I don’t normally watch TV, so it’s easy to forget, but it’s frankly horrifying just how heavily propagandized the average American is.
When I moved out on my own I never bothered getting a cable subscription. It’s been several years now. On my PC or my phone, I use ad blockers. On the TV we pass around account credentials for streaming services. I almost never even see advertisements any more (in media, anyway), aside from when Mike Duncan is hawking razor blades or mattresses at me for the first minute of his podcast.
On rare occasions my wife turns on a stream of CNN, John Oliver, the Super Bowl, the Olympics or whatever, or when I go to see family or somewhere in public where cable news is playing, I begin to feel physically ill. It is all just so fucking slimy and duplicitous. They literally cannot go a minute without reinforcing some sort of big lie about American exceptionalism, empire, or the innate benevolence of American institutions, the global free market, or their new favorite term, the American led “rules based international order.”
It is, as Zizek would say, pure ideology. It is nothing but ideology. Doesn’t matter if it is MSNBC, CNN, Fox, NPR, local broadcast TV. It is always like fucking astrology. It is always working backwards from the assumption that the United States is legitimate and justified in all circumstances to explaining how domestic and world events uphold that assumption. It is never an investigation into how or why crises take place, what the root causes are, or how they might be avoided or mitigated. It is never about holding powerful people accountable.
Then after 6 minutes of that slop, it is time to cut to the advertisements so you can learn about how the new Tide Pods are environmentally friendly™ because you can run the machine on cold (as if you were going to waste money washing your socks in a separate machine at the laundromat), some new TV series about being Black in America which frames all problems of living in the inner cities on a bunch of yokels in the hills and prescribes national unity as the solution, how the newest Ford pickup is bigger and stronger than all previous iterations but we’re working on becoming environmentally friendly™, or some patriotic spiel from Bruce Springsteen about how great America is, followed by a sales pitch for the new Jeep Wrangler. Then three or four ads about the newest prescription psychiatric drugs with animations of sad bumblebees turning into happy bumblebees while someone reads an entire page of disclaimer copy.
It is fucking bleak. It is worse than any picture they try to paint about the conditions of propaganda in our Official Enemies™ like China or DPRK. It is like a very bad methamphetamine-enhanced acid trip.
only the Polytron reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds
My liberal parents are like “television news is all propaganda” but also “so I was listening to NPR and…”
“Our local paper takes the side of big business” but also “the NYT and WaPo are the last bastions of democracy in this age of division”
I’m just going to share a chat convo I had with a lib friend about NPR:
<Me> Just because [NPR] isn’t outright stating what you should think doesn’t mean they’re not trying to sway your opinion. Propaganda is just as much (if not more) about emphasis as it is about fabrication.
<Me> Who are the “both sides”?
<Him> NPR gives equal time to all views
<Me> How often do they feature Marxist-Leninists? Anarchists? Maoists?
<Him> NPR does a pretty good job of presenting enough info for me to form my own opinion
<Me> How often does it bring communists on to speak?
<Him> Don’t know
<Me> What do you mean, “you don’t know”? If you listen to NPR on a regular basis, you should be able to tell me roughly how often it includes communist voices.
<Him> I mean I haven’t really paid attention to the exact view points. only that I get multiple sides of the story.
<Me> How can you claim they represent “all sides” when you aren’t even paying attention to what people are saying?
<Him> I am paying attention to what they are saying.
<Me> But you just said that you “haven’t really paid attention to the exact view points.”
<Him> Bad wording on my part. I paid attention to the view points. But not to the political leanings of the person making the view
<Me> It shouldn’t be hard to infer someone’s political leanings from their viewpoints. They’re going to make points that are in line with their views.
<Him> I dunno. I don’t fit cleanly into any given political category.“When was the last time they had a conservative/republican give a viewpoint”
“Today.”
“When was the last liberal/democrat?”
“Today.”
“When was the last anarchist/communist?”
“I don’t really know what viewpoints the speakers have.”
<Him> I dunno. I don’t fit cleanly into any given political category.
:centrist: and most likely right wing.
and most likely right wing.
I cut contact with him after he argued at length in support of vaccine apartheid because “poor countries don’t contribute as much to medical research”
