As the Media Merges with Politics, Can We Resist ‘Electotainment’?

[KoKo]

Published on Monday, November 19, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
As the Media Merges with Politics, Can We Resist ‘Electotainment’?
by Danny Schechter

Make politics so tendentious and predictable that issues really don’t matter. Focus on posturing and being clever instead or what matters. The pundits say that the candidate that wins is the one that makes the fewest mistakes. Is that the way we should chose a president?

Anyone notice what’s not being debated—our economic collapse, the subprime meltdown, the crimes of Wall Street, the inflation that is squeezing our lives, the threat of new wars, global warming, infectious diseases etc. etc. ? You know what I am talking about. And one of the reasons is due to another media failure-a lack of scrutiny of the wealthy funders behind the political curtains.

Today, the notion that war is politics by other means, has been inverted: politics is now war. That’s why veteran political correspondent Ronald Brownstein calls his new book “The Second Civil War.” It argues that extreme partisanship has paralyzed Washington and polarized America. It has led to candidates playing to the certain constituencies while ignoring the needs of millions.

This has been the GOP strategy and it has propelled a minority of zealots into becoming our Republican Guard. They are also media whores, always in the media and on the media. (Karl Rove just joined Newsweek as a columnist while partisan soundbite artists on all sides dominate the punditocracy.) Extremists on the right are everywhere; progressives rarely heard or seen. MoveOn gets in the news when the right choses to target them, not because what they do merits media visibility. That’s why they have to buy pricey ads to get heard.

When we talk about media mergers, we rarely discuss the merger between big media and big politics!

The truth is that news business is now show business and that politics dances to its rules. TV news used to model its programming on what newspapers reported. Now fewer Americans even read newspapers and the press often follows TV’s lead because of its fetishism with immediacy. New media outlets like My Space and You Tube further glitz up the process while the Daily Show and its imitators give young people more to laugh about than think about.

That means that personalties rule and information is sloganized, dumbed down and robbed of substance. It means more “message points” on the right and rhetoric on the left. No wonder so many Americans don’t even bother voting.

Formalistic debates and related blather on the Sunday shows now substitute for the work of the political parties which are no longer mass-based bottom-up grass roots organizations. TV is our politics. (Roseanne once called it “our everything.”) Candidate strategies are built around waging expensive “airwars” in contested states; they fight with TV ads, not house parties and real field organizing. It is easier to “participate” by sending in checks or signing petitions on line. Low-key passivity is then redefined as activism.

Look at the conventions. The delegates are increasingly elected officials and political pros. These events are now considered ho-hummers with the media barely covering them anymore allegedly because they are designed as formulaic TV shows. That same media doesn’t admit that they are the ones pushing for the high entertainment and production values. The pols are just imitating them by hiring media consultants. It’s a symbiotic game. Remember that most of TV is driven by so-called KISS formulas-Keep it simple and stupid.

more of a good read at.....................................

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/19/5327/

[Red Zelda]

1. great post

and through bogus polls and "new numbers" every day is election day. No substance.

[Joanne98]

2. Diamonds and pearls and bogus polls!

[KoKo]

3. ...