The Northern Valley Beacon has met the enemy, and it's the ignorant American people. The NVB has diagnosed yet another symptom of creeping fascism (there's that word again). This time, oddly enough, the evidence of fascism is the freedom of the press. Yeah, I thought this was an odd argument, too. I continue to marvel at the attempt by the official web organ of the Brown County Democrats to win elections (as one supposes a political party desires) by calling the voters idiots. Americans, we are told by NVB, are too addled to demand "real" news, and instead wallow in trivialities, such as run away brides. They denounce "corporate media" (ominous music plays in the background):
The first is the corporate media that are looking for high viewer numbers. Those numbers determine the amount of advertising they sell and how much they can charge. They quickly abandon genuine news for the lurid because we have a population whose predilection for the inane and the mindless quest for status has been reinforced through the media's ability to exercise mass operant conditioning. The rule: do not bother the audience out there with anything that might distract them from the trivial and self-gratifying. It's bad for business.
Just like the Nazis, the Klan and the Sino-Soviet Marxists (yes, they all get a mention) contemporary American totalitarians seek to gain power by...defending a free media that caters to the desires of the people? A strange argument, to say the least. And notice that the NVB insults the American citizen as someone with a "predilection for the inane and the mindless quest for status." Thanks for the flattery. (By the way, I just finished the amazing Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture by two philosophy profs at Univeristy of Toronto. They discuss what they might suggest is the not so inanne and mindless quest for status. I highly recommend.) The NVB suggests:
Honestly brokered information is almost a black market commodity in today's information society. It is all but impossible to find a newscast or a newspaper today that evaluates news on the basis of developments that are relevant to people and have an effect on them and serve the interests of government of, by, and for the people.
Let's all agree, that the American people are attracted to low-brow entertainment. I will be the first to get on my right-wing high horse and chastise them for this. But let's be a bit more moderate here. The NVB seems to imagine some Golden Age of American politics where we all spent our leisure time reading policy manuals and engaging in political speech characterized by high minded oratory and directed at a highly educated and politically active people. This Golden Age, like most Golden Ages, never existed. The Lincoln-Douglas debates are the exception, not the rule. True, there was a time when politics was something people did as a kind of leisure activity, but the political rhetoric was as low, or lower, and as nasty, or nastier, than today. And does the NVB want to bring back the partisan rags that dominated most of the nation's history of newspapers? Does the NVB imagine that the Hearst papers were models of sobriety? No, American news and American politics have always had a fixation on the lurid and tabloid. Our current condition is the rule, not the exception.
Also, while there is a kind of apathy that is dangerous to democracy, and some of that apathy lingers in the American soul, the fact that Americans aren't as consumed by politics as is the NVB is probably a good thing. One thing that drove me from my college political organization when I was an undergrad was the unattractiveness of people who live politics morning, noon, and night. These were the kind of people who really believed that the fate of the nation hinged on the next election and everything in life must be interpreted through the lens of partisan politics. The NVB reminds me of these people. I have often said that I am glad there are people who lead political lives and find nothing more interesting than political organizing, and I am equally glad I am not one of them. Most people have other things to do with their lives besides immerse themselves in the intricacies of, say, the Military Code of Justice. They do things such as go to work, earn a living, raise a family, go to soccer matches, catch a movie now and then, get homework done, etc. Nations consumed by politics are usually also consumed by anger and violence (take, for example, Iraq).
The overblown rhetoric of the NVB is stunning.
Like the Nazi machine that systematically portrayed the Jews and other minorities as human vermin, like the Ku Klux Klan that portrayed blacks and other minorities as social contaminants, and like the Sino-Soviet Marxists who portrayed democrats and capitalists as insidious evils, the fascist-oriented political voices are defining, labeling, and defaming the people they have defined as the enemy.
The object of this rant? Internet discussion groups. One would have to be blind to think that what is going on in Internet discussion groups somehow is a window into the American political soul. My experience with discussion boards is that they are dominated by about five nut-jobs who do nothing but hurl insults at each other. These are not exactly a window into the soul of the American electorate.
What is at the heart of the NVB's criticism? The American people are too stupid to demand better news. Striking a remarkably elitist pose, the NVB lectures its more ignorant fellow citizens (that's you and me) declaring that if only we were as concerned and informed as the NVB, then we would all be as wonderful as they are. Once again, it is remarkable that the NVB denounces the "political voices that are defining, labeling and defaming the people they have defined as the enemy," while at the same time the NVB calls its opponents fascists and totalitarians and compares them to the Klan and Sino-Soviet Marxists. Realize that the people the NVB continues to denounce make up a majority of the American population. Let's be clear. Whatever it's faults, democracy tends to give people what they want. I have my own problems with some of the ramifications of this, but that is a subject for another day. But we do tend to get the news we want, the information we want, the entertainment we want, and (political science research tells us) the government we want. The NVB's beef is not with totalitarian corporate media, it's with the American people.
For all of it's overheated rhetoric about totalitarianism, I wonder where the totalitarian mindset more firmly takes root. Is it in the corporate news office that tries to figure out what the American people would like to see? Or is it in the minds of those who, impatient with democracy's foibles, start denouncing the people as incapable of self rule?
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