The Great Media Feedback Plot

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Da Bomb.

So…I ran into a discussion elsewhere about Frank Rich’s recent little NY Times article on Glenn Beck, Even Glenn Beck Is Right Twice a Day.  Not much to it, really…having a professional theater critic write about politics is as unconsciously apropos as it gets in da newsz bidness as it stands in America (Well…there’s always that sports reporter who’s always jabbering about leftiness wing issues on MSNBC…), and like everybody else from Rush Limbaugh to Mother Tersesa…well, maybe not Rush…Frank certainly means well. The article itself is harmless enough as it stands. It is just another bit in the massive byte wall that is the American media, another impotent set of ideas about what is and isn’t happening in the U.S. today, another demographic covered in the eternal quest for advertiser money.

Yawn.

But I had a cup of coffee to finish. I got to thinking while I was drinking and the following piece popped up almost unbidden from my idle brain.

Read on if you are interested. Or not, as you must. I’ll tell you one thing, though…you will never read, see or hear what I have to say below in any corporate-sponsored media the world over.

Not ever.

Bet on it.

And now…Da Newsz!!!
The media is in the business of selling…selling itself, really.

It is in the business of creating controversy. It is ‘sponsored”…and to a large degree simply owned…by giant corporations, so whatever controversy is created cannot be allowed by its sponsors/owners to seriously damage their short-term profits. But corporations have a quarterly bottom line that they must meet. They must either show a regular profit or the stockholders will change the management team, so the bottom line is almost always short-term. This results in over-amplification of things that range in importance from relatively insignificant events right on through to things that pose serious threats to the very survival of humankind.

I call this the “Snow. Snow! SNOW!!! syndrome. Fifteen or twenty times a year in the northeast U.S. all of the media weather forecasters predict serious snowstorms. “Watch this station for further details!!!” they shout. “Snow.
Snow! SNOW!!!

And of course, they are only a correct a couple of times. But they get ratings.

This principle applies to everything on earth as far as the media are concerned. It is all grist for their hype mill. If it captures an audience, it is good.

“Flu. Flu! FLU!!!

“War. War! WAR!!!

“Obama. Obama! OBAMA!!!

The coverage can be pro or con on any subject covered. Like the old publicity agent line…”Say anything you want about me, but spell my name right.”

And, with large subjects like politics and war they can get mileage out of all sides of the issue. The only “developments” that are bad for the media are no developments.

Less than 12 months ago it was “Obama. Obama! OBAMA!!! The greatest thing ever since processed cheese!!!” And now? “Obama. Obama![ OBAMA!!! Will he fail??? Whatever you do, STAY TUNED!!!”

And so it goes.

Over and over and over again, each go-round amplifying the noise factor a little more, creating a feedback system just like the ones that you hear in theatrical sound systems. Only…in this instance, there is no one at the control board to turn down the amps or shut off the mics.

Solutions?

I fear that there are none, save individual ones.

Turn the damned feedback system off in your own life.

Step away from the TV with your brains in the air.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

MEDIASTRIKE!!!

CULTURESTRIKE!!!

Obama is fighting against huge odds. The corporate financial powers that oppose any real change in this country…anything whatsoever that will interfere with their short-term bottom line requirements…are inconceivably large. He is in over his head, and I wish him well as he flails toward a distant shore. In his heart, I believe that he has good intentions, that he has come all the way from the bottom to the top of this system by using the art of reasonable compromise and that he is now trying to apply that approach to the system as a whole, but I also believe that it is too late for anything except business as usual and let us hope that we make it through to better times no matter how they impose themselves upon us. At the level on which Obama is trying to work, there is no possibility of compromise. Not in this system there isn’t. There is only profit and flat-out, winner-take-all competition…also known as war, on any and every level…for dominance.

God bless us all, and let us pray.

If Obama is defeated…if he becomes Jimmy Carter II, a brief interlude of relative sanity in a mad, bull elephant governmental rush towards a new kind of media-enforced dictatorship…if he is succeeded by another CIA-sponsored right wing government, we are up Schmidt’s Creek with only a nuclear deterrent as a paddle.

A paddle that we dare not use.

Uh oh. Uh oh! UH OH!!!

Turn off your own feedback machines. That is the only thing that I can offer besides the advice that you should wake up every morning, try to fully accept the ancient warrior credo that “Today is a good day to die” and then go on about your daily business with as little interference from the media noise machine as it is possible to have in this stupidly noisy culture.

Stop this noise before it gets so loud that it brings down the building. In your own lives. If enough people manage to do that…and I am not very sanguine about that possibility, myself…then maybe we have a chance.

Maybe.

Otherwise?

The guaranteed end of this feedback loop?

Bet on it.

You been warned…

S.