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24/7 cable "news" is a problem, maybe the driver, certainly *a* driver.
the tabloidization of news, the rise of infotainment, is also linked strongly to the rupert murdoch mode of operation, which didn't spring into being full-blown from his head with faux news. and of course the generalization of an utterly commercial ideology which overrode older quaint practices like journalistic integrity. and the rise of the net with the accompanying financial pressures on newspapers. which did the thing that capitalism in the real world does, which is to concentrate. ownership of papers on the one hand, centralization of infotainment in wire services and such on the other. that was one of the many problems with the fraudulent 2000 election, really: beneath the apparent diversity of networks it turned out that everyone was buying exit poll data from the same firm. so the same mistake turned up everywhere. bad for bidness, dontcha know. because political legitimacy is a commodity too these days. that great logic of everything being a commodity---it works wonders. there's no way to really withdraw consent, but there's also no way to actually exercise it. so there's an authoritarian information system that committed to generating and maintaining different types of churn amongst audiences. or something. movement is conflated with political freedom. if you believe in markets and all that capitalist nonsense, you have no perspective from which to say anything. you just notice that something strange has happened. because you have no critical viewpoint on the commodity form. it's nature. this is why i am not a libertarian. well that and ayn rand. dreadful writer. but i digress.
so everything is about advertising delivery and it seems that on the opposite tip local television infotainment delivery systems have long been about that with their if-it-bleeds-it-leads approach to pretty much everything. i remember living in the endless beige nightmare of southern new jersey and working in philadelphia for a while. when i would get home, local tv news would be on and it would busily frame philly as a war zone and i had just come from there and it didn't seem like much of a war zone but hey what did i know i was merely living and working in the place in a way that was not about the creation of dramatic story arcs that open up space for teasers and keep viewers glued to their couches both waiting to hear more and congratulating themselves on their good sense and credit rating which converge on their suburban living rooms, both real and imagined.
another element maybe is the "lessons" that the thatcher/reagan reactionaries took from vietnam. well there were two, yes: no draft and pool the press. so control infotainment flows because remember the war in everyone's living room. of course the conservative "lesson" in this respect is insane in that it presupposes that the war in vietnam was somehow legitimate and what accounts for the massive dissent was (a) yucky images on tv and (b) the draft. as it turns out, they mighta been right about (b). actually now i think about it, the other thing that the right learned was to change the nature of repression and try to steer away from on-camera confrontations between the state and citizens during things like protests. so control of information. like those fabulous private corporations do it. to hell with this public's right to know stuff. that's just bad business. and besides, as long as people keep buying stuff we know the system is working. and politics is just another commodity. democracy is the fact of churn. and this is a little view of how authoritarian infotainment streams operate. note how meaningless the state/private distinction is in it all. it's always been meaningless. that's another reason i'm not a libertarian. well that and ayn rand. but i digress.
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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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