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kpete

(71,901 posts)
Thu Dec 29, 2016, 11:57 AM Dec 2016

Yes, The Media Spent The Election Teaching Americans How To Love A Dictator

You watch "Say Yes to the Dress," don't you? "Real Housewives of Atlanta"? You keep up with the Kardashians? Like those nominally unscripted soaps, the Trump Show is a guilty pleasure, too digital junk food, political empty calories, the "reality" formerly known as reality. Trump's hat may say "Make America Great Again," but his meta-hat says, Let me entertain you. The twitter taunts, the billionaire boys club, the mayhem at rallies, the humiliated rivals, the insulted, dishonest media: As Russell Crowe asks in "Gladiator," "Are you not entertained?"

Look at the promotional campaign MSNBC is running for its anchors. The print ad features a tight close-up of Trump's face. The text reads, "What will he do?" Beneath that, "What won't he do?" And beneath that, an indictment not of him, but of us: "This is why you watch." At the bottom, flanked by photos of its anchors, are the MSNBC logo and a tag line: "This is who we are." New York magazine writer Joe Hagan tweeted about it, "This ad nails everything that is wrong with the media. Fascism as ratings spectacle." If you grieve over the audience's addiction to disaster porn, if you mourn the news-as-entertainment business model that fostered it, then you're bound to feel guilty about watching, and you've got a rough ride ahead. But if, instead, you treat boredom like a fate worse than tyranny, if you medicate civic ADHD with always-breaking BREAKING NEWS, if you mistake engagement with social media for actual citizen participation, you're gonna rock these next four years.

Trump voters love the rupture with the American political narrative that he ran on. But if the popular vote is any guide to the country's mood, I suspect that fear of the future is now more widespread than exhilaration that anything can happen. The truth is that no one has a clue what's next. That's not fun; it's frightening.

The next commander-in-chief is an impulsive, deceitful, corrupt, intellectually lazy megalomaniac. That's a delicious character disorder for the villain of a comic book, and it's ideally suited to a news industry whose audience is addicted to melodrama and whose narrative technique maximizes suspense, surprise and dread. Though horror is a thrilling genre, and real-time tension is irresistible to our animal appetites, there's no guarantee that the scary story we're living through will have a happy ending.


the rest:
http://crooksandliars.com/2016/12/yes-media-spent-election-teaching

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Yes, The Media Spent The Election Teaching Americans How To Love A Dictator (Original Post) kpete Dec 2016 OP
I don't watch ANY of that reality-TV shit Skittles Dec 2016 #1
In answer to the first three questions in OP... Different Drummer Dec 2016 #2
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