Journalistic Malfeasance, Harry Reid and The Negro: It's All Entertainment
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
By Mark Karlin
I can't help but second P.M. Carpenter, our exclusive BuzzFlash columnist who I don't always agree with (but with deep respect) -- particularly on progressive idealism (me) vs. political pragmatism (Phil): As Phil disapprovingly notes, the Harry Reid "Negro" statement went like wildfire from the newly published book "Game Change" into the realm of television, radio, and newspaper entertainment.
BuzzFlash has long editorialized that the world of corporate interests, politics, journalism, and entertainment have largely merged.
What is "Hardball" but a mud wrestling match to see which version of Chris Matthews' Sybil character shows up?
It took Jon Stewart, of all people, to bring down the theatrical boxing antics of "Crossfire," which never delved into substance, but kept us amused with its political pugilisitc, shouting "reality" show appeal.
But although Stewart was the straw that broke Crossfire's back, its legacy lives on across the nation in television and radio political slugfests that do little to enlighten public policy, but provide us a ringside seat at the fights.
As Carpenter noted in the end of his commentary on January 12:
Calling for an end to this national behavior is equally "unbearably pointless." Everyone is aware of it, but the addiction holds, and worsens. Perhaps this is merely what a declining empire looks and sounds like.
Carpenter adds a recent quotation about the media "balloon boy" type media hot and heavy coverage of Reid's remarks, spoken by of all people the head of the Council on Foreign Relations:
"[T]he media huff-and-puff over the whole dismal mess is unbearably pointless. This is an anecdote, not a story; can we please get back to the business of the country now? Last time I looked, the deficits were out of control, California is falling into the ocean, the health care system even after 'reform' will be a vast and ever-more unaffordable quagmire, the public schools aren't anywhere near what they ought to be, our infrastructure is aging, unemployment will be in double digits for some time to come, the global economic system is more turbulent than ever, organized terror groups are trying to kill us, and rising powers around the world are flexing their muscles and feeling testosterone highs. And that's just for starters."
It seems that even us progresssives, including at times BuzzFlash, can't remove ourselves from sensationalistic fascination with a gaper's block, because the corporate mainstream media keeps repeating it day after day, hour after hour, minute after minute.
Entertainment is always a strategically effective diversion for the non-elite classes from the true issues that confront the nation and them: concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few who want to keep the country club closed.
As Carpenter so trenchantly points out, it's not just a temporary "bubble" of misguided journalism. Corporate mainstream media is rudderless by design, being steered by the captains of industry and the financial campaign needs of both parties in D.C.
Our mainstream media, from picking up a paper or watching television "news," has adopted the slogan "let us entertain you" because real public policy debates are so boring and take up valuable commercial time and anyway "we need to keep you diverted from the Wall Street swindlers and White House advisors who are enabling them as they pick your pockets clean."
Meanwhile, the rest of the nation goes to Hell because the hookers in the mainstream media are on a mission to grab onto political triviality like junkyard dogs and explode them breathlessly across our television screens -- more than 70% of Americans still primarily get their "news" (or Valium) from television.
We are a nation, with some exceptions, of World Wrestling Federation (Entertainment) political junkies.
That does not bode well for our future.
BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
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This Is the Lasting Political Legacy of 1968 . . .
I've said this before, and I'll say it again . . . The fact that our politics have degenerated into a WWE-style soap opera is the lasting legacy of the "politics of resentment" exploited by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968 with their infamous "Southern Strategy" of appealing to conservative Southern white voters opposed to the civil rights movement and deepened six years later with the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon out of office in disgrace.
As a result, the Republican Party -- the party of the "Great Emancipator," Abraham Lincoln -- drove the final nail in the coffin of its electoral appeal among African-Americans, whom, prior to World War II, were the party's most loyal electoral constituency.
Ironically, Nixon would have won the 1968 election by a substantially bigger margin were it not for the third-party candidacy of Wallace. The then-arch-segregationist Alabama governor took far more votes away from Nixon than he did from Democrat Hubert Humphrey, whose campaign was doomed form the start because the then-vice president was saddled with Lyndon Johnson's ill-fated war in Vietnam. Many of the young people who strongly backed the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy refused to back Humphrey because of the war.
American politics haven't been the same since. And now, some 40-plus years later, we're living the legacy of 1968 -- a permanently polarized nation, bitterly divided along ideological lines. Had Nixon and Wallace not played so blatantly to the politics of resentment, our present-day political discourse would be markedly different from what it is.
It's entertaining as watching the B movie 'Idiocracy'
Obama and his Congressional DINO minions have brought us change that remains the same we just can't believe in, while the GOPs shout at the DINOs for not changing the change the GOP previously didn't change.
The upper 1% plutocratic fascists don't care which party is in power, just as long as enough Blue Dog DINO-Fascist Democrats and Neocon-Fascist Republicans continue to pass legislation mostly for the benefit of the glorious overlord class, instead of for us unwashed WE THE PEOPLE serfs.
When will the MSM up the entertainment by throwing a few chairs for instance?
It's really sad when fake studio wrestling is more real than fake, U.S. political discourse.