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the staged press conference--complete with pre-submitted questions--was instituted systematically under reagan, but didn't constitute exactly a break with what already was in place. more an extension of it, taking it to another level. the gipper, for all this "Great Communicator" horseshit you read in hagiographies, wasn't real great extemporizing...
there are problems with this sort of practice, but they don't surface so much as such until the media environment, driven by budget decisions and the pressure for footage that 24/7 infotainment bring, start relying on prepackaged situations/information because it saves production time and money. this because any state apparatus (it seems) will stage itself as Powerful and its actions as Coherent and so Justified no matter the media context---so long as there's some reasonable expectation (on a infotainment consumer level i guess) that the press is independently checking information, operating in a critical manner etc and is not simply a relay system for this Packaged Stuff, then you can say the environment is more or less democratic---but once that critical dimension starts to fade away, the line between relay system for ideology and free press starts to erase itself.
personally, i think we're well into an ideological relay system that talks about itself as if it were a free press (in the sense of providing the kinds of information required for coherent judgments on the part of a democratic polity)--particularly on television.
but i think it was far more problematically the case under the bush administration, particularly during the marketing of the war in iraq...which seems the low point of the "war on terror" in retrospect.
but it's good to remind yourself that this is the case---that information comes prepackaged, particularly from state sources---all the more if you find yourself in general political agreement with the administration in power. part of the reason it seemed so apparent to me anyway during the bush period was a function of the fact that i saw them as repellent. the apparatus did not go away once obama came to power---it just tends to disappear as such a little beneath the basic agreement with this or that argument/action.
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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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