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long ago and seeingly far away there was an e-list called red rock eater that i subscribed to--the guy who ran it was consistently interesting (i can't remember his name) and was the first person i know of to note the centrality of projection to the conservative ideological worldview--in this case, the myth of the "liberal media" is a screen the primary function of which has nothing to do with an accurate description of the current media environment and everything to do with situating the conservative-specific blurring of ideological statements and information about the world in their own media apparatus as a corrective to perceived "bais" from without.
the effects of this projection are obvious.
this information about explicit directives coming from "above" that infotainment about the iraq debacle be shaped to accord with the pronouncements of the bush people is different--this is collusion of a different order and poses a quite fundamental problem concerning the nature of the american "free press"--and since the press is the principal relay of the information required for the functioning of the american "democratic" polity, of the political system more generally.
what is obvious: we are living in an ideological context that is not terribly different from the relation of the french communist party and the confederation generale du travail (pcf-cgt) of the 1950s, in which formally independent organizations tightly co-ordinated the nature and release timing of information in order to co-ordinate opinion in order to either enable or block actions, shape dispositions--to organize consent. in that case, the "transmission belt" functioned in a larger, pluralist context, so in principle was an open space in the sense that folk could, if they chose, move into and out of that informational universe--but the fact is that this system was largely self-enclosed and self-enclosing.
in the states, what it looks like is a pattern of co-ordination has been set up that operates on a much larger scale and effects the central elements within the media system or apparatus itself.
this explains alot. what it explains is **really** not good--the centrality of denial in american political life, the inability to adapt to change, the inability to think strategically because the information required to do so simply is not present--information is conditioned by the desire of the dominant social class to remain dominant--and so is ideological in the classic marxist sense of the term.
you also can read off an interesting indication of the relative weight of types of media in shaping the information processing of alot of the population--information hierarchies if you like--it seems that television, despite every fucking thing about it--is seen as providing a more "direct" access to "the world" presumably because of the role played by action footage, which provides an illusion of unmediated access to real-time or close-to-real-time phenomena or events. but anyone who has thought about it at all knows that television is a talk medium more than it is a visual medium--but the relation which i think obtains for alot of folk is inverted. print media in paper form seems to carry more weight than information available in electronic form--so it follows that the relative openness of the information context available on the web is not of the same status as the more self-enclosed media environments of television infotainment supplemented with slightly more depth-oriented glosses provided by newspapers. wedged in there somewhere is the natterings of the chattering classes, who provide simplistic and therapeutic mobile narratives for the unsettling aspects of live footage that escapes the confines of the immediate voice-overs provided by the manicured actors who read teleprompters but who are confused with Authorities or Information Sources.
whether this is fascist or not is a function of the ideological contents that dominate consensus narratives.
that this environment is a type of soft authoritarian rule is evident, however: this is what american soft authoritarian rule looks like, this is how it works. this is what it is: you are in it, you are of it.
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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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