I'm Sick of the So-Called "News" Honestly, it doesn't matter what day of the week or what time of day a person tunes into the 24-hour news networks, he or she can always find out the latest vapid and boorish insult that's spewed from Trump's lips.
The problem is… it isn't news!
It's nothing but pure infotainment.
The corporate commercial networks are much, much happier presenting personal drama in the form of packaged infotainment and faux outrage rather than any sort of programming in the public interest.
... The corporate media drives viewership and profits by airing personal drama over public policy, and the end result is that viewers turn off the TV at the end of the day as ill-informed as they were when they tuned in.
There's no silver bullet for this problem, because this crisis in our media is the result of more than 40 years of conservative policies that have radically altered our news media.
One problem is that corporate commercial broadcasters don't have any reason to talk in-depth about real issues, their only aim is to get more viewers so that they can get more advertisers, CBS chief Les Moonves made that unsettlingly clear during the primaries last year.
Another problem is that groups like Northrop Grumman, the American Petroleum Institute and the Pete Peterson Foundation buy the ad spots, so networks don't want to talk about reining in the military industrial complex, or the realities of human-made climate change, or about the popularity and success of Social Security that Peterson wants to privatize to his buddies on Wall Street.
Likewise, anti-union telecom giants like Comcast and Verizon don't just own the broadband infrastructure, Comcast actually owns MSNBC! So you're unlikely to hear anything of substance about any real labor issues, or net neutrality, or about the Trans-Pacific Partnership which they and/or their trade groups and lobbyists helped negotiate.
... When you look past the brute, behind the knave and beneath the hair, there’s no there there: no policies, no plans, no grand vision. Just appeals to base instincts and violent impulses by a totalitarian wannabe.
... According to Chomsky,
the most effective way to control a populace is to severely limit the parameters of debate, but have the debate within those hedged parameters be vigorous so people think something of worth is actually taking place. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/wil ... in-history
... The spectacle of titillating and infantilizing consciousness and public discourse with a flood of shocks, sensations and simplistic views has become the hallmark of a broken political system now largely controlled by the ideological extremists who inhabit big corporations, hedge funds, and the ranks of the ultra-rich.
Trump’s rhetoric, along with the discourse of other extremists, echoes Hannah Arendt’s insight that
totalitarianism is produced, in part, by making human beings superfluous, ignoring their voices, and silencing them in fascistic discourses of certainty, absolutes, and unaccountability that allow no space for critical thinking, informed judgment, and critical agency. http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/hen ... n-politics