Henry Dampier looks into the Media Hall of Mirrors:
Most of what’s in the media has become internally reflective. Wire services and newspapers write original reports, which are then digested by secondary news providers (TV, radio, and the web). Then, authorized pundits tell you how you are supposed to feel about the news. The pundits and the secondary news-mongers then provide fodder for people to react to on tertiary communications networks like Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. While this system might not be capable of developing perfect consensus, people tend to feel a need to pay (and that payment is costly, even to people earning $8/hour) attention to what the consensus is — or at least what the fragmentation of consensus happens to be.
This makes sense, because the operating assumption of democracy is that generating consensus is what a legitimate government does — it verifies the consent of the governed, providing a moral patina to the state which wouldn’t be present otherwise. They might not be able to garner 300,000,000 signatories to the social contract, but the opinion-molders can generate a serviceable consensus reality. Not everyone will agree, but most people will agree about the fundamentals of ‘reality,’ and even if they don’t agree, they will know what those fundamentals are supposed to be.
At the personal level, all this consensus-generating is enormously wasteful and is often quite damaging. Paying attention to crashed Malaysian planes means that you have less attention to devote to the actually important matters of life within your locus of control. Knowing all the details about the latest lurid scandal means that you have less space in your mind for the people, tasks, and things that actually matters to you.
In this way, democracy generates a pervasive mental pollution which wouldn’t be present otherwise. The media isn’t an entity independent of politics, despite all the pretenses about a free press. The reason for this is because every man is supposed to be a political micro-sovereign. Each person is, at least in theory, supposed to be sufficiently educated so as to be able to ably exercise their tiny slice of authority. And the only way that sovereigns can act with confidence is to accumulate enough support from all those micro-slices to do whatever it is that they wanted to do in the first place.
Liberals really do believe they are above it all, that they shed partisanship, ideology or mere subjectivity like the Homo sapiens sapiens shed its tail. As far as they are concerned, modern science affirms all of their basic premises.
The apocalypse? That’s crazy bible talk, but climate doom, that’s pure cold (no pun intended) science!
You can see this with Rush Limbaugh. He is always prefaced with “conservative” radio host. You don’t ever hear his name mentioned without the word conservative, or another insult, in the same sentence. On his Wikipedia page the word conservative appears 23 times, and the word republican 14 times.
While on the Wikipedia page of Charlie Rose. for example, the only reference to his politics is that he did an internship in the office of the Democratic North Carolina Senator. The word liberal is mentioned zero times! Same with Jon Stewart from the Daily Show. the only nod to his politics is “When he was labeled a Democrat, Stewart generally agreed but described his political affiliation as more socialist or independent than Democratic.” He is just a little bit of a leftist, but generally objective, wink wink. The word liberal is also not found once on his wiki entry.
And when it is mentioned, it’s with a spin. From Rachel Maddow’s wiki: “I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.”
Oh snap!
“Maddow said she’s a national security liberal and in a different interview that she’s not a partisan.”
Calling a liberal partisan is almost hate speech.