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there's a number of ways to look at this general issue---personally, i think the op is framed in a narrow way on it because the simple fact of the matter is that television--and by extension the "free" press--is an ideological co-ordinating mechanism. the interests of a news outlet can be summarized (at a remove) as:selling advertising; instantiating itself as a medium that relays infotainment in order to legitimate itself in order to enable its functions as advertising delivery system; the delivery of versions of the world on a routine basis; the versions of the world are enframed by a direct institutional interest (above) and a secondary interest, which is in placing itself as a mediation between viewers and the world; as a mediation between viewers and the world, television is in a position to co-ordinate opinion both at the registers of what is seen (and not seen) and by how it is framed, both as information stream and as topics for "debate" which are the space within which the range of "legitimate" political opinion is elaborated, its parameters set, etc.
if you connect the advertising delivery system and infotainment delivery system functions, they converge on the structuring of desire through the structuring of relations to the world.
these functions do not require a conspiracy theory to explain--they may or may not all be explicit motives on the part of actors within the media apparatus--but socially, this is a way to understand what the medium does--and by socially, i mean functionally.
viewers as consumers of objects advertised lean on viewers as consumers of the medium which offers the advertisement.
viewers as consumers of objects advertised are most likely to act on the advertising consumed in situations which are not understood as crisis.
so television has a structural interest in minimizing crisis.
news as an advertising delivery system relies on an assumption of transparency, so presents a world as discontinuous, as shot through with continuous disruption, and so as a seemingly endless sequence of disturbances.
disturbances and the footage of it activate a kind of voyeurism--crisis implicates the voyeur in a manner that runs counter to the dynamic--disturbance activates a range of responses which are functional for advertising--crisis undercuts the relation to advertising itself.
television has a structural interest in introducing disturbance and in minimizing implications at once. the routine scenario is that of a melodrama--disturbance, assertion of order, resolution, residuum.
crisis is not melodrama.
think for a minute about the way the iraq war has and has not been covered as a sequence of possibilities for activation and redirection by television as advertising delivery system. the erasure or minimization of crisis--in this case the political implications of the war in iraq, which by any rational standard should have by this point issued into a generalized political Problem, should have undercut the basic legitimacy not just of the administration but of the political order that enables it---because if a war launched under false pretenses and them managed with utmost incompetence is not a cause for political Problems, if it does not undermine the legitimacy of the administration and of the political order which holds it in place DESPITE the war in iraq, than what WOULD be a crisis that draws the legitimacy of the political order into question?
and if there is no crisis that could possible draw the legitimacy of the political order into question, that means that popular sovereignty means nothing, because there is no situation in which it could possible be exercised.
and so you can see the outlines of the american form of soft totalitarian politics, with television as a de facto co-ordinating mechanism at its center.
if any of this is true, then the biggest Problem television (as a whole) could face is the exposure of its complicity in the process of ideological co-ordination. television itself shoudl appear neutral so its functions can unfold across a relation that is confused with freedom (not in the political sense--in the sense of a freely-chosen relation). if television is implicated in the co-ordination process, it becomes particular. if television becomes particular, it segments viewers, looses them. better to interpellate in general.
i think this is why the massive silence over the ny times story that revealed the tip of the iceberg of marketing war by revealing the relations between pentagon "public diplomacy" (marketing war) and the networks.
i don't see any way around the conclusion that television is such a co-ordinating mechanism--it seems to me self-evident.
i think that the only way you can not understand this is to not look.
one of the more bizarre features of conservative politics of the past 15 years has been the projection "the liberal media" which seems to enable a kind of selective acknowledgment of the co-ordinating functions on the part of conservatives which enables them to rationalize even more narrow and explicit forms of co-ordination as somehow "a response" while at the same time to put aside the fact of co-ordination. this is the space of an infantile relation to the world.
all this to explain the post above, loquitor.
it isn't really about you.
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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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