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ace--the problem was not a "hidden agenda"---what you were doing was pretty obvious.
and there's no defensiveness in it, despite the pleasure that must come from you in imagining such.
basically, the question you posed was in opposition to any analytic view of how infotainment works as a political question. what you argued was that an attempt to analyse presupposed a distance--which is true in theory, though in practice it's not so obvious what that means---between the analyst and the "objects" of analysis which in this case would be infotainment, how it's packaged and then one form or another of linkage between that packaging and an audience.
this distance was staged as not following from the game of trying to understand how such phenomena work socially, but rather as a snob thing.
there's nowhere to go with that.
if you're going to move from the anecdotal ("i feel this way when i see x on tv") to trying to work out patterns, you have to operate at a remove. whence statistics or any number of other devices the only point of which is to let you fashion and then talk about patterns. even a conservative media analyst would adopt the same basic procedure. even a tool like reed irvine does it.
and it's obvious to anyone who thinks about it that the distance you take, the way you proceed, what you're looking at--all of it is political.
the idea usually is to try to control for the political dispositions that shape how you frame and move through a question.
but that never really works out, despite all the blah blah blah about bias or "objectivity"
so you have to read critically. there's no way out.
the other thing you objected to was people trying to understand how conservative politics operates as if it were different from how other types of politics operates--which it is. and there is inevitably a kind of traveling to the zoo to look at the conservative creatures dimension to that. but that too is unavoidable, part of the game itself.
if it's part of the game itself and you object to it, not because the game comes with problems that require you approach the outcomes critically, but because you see the game as an extended exercise in snobbiness, then your objection really is to analyzing anything to do with conservative political discourse at all.
that was the problem, ace.
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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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