change their mind? It says this: nothing will change, ever, since such a huge chunk of the public can be made to dance so easily at the end of a string. It doesn't matter if Dubya goes down in flames, or who replaces him, Republican, Democrat, Green Party, aliens from Alpha Centauri... the Media is the puppet-master and the Great Unwashed are the stupid dopes that will believe anything they're told.
Knowing this is not really depressing, but knowing this is how it's always been and is how it will always be, is.
Have a nice day!
- g-spot -
Soldiers keep getting blown away for no discernible reason but they don't even make single-line links on news sites anymore. And no one remembers who the fuck Saddam or Osama are. And even the British bombings were covered like a hurricane forecast that turned out to be overcast with a few showers. Okay, something did happen : Karl Rove. And when he stopped being Flavour of the Picosecond, Cindy Sheehan. What do these two have in common? The media. In the last few months, the media has smelled blood in the water and has shifted gears. Why? Because they can see the tide turning better than anyone and when the balance tips, they're front and center with poison pens ready to strike. Not because they too have suddenly understood how horribly they've been duped... they've never been duped. They just go with what works to sell newspapers. Doesn't anyone remember the extreme political correctness wave from 10 years ago? Wasn't that just the liberal equivalent of the shrieking "Save the Family" right wing crazies we hear about now? There was no end to the coverage on that crap and it wasn't Republicans pushing it.
But what does it say when 15% of the U.S. public can just change their mind for no more reason than the media is telling them to change their mind? It says this: nothing will change, ever, since such a huge chunk of the public can be made to dance so easily at the end of a string. It doesn't matter if Dubya goes down in flames, or who replaces him, Republican, Democrat, Green Party, aliens from Alpha Centauri... the Media is the puppet-master and the Great Unwashed are the stupid dopes that will believe anything they're told.
Knowing this is not really depressing, but knowing this is how it's always been and is how it will always be, is.
Have a nice day!
- g-spot -
posted by peeler at 8:07 PM
<< Home