"Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product"
Matt Taibbi got it exactly right. Americans have allowed themselves
to become Consumers.
All corporate media, print, radio or TV depends upon advertisement in
order to exist. Exist, but not for the benefit of the readers,
listeners or viewers.
They exist to turn a profit. Our entire society has been converted to
consumerism, and we are all taught to worship the bottom line. The
more profit, the better the product. The more wealth a person
gathers, the more we idolize them.
In some distant time, explores from outside this Solar System will
look upon our Earthly remains and wonder how such a mighty
civilization could have vanished.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/20/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Roger Ailes. (photo: Matt Furman/Redux)
Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
20 May 17
On the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of
people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger
Ailes.
The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also
bursting with biting one-liners.
When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death
of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in
Saudi Arabia."
Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment.
He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's
vicious and bloodthirsty character.
We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people
whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each
other online, and we're that way in large part because of the
hyper-divisive
media environment he discovered.
Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV
executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he
saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick
it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in
the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that
spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about each other.
Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly - "I created a
TV
network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh - where he saw
billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of
the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often)
incorrectly, from their childhoods.
In this sense, his Fox News broadcasts were just extended versions of the
old "ring around the collar" ad - scare stories about contagion. Wisk was
pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar;
Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities
crawling over your white picket fence.
Ailes launched Fox in 1996 with a confused, often amateurish slate of dumb
programs cranked out by cut-rate and often very young staffers. The channel
was initially most famous for its overt shallowness ("More News in Less
Time" was one of its early slogans) and its Monty Python-style bloopers.
But
the main formula was always the political scare story, and Fox quickly
learned to mix traditional sensationalist tropes like tabloid crime
reporting with demonization of liberal villains like the Clintons.
Hillary Clinton in particular was a godsend for Fox. The first lady's
mocking comments about refusing to stay home and bake cookies - to say
nothing of the "I'm not sitting here, some little woman, saying 'Stand By
Her Man' like Tammy Wynette" quote - were daggers to the hearts of graying
middle Americans everywhere. What's the matter, Ailes' audiences wondered,
with Tammy Wynette?
So they tuned into Fox, which made ripping Hillary and other such
overeducated, cosmopolitan, family-values-hating Satans a core part of its
programming.
But invective, like drugs or tobacco or any other addictive property, is a
product of diminishing returns. You have to continually up the ante to get
people coming back. So Ailes and Fox over the years graduated from simply
hammering Democratic politicians to making increasingly outlandish claims
about an ever-expanding list of enemies.
Soon the villains weren't just in Washington, but under every rock, behind
every corner. Immigrants were spilling over the borders. Grades were being
denuded in schools by liberal teachers. Marriage was being expanded to gays
today, perhaps animals tomorrow. ACORN was secretly rigging vote totals.
Hollywood, a lost paradise Middle America remembered as a place where
smooth-talking guys and gals smoked cigarettes, gazed into each others'
eyes
and glorified small-town life and the military, now became a sandbox for
over-opinionated brats like Sean Penn, Matt Damon and Brangelina who used
their fame to pal around with socialist dictators and lecture churchy old
folks about their ignorance.
The Fox response was to hire an endless succession of blow-dried, shrieking
dingbats like Laura Ingraham, author of Shut Up and Sing, who filled the
daytime hours with rants about every conceivable cultural change being the
product of an ongoing anti-American conspiracy. Ingraham even derided
muffin
tops as evidence of America's decaying values.
Ailes picked at all these scabs, and then when he ran out of real
storylines
to mine he invented some that didn't even exist. His Fox was instrumental
in
helping Donald Trump push the birther phenomenon into being, and elevated
the practically nonexistent New Black Panthers to ISIS status, warning
Republicans that these would-be multitudinous urban troublemakers were
planning on bringing guns to the GOP convention.
The presidency of Donald Trump wouldn't have been possible had not Ailes
raised a generation of viewers on these paranoid storylines. But the damage
Ailes did wasn't limited to hardening and radicalizing conservative
audiences.
Ailes grew out of the entertainment world - his first experience was in
daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show - but he later advised a
series
of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.
So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds,
mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.
The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana
republics
everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft
news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of
atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms - Fox for the
right, MSNBC for the left, etc.
Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on
the
right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view
the news as a consumer product.
What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read
this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world
that
most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live
in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one
ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.
Moreover, Ailes built a financial empire waving images of the Clintons and
the Obamas in front of scared conservatives. It's no surprise that a range
of media companies are now raking in fortunes waving images of Donald Trump
in front of terrified Democrats.
It's not that Trump isn't or shouldn't be frightening. But it's conspicuous
that our media landscape is now a perfect Ailes-ian dystopia, cleaved into
camps of captive audiences geeked up on terror and disgust. The more scared
and hate-filled we are, the more advertising dollars come pouring in, on
both sides.
Trump in many ways was a perfect Ailes product, merging as he did the
properties of entertainment and news in a sociopathic programming package
that, as CBS chief Les Moonves pointed out, was terrible for the country,
but great for the bottom line.
And when Ailes died this morning, he left behind an America perfectly in
his
image, frightened out of its mind and pouring its money hand over fist into
television companies, who are gleefully selling the unraveling of our
political system as an entertainment product.
The extent to which we hate and fear each other now - that's not any one
person's fault. But no one person was more at fault than Roger Ailes. He
never had a soul to sell, so he sold ours. It may take 50 years or a
century
for us to recover. Even dictators rarely have that kind of impact. Enjoy
the
next life, you monster.
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