Mindless Media Pitch Trump to a Mindless Electorate

[sinkspur]

Mindless Media Pitch Trump to a Mindless Electorate

 by IAN TUTTLE   

April 29, 2016 12:00 PM  I

n Politico, Campbell Brown, a longtime correspondent and anchor with NBC and CNN, offers a lamentation for her profession: “Do we really matter,” she asks — “we” meaning television news in the year 2016 — “except as a free-media platform for a presidential candidate who almost every journalist knows could destroy the country if he ever got into the White House?”

Brown is talking, of course, about Donald Trump, and her essay is titled “Why I Blame TV for Trump.” Citing conversations with colleagues in television news, Brown suggests that “TV news has largely given Trump editorial control” because doing so sells: “It’s understood in the newsroom: Air the Trump rallies live and uninterrupted. He may say something crazy; he often does, and it’s always great television.” In the era of Trump, TV-news ratings are soaring, and executives are keen to ride this wave until it breaks. AS CBS president Les Moonves said last year, the Trump phenomenon “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

Yet as deserving of condemnation as they may be, Brown’s colleagues in television news may have a partial excuse. After all, TV executives didn’t create the ratings. Viewers did.

There is, of course, a complex relationship here: “How do voters know what they want until they see it?” &c. And Brown is right that “the coverage itself has helped create him,” and that much of the media “wants him, or needs him, to be the central character in this year’s political drama.”

But Trump is not a Manchurian candidate. He wasn’t crafted and buffed for maximal appeal. The Trump you see is the Trump you get. Television news simply provided the airtime.

 And it turns out people like that Trump. Ten million people like the guy who calls women “pigs” and says he would force American soldiers to commit war crimes. More primary voters like the guy who brags about his serial adulteries and the size of his genitalia than liked courteous Mitt Romney in 2012. Forty percent of the Republican-primary electorate prefers the litigious 9/11 conspiracy theorist to the accomplished former governor of Texas, the miracle-working governor of Wisconsin, or the wunderkind senators from Texas and Florida.

The media coverage has been fawning. But that’s because the people are. There was already an appetite for Trump, and Les Moonves and Jeff Zucker (CNN) and others simply filled it.

What do you do about that?

Brown encourages more aggressive journalism, and yes, that would help. Do call Trump on his lies. But let’s not pretend that exposing Trump as inclined to self-contradiction or fabulism is the solution. That’s already happened. Trump’s flip-flops, his opportunism, his lies and damned lies — they haven’t been concealed from inquiring minds.

 No, the fact is, there just aren’t inquiring minds. Ten million people have decided not to think. They have decided to ignore Trump’s countless heterodoxies, and what they suggest about Trump’s fitness for office. They have decided that they will not reflect on his manifest lack of character, and how it would affect his leadership. They have decided even to ignore his unfavorability numbers, and what they would portend in a general election. They know what they want to believe, and that’s that. Donald Trump is what happens when, en masse, voters abandon rational thought for emotional indulgence.

Certainly we have a mindless media. But who can blame them? We have a mindless electorate.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434757/donald-trump-media-tv-news-campbell-brown-ratings-viewers

[don-o]

Mindless Media Pitch Trump to a Mindless Electorate

 
Brown encourages more aggressive journalism, and yes, that would help. Do call Trump on his lies. But let’s not pretend that exposing Trump as inclined to self-contradiction or fabulism is the solution. That’s already happened. Trump’s flip-flops, his opportunism, his lies and damned lies — they haven’t been concealed from inquiring minds.

 No, the fact is, there just aren’t inquiring minds. Ten million people have decided not to think. They have decided to ignore Trump’s countless heterodoxies, and what they suggest about Trump’s fitness for office. They have decided that they will not reflect on his manifest lack of character, and how it would affect his leadership. They have decided even to ignore his unfavorability numbers, and what they would portend in a general election. They know what they want to believe, and that’s that. Donald Trump is what happens when, en masse, voters abandon rational thought for emotional indulgence.

Certainly we have a mindless media. But who can blame them? We have a mindless electorate.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434757/donald-trump-media-tv-news-campbell-brown-ratings-viewers

I'm going to post this link from time to time to a book (pdf) that absolutely opened my eyes  several years ago. Maybe some day, I will start a discussion thread about it.

https://zaklynsky.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/postman-neil-amusing-ourselves-to-death-public-discourse-in-the-age-of-show-business.pdf

[Mesaclone]

I'd read your post, Sinkspur, but I'm too mindless to comprehend it. If only those of us who are Trump supporters were as handsome, intelligent, and well heeled as yourself. You're a powerful man, handsome and distinguished. Oh well, I guess I'll just go watch another episode of iZombie!

[don-o]

From the Foreword of "Amusing ourselves to Death"

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

[don-o]

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2337731-amusing-ourselves-to-death-public-discourse-in-the-age-of-show-business

110 quotes from Postman's book.