host:
i think we have different approaches to thinking about this kind of question. while i am interested in the cnp, who they are and what they do, i am not inclined to think in terms of a cabal when you have other factors at play at the same time that are materially right in front of you and which have particular effects that you can see repeated at almost every level of the informational context that makes contemporary conservative ideology possible.
i was at a conference-thing last weekend and saw a presentation by d.a. pennebaker and chris hegedus--they were talking about making "the war room" and hegedus pointed out something that appeared obvious after she said it, but which i had only really noticed in the context of baseball games--that television is not a particularly visual medium--it is a talk medium that uses particular types of truncated imagery to ground the talk in the illusion of "reality"---pennbaker talked about running into a wall of television cameras positioned entrances to hotels--what they were after were shots of the Agent in Question--in this particular case, al gore--entering or leaving the hotel. that shot is enough--the relevant story is told to you, and the image of passage into or out of a door adequate to assure you as a viewer that what you are seeing is "news"....
on the other hand, i should say that i do not watch television often at all any more--i stopped on 9/13/2001 in fact. the only exception is when i find myself in a hotelroom--which is basically a television watching station--and am bored. i watched a TON of tv news, with my head a bit rattled by meeting a bunch of documentary film-makers during the days and evenings that i was there. of course, my perverse self-flagellating side required that i watch alot of faux news, and of course i was treated to (for example) a sundaymorning talking head from the dnc talking about whatever the democratic congress might do about iraq as behind him ran a loop of american military vehicles exploding somewhere in iraq. over and over and over. this is the kind of cheap shit one expects from faux news...but i was quite fascinated by the way in which information is framed, truncated, chopped up.
now it may be that at some level the cnp is a part of this in more ways than i know about---but that does not lead me in any way to think that the nature of the central information-relay system that operates in the states is suddenly not an interesting and important matter to consider. and this because even if the cnp turns out to have played a fundamental role in reorienting something of the politics of corporate media, that still says little to nothing about the medium that they might have reoriented---which they did not invent.
i sense a rant starting and have some other things i need to tend to so i'll cut this off here.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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