What Mass Media Did Not Learn From A Coup Attempt

Mass media isn't "fake news", as some claim, but it definitely cannot tell us the entire story. How it tells what it does tell, however, can often be inadvertently misleading.

What we learn from mass media about all sorts of things could, in an ideal world, be the evidence that would lead all citizens to dig further and to find out the details and complexities of events that literally cannot be described in 1,000 words or less or in a minute-and-a-half-long interview with a guest on a cable news program.

If I were confined to no information about the world that is all around me whether I like it or not, confined to no discourse but that which ushers from the television in my room, as if I was grounded, under some kind of strange house arrest imposed by strangers disinterested in my welfare as a human being, locked in and unable to leave, unable to look around, unable to relate to my neighbors, unable to see what is in front of my face, I’d likely agree with one spectacular overgeneralized meme that is now a constant on cable news stations:  Donald Trump is one bad hombre who fomented a coup attempt to remain in power--illegitimately.

But is Donald Trump all there is to this when mass media tosses him out as the very latest scapegoat for all that has been going wrong for years, for all that happened on January 6? Or is there more to this story than a tiny pinhole view full of stereotypes and representations and the limitations of the "keep it short" mentality of getting news across quickly and without much fuss?

In fact, were I incapable of using simple common sense, finding it absolutely impossible to think from A to B about phenomena that contains so many complexities and frames of references that need to be examined by all of us, it's entirely likely I would suddenly "own", as in "have in my possession", a point of view and a frame of reference so narrowly focused that I'd believe that what I see on the TV news, or read in the newspapers, or find on the Internet is simply put "all there is in the world". I actually know people who see their worlds in this way. It's not something to laugh about either. I know people whose complete understanding of the world of political events, the world of economic trends and occurrences, the ideas within the culture, and society, and even religion, morality, and ethics are framed, and ruled, by those representations and stereotypes we encounter in terms of "mediums". As in "many mediums". Indeed, those of us who need to know what is happening in the political world in a balanced and fairly portrayed versions of events--actually have a sort of choice: And all the facts are not only different, sometimes they vie in opposition with one another.

That's a strange turn. We should know from even our secondary educational experiences that facts are non-negotiable, that facts are not matters of opinion or controversy, and that facts can be manipulated by a number of tactics--such as stacking the facts into an order that literally twists public information into pretzels that do not reflect the real world at all. Or the omission of certain facts. The use of distraction journalism, i.e. the headlining of big stories in order to hide the much more important details of other stories that are of primary concern to viewers, readers and listeners. And worse, the bleeding of opinion into what used to be called straight news--to the point that people are confused by which is which. Even worse is the substitution of propaganda for news content. While the line between propaganda and news content is razor thin, the ignorance of an important rule of thumb--both sides of the story--leads news recipients in all the wrong directions. Finally, the imposition of a famous propaganda tactic developed by the USSR's propaganda machine--creating a stark division between one media source and another to the point that the only palpable upshot is confusion, ambiguity, and a populace uncertain which source is the verifiable source and which isn't. It's odd that "conservative" news content, a veritable politicization of news into an instrument of both propaganda and provocation, while "conservatives" are always beggaring us about "socialism" would be using a technique developed by the Soviets to mislead people and challenge their trust in "official" authority, or "the establishment".

Mass media. A medium amounts to what stands between one and the world. In terms of the exceptionally limited picture of reality that is implicit in the concept of indirect information--as opposed to direct experience, a hands-on thing that must be witnessed "in person"--mass media is a filter. In some interpretations, and good ones in my opinion, mediums are also gatekeepers: the media allows some information but disregards other information. And competent organizations within mass media use a number of tactics to create a hierarchy of importance that offers order to an avalanche of information that can wash away even the best minds if not filtered in some way. In terms of news media, "news values" also are how businesses organize content to gain the most readers, and hence the most ratings that lead to the most and most expensive advertising accounts.

What happens, though, if ratings or increases in viewership for the sake of making money overrides the competent news values? After all, the dissemination of political information that is trustworthy and accurate and responsive to all of us is so important to the survival of democracy that the founders of the US at one time considered making news media the fourth branch of government. The reason this failed to happen is that mass media has an important role: A democracy needs an accurate accounting of the activities and behaviors of politicians and government officials in order to stem the rise of corruption and tyranny. Hence, giving mass media directly to the people in terms of keeping it in private hands long has been seen as essential for political health in a civil government order.

While it is a good thing to keep mass media in private hands, sometimes the disadvantages to this passed-on responsibility occlude the advantages to be gained by such an arrangement. The placement of media in private hands has always been somewhat dependent on an optimism that the private interests can be and will be conscious of the public interest, the domestic tranquility so to say, and the general political welfare and knowledge of all of us. How could that go wrong?

That arrangement, sadly, is going wrong. And has been going wrong for some time.

Today, monied interests seem to have become the ruling power in news dissemination. This is a longstanding critique of privately-owned news: That the wealthy will dominate news organizations to the point that their self interests will overwhelm the public interest. But today this state of affairs could not be any worse than it already is: The overriding "value" in the generation of news content we now "consume" (interesting word) indeed could be encapsulated by the simple concept of "there is money to be made". Critics of this distortion also point out that especially televised news reporting is so expensive that privately owned or even publicly-traded news organizations are thrust into a dependence of advertisers, wealthy individuals and corporations that will both try to and have successfully manipulated news content their self-interested advantages. Many would be shocked to know that the hand that feeds is more interested in those it feeds giving it some money than it is in protecting the legal and political order that has allowed those private interests to take advantage of conditions propitious to profit, power and endless expansion. The pursuit of money, which isn't in either the Declaration of Independence or in the US Constitution, overrules simple sanity, particularly when the money is in favor of, well, those with money, those whose power is dependent on the money, and those whose entire lives are based on wealth, status, and the getting of more of it all.

Isn't that what civil government sought to prevent in the first place? Isn't an aristocracy built on money just as bad as one that is built on hereditary elitism?

Take for example today's current events. April 4, 2023, the day when I began this essay was the day that will enter American history as the very first time a former president is to be indicted for criminal activities. Criminal activities. Donald Trump, rumor has it (given no one yet has seen the full list of charges) stands accused of around 91 felony counts. And additional state and city government charges. But every day, there he is, out in front of the cameras or on his Truth Social social media platform, sullying public opinion for his narcissistic and self-interested advantages. He's actually good at taking mass media's tendency to rubberneck and gawk over outrageous public behavior. He threatens witnesses, tries to rig elections, attacks prosecutors, issues death threats against people he found unwilling to cooperate with his creepy megalomanic obsessive-compulsive appetites, impulses and power mad delusions.

Apparently, all anyone seeking to gain power via the public interest has to do is say something outrageous, attack someone one opposes, and then watch as television reporters and camera crews descend on the scene to breathlessly report what has been said or done in one of those "would you believe what he just said or did" ways of looking at the world. Sensationalism. Yellow journalism. And attempts at shaming the shameless by politely sniping at them from an anchor desk. What's odd about this crass manipulation of mass media is that mass media fully cooperates with its own abusers. Many politicians are following Trump's use of this tactic. Florida governor Ron DeSantis says some pretty ugly things. And he gets plenty of attention for being a horse's ass, a real piece of work.

Ah yes. Let's reward our worst bad actors--solely for the sake of generating viewers, and by extension, generating advertiser commitments and money. Does that make any sense at all?

But the flip side of this is just as ominous: What happens if we ignore the lawlessness and intimidation? In other words, mass media is being tossed into what I call "the zone": a bully abuses you and whether you actively resist or move away, the bully has drawn you into a dynamic that makes it much easier for the bully to dominate you. You have a choice between two bad options. This is how the proverbial "strong man" takes power: manipulation, intimidation and bullying.

One thing I've noticed is that these bullies literally cannot stand being ridiculed. When Saturday Night Live used Alex Baldwin to impersonate him, while most of the country laughed, Trump, at the time President of the United States, threatened to "yank" NBC off the air. Of course, he didn't have that kind of power. Clearly his ego took a blow and reacted violently--like a little child.

One actually can take another completely seriously and still ridicule them and turn them into a public laughing stock.

Because Trump is literally all over TV's cable news stations for every little stupid thing he says or does, this pinhole view of the real world places him in center stage, thus capturing mass media as yet another tool in his arsenal of dumb. When Trump was ordered to New York City to face indictment for corruption, tax evasion, banking and insurance fraud and worse,what I'm calling "the coronation of Donald J. Trump" began. We saw him, Trump, leave his palatial Mar A Lago home, and Trump, entering a black SUV, a cortege of black SUVs traveling a freeway on its way to the airport, and Trump again, this time leaving the SUV, and Trump yet again, stepping up onto a huge jet airliner with TRUMP emblazoned across its fuselage. The plane, I observed, is the same color scheme of the Nazi flag. Is that beside the point? I can't help but wonder about that sometimes.

All on TV. You'd have thought he was the Pope. Breathless footage, shot from the air, of some lumpy old guy forced to face a judge over what look to be blatant criminal activities.

"We must remember he is presumed innocent before proven guilty!" one announcer observed. But is there any guilt involved when cable news channels obsess over that kind of nonsense? How about "just the facts" and then "next story"? Then, later, we once again got a bird's eye view of Trump's plane landing in New York City, Trump, stepping down from the huge black and red and white airliner, and Trump again, entering an SUV, and then a cortege taking Trump to his Trump hotel to spend the night. This has got to be the biggest thing since the OJ Simpson White Bronco Chase Scene in 1995. Should we be impressed?

Wait. There's more. The next morning, breathlessly excited TV anchors directed our attention at Trump, emerging from TRUMP hotel as if it's Groundhog Day, and he's the Groundhog.

I agree with that. He's definitely one dirty pig all right. All that free attention to an idiot who is running for president in the 2024 election. The media just can't get enough of him.

A coronation! Before a magistrate! All the focus on some guy who is alleged to have committed 91 felonies, and what's he doing? He's capitalizing on it. Mass media is so busy creating clickbait that its obsessive feeding frenzy is actually more of a detriment to the public good than anything even remotely servile to the public good as a prevailing value.

Yes, Trump's numbers seem to be going up. Right now, he's leading the pack of mutts already planning on running for the GOP primaries.

Meanwhile, while Trump is beginning to get the comeuppance he deserves from the legal system, his "supporting" news channels--Fox to be precise--literally ignore the comeuppance. Why? The money, the viewers, and the ideology.

OK. We get a pinhole view of the world around us via indirect information as disseminated by mass media. It can never function as the full picture. The pinhole viewpoint is actually around the size of one's TV screen, or the screen on a laptop or a cellphone. The entire world is actually quite large, a deeply complicated place. What happens if the old axiom, "if it bleeds, it leads", used by many local television news stations? What happens if all the news about the government, about politics, and about current events focuses on a pinhole-sized picture that attacks authority? This problem isn't so easy to file away as "the mass media watchdog". Sometimes that function can be manipulated if, say, market surveys indicate local citizens have an overall negative view of government, politics, or crime in the city. Hence: maximize all that! Give the viewers or readers what they want: more blood, more gore, more corruption, more "gotcha journalism".

But does that actually play into the public interest in terms of "rightness"? Or does it turn media viewers, readers and listeners into "news consumers" who have to have their "market preferences" satisfied in order for especially local stations and organizations to build business? These are pertinent questions I see or read of no one in mass media even bothering to address. As before, the essence and existence of this problem circles around money as a universal solvent that fixes every problem imaginable. Is that "rightness" or "righteousness"? Hardly.

But the fuzz on the screen gets worse: Psychological and neurobiological research has proved that avalanches, blizzards of adverse information create a problem called "learned helplessness", something that results in the psychological subject's passivity, alienation, nihilism, and distrust of authority. This could fall under the rubric of "keep beating them down until they no longer care at all."

Is it the role of mass media in US society to foment widespread disenchantment with authority? Why would it be? As it stands today, we indeed are witnessing widespread disenchantment with the funhouse distortion we wishfully want to pretend is democracy. Democracy through the pinhole view is not really democracy. Because the moving images on the screen or the rapid-fire clickbait on the web are only representations, what we get from mass media is a representation of democracy that has nothing to do with democratic representatives we pay for with our income taxes. As Sheldon S. Wolin, sometimes referred to in the supposed business of political theory as "a maverick political scientist", describes this tendency, the US is a managed democracy. Yes. Managed. As in "Management". Democracy is being managed from behind the scenes. And mass media sometimes can be the management tool of choice for special interests who want to spread disenchantment with government, and disenfranchisement with the "us" who actually are the owners of the government.

How is it that the middle-of-the-road road hog called "commercialism" has decided to get between the American people and the people's government? What happens when commercial interests by and large take an adversarial rather than a simply rivalrous stance toward government? What happens when news content is subordinate to private sector propaganda needs? Being averse to the government is one thing. To foment wholesale aversion to it is almost criminal in and of itself.

Here we go again: powerful economic interests that are unsaddled with any political accountability at all to the American people are owners of the most powerful propaganda technology the world has ever known, and all the news about the government is bad news. Even if Donald Trump thrives on bad news.

In a way, Trump, like many wealthy plutocrats, is a domestic imperialist. He's the sort of thing that always appears to demagogue reactionary stances and views so beyond the pale that people with common sense are bound to pay attention--because political unity has begun to fail. . . into factional warfare, and an overemphasis of the individual as the measure of all things political, the latter an ignorant fallacy in itself. Not only is he a fraudulent grifter who is now guilty of all kinds of crimes and offenses against civilization, he's being funded from brainlessly likeminded plutocrats and reflexive (as in knee-jerk) paranoids who believe something needs to be done to end any and all resistance to commerce. This kind of imperialism is retrograde--directed against the country itself. Against its values, against its sense of progress, and usually, simply "against".

Get it? Look at his supporters. They're not in favor of anything, they are only against whatever it is they see in front of their faces as their faces glow in the blue light of the TV screen. Passive, alienated, nihilistic, disenchanted, many have had all their anger misdirected toward the government by a commercial cabal of antagonists that might as well come right out and paraphrase "conservatism's" little saint, St. Ronnie Reagan:

"Hi! I'm from the corporate world and I'm here to pretend you're my friend!"

What if we were to claim this: capitalism can't do anything right. Shouldn't we question capitalism's ability to concoct "justice" or "equality" before allowing capitalist interests to supplant democratic political agency as ideally distributed among the American people? Look at how mass media begins coverage of upcoming political campaigns practically the very day after a national election. Is this something the American people need, a perpetual campaign season? Or is it distraction journalism? A means to the end of not reporting on actual issues we all face? Think of where this strange phenomenon takes us: winners and losers, a competition, all of it a matter of who can raise the most money. The emphasis is off-point. Do we elect people to represent us? Or is a political campaign nothing more than a sporting event involving men and women in dress clothes?

Who funds these political campaigns? We know who's been empowered to do the most funding, and because of Citizens United's choice of Supreme Court Justices (yes, we might as well be honest about that), people who never spend one thin dime without expecting some kind of big payoff get to contribute the most--to the point that this blizzard of coinage has distorted the very idea of election.

Not long ago, we began to notice a rise in ire against social media, ire centered in the ranks of many of the more reactionary Republicans and "conservatives" who pretended that their concern over social media is all about "the censoring of conservative voices" by large, "Liberal" social media platforms. Apparently, many rightist propagandists and political allies were indignant that any social media company--Facebook or Twitter or others--would moderate content to keep personal attacks at a minimum. Who knew? The personal attack is the hallmark of conservatism?

Nope. Edmund Burke, father of conservatism, inveighed against vulgarity and the coarsening of political discourse. All that media nonsense is designed to attract attention, to disenchant "consumers" with authority, and to so inflame public discourse that only the discourse itself suffers. Then democracy is once again bullied by loudmouths bloviating all kinds of infantile idiocies.

I remember how nearly 20 years ago, during an evening of solitary drinking, I tuned into The Michael Savage AM radio show. He's called "The Bay City Madman" because he's more like the famous Triumph the Insult Comic Dog from Conan O'Brien's Team Coco on HBO than he is a reasoned pundit with strong opinions. As a call-in, I reeled a little when the first thing Savage asked me, "Do you agree Liberals are crazy?" I tried saying no, and that's when the broadcaster hung up on me.

That might have deserved a rim shot from people who have been conditioned to think attacking other people is fun.

Who gets to "win" in that sort of coarsened scenario, one in which money is now "freedom of public speech", one in which the ad hominem is considered a sane aspect of reasoned public discourse? This isn't too difficult to see: It's the wealthy who thus get all the advantages. Not only can the wealthy elites divide the polity against itself, thus giving them, the wealthy, the edge, but they can also impede coherent government. That's happening right now. Attack politics are espoused by reactionaries who claim to be conservatives. Moreover, the wealthy can sway elections simply by spending money. We should call this "the financialization of democracy", a sort of neoliberal rabbit trick where everything not nailed down (and some that really is nailed down) is turned into "market forces".

More of this creepy "economization" of "the political" on any cable news channel, and on literally every rightist AM radio talk show. Trump's big motto? #winning. The economization of the political into economic, not political, values and tactics. And why wouldn't a powerful and privately owned news network or news organization follow suit? They're all about #winning too. Beating the competition in the ratings game. Being number one of all news channels. It's all commercialization gone completely feral. While it's also apparent that traditional news values are in play, and that the mass media by and large does play a positive role in the preservation of democracy within the US, this balance is precarious, sometimes tenuous, sometimes thrown out of balance--when monetary demands such as those cable news channels and network news teams face coerce those organizations to play a little faster and looser with their roles than preferable.

Here we go again: more economic coercion. If an important role in the preservation of democracy is thrown into the gears of the money machine, there truly can be dangerous outcomes. While one possible solution to this problem could involve some state moderation of news content a la the Fairness Doctrine, the federal policy established during the Truman administration when it became all too apparent to the American people what a demagogue like Hitler could do to a country if he captures mass media. But look at where the rightists dominate AM radio, sometimes the only way some far out in the countryside can get news information. Pretty scary, eh? Also awfully odd given the ramifications for such a monopoly on broadcast information easy enough for anyone to see. And when a broadcasting outfit like Sinclair or Clear Channel or Salem or other media empires consolidate their hold on local standards for their organizations the distortions are even more dangerous. As would be too much or too little federal oversight.

It's horrific to me how so many rightist propagandists obsess themselves in the dissemination of anti-government rhetoric while at the same time pretending to be the only patriots in the US. Patriot. That's a sort of signal of what or who is involved in some agenda along the fringes of the lunatic extremities of viewpoint.

Earlier, I mentioned, in the economization of the political, the concept of the individual as preeminent in society, over and above the actual political--which requires a relation between people to even exist--tends to skew towards ideas as seemingly innocuous as "entrepreneurialism" all the way into authoritarianism. Liberating commercial activities, regaling those who conduct them with a complicated name, entrepreneur, atomizing the public into a systemic miasma of every man for himself, the overweaning environment of competition between self-interested individuals, all this tends to distort how Americans see themselves. But what happens if the individual fails? What if the localized picture of "success" is so out of kilter with the realities of people who have to struggle with the reality that not everyone is going to fit into a reductionistic definition of success as only "financial success"?

This is where the rubber bad tires meets the road. Beyond the commercialization of mass media into an adjunct of commercialization, consumerization and commodification of society, culture, the economic and the political, even the theological, there lies a serious contradiction: How do we interpret those who have not been financially fortunate? Are we on some sort of national merit system where wealth is the only measure of success? Doubtless many local citizens in areas hardest hit by economic and financial realities that almost prevent financial success for individuals, many would bristle at the idea. Worse, they bristle at the idea of people from large metropolitan areas interpreting who they are from standards inappropriate to their ways of life. The Rust Belt has been subjected to outsourcing, and abandonment--to the point that, should those citizens fall into a mass media interpretation designed to hoodwink them into the belief the government did that to them, we can see far more easily that what culminated on January 6, 2021, was due to circumstances far more complicated and dangerous to the proverbial powers-that-be than anyone in the commercial mass media is either willing to or allowed to admit in public.

What's stopping them? Advertiser dollars. What replaces these verities? Distraction journalism. In a way, I sometimes get the sense that those who have the most to lose should the truth get out are barring the doors to keep it out. Desperate to keep the information from "leaking" so to speak.

But what would happen if such economic interest coercion of news information was to suddenly see its financial power basis collapse? What would happen if a sudden economic upheaval deprived those individuals and corporations of their power? After all, the power of economic use of force, perfectly legal, is based on its ability to use money and influence to "coerce" the American individual, and those interests do this literally every single day. For example, how is it that, because of the strange predicament of human existence that necessitates we find a way to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves, we have traveled down an odd road that could have everything to do with the interpretation that the increasing complexity of this simple activity (at least in some cases) indicates that capitalism is a manifestation of entropy? We have no choice at all there. We either eat, water, clothe, and shelter ourselves--or we die. Were the necessity of cooperating with commercial interests a fully politicized phenomenon, it would have an interesting title:

Totalitarianism: eat or die.

How does this unavoidable tie to a powerful, influential and nearly absolutely self-interested sector of civilization both promote "the individual as self-interested" and enslave the individual to its self-interested pursuit--not of life, liberty and happiness--pursuit of power, profit and endless expansion, even so far as to run contrary to the interests of the individual? We hear it all the time from commercial interests and their political allies: The individual is all, the collective is a myth. Very odd. This atomization, by my lights, is nothing but an interpretation that connotes the mentality that in order to "compete" with and then "win" against the competition (which is us), "the competition" needs to be atomized, dispersed, deprived of collective power.

How is this played in the theater of mass media?

It isn't.

And the individual, often bandied about in the offerings of all sorts of commentators, is regaled in a reductionistic modification as "the entrepreneur". The free-wheeling individual who takes financial risks as exemplary of individualism now out of balance when weighed against the values of a healthy democratic system is also awfully strange, an illusion that, somehow, possibly by magic, even a fry cook is taking risks in venture capital in order to profit beyond all preliminary expectations at his job flipping burgers. Is that for real? On the other hand, commercial sector advocates that colleges need to cut back on the liberal arts (which include political science) in favor of STEM-related courses propitious to business, have made plenty of hay over the liberal arts graduate as a Starbucks barista. Apparently, if one isn't motivated by money, one is not a success. But which is it? The fry cook entrepreneur? Or the barista failure? OK. Look. Neither are for real. Both are golems created in the boardrooms of the mass media.

Additionally, too much mass media influence painting up a commercialized interpretation of the meaning of individualism as "power broker", "money maker" or "guardian genius of industry", and we end up with all kinds of bush-league caesars. Since the addendum to peals of individual glory is self interest, a college graduate's lacuna in having next to know political educational experience, the end result is that, eventually, the ultimate winner is going to be the ultimate ruler. The entire Trump shtick is based on that idea.

The United States, crossing the Rubicon between republicanism and empire. This new masked version of coercive economic force is beginning to embattle the republic. There is nothing wrong with using self-interest as a part of the competitive tool chest in a business, but if this interpretation of interests in competition bleeds into the mindset of politics, the republic is under siege from an obviously not-so-invisible rival: capitalism.

How much influence does this weirdness have on how mass media interprets events? I'll leave that question unanswered. But look at the pictures on the TV set. It's clear that a number of people are attacking the US Capitol, defecating in its hallways, and worse. Is this all due to an immense and overpowering love of Trump? Or does the anger and rage fueling the attack run much deeper?

What happens when what is essentially a moneyed aristocracy slides out-of-touch with the rest of a citizenry? What happens if a mass media, inadvertently defending that moneyed aristocracy distorts how citizens view their political agency as, well, next to nonexistent? What happens when millions of lives are so uprooted and destabilized by economic coercion that those unwilling to remain passive in learned helplessness lash-out?

It's ironic: We saw all that on the TV set.

Some political commentators, in defense of an unspoken commercial hegemony that continues to grow in coercive power, are now lashing out at calls from opponents of that hegemony by ridiculing calls for our politicians and judges to look at root causes. Apparently, what those people want is to shift the blame onto another scapegoat, one much more deserving of that status: Donald Trump.

Thus, the deep contradiction between actual life in the US and what is portrayed on the television and in mass media has not been, and possibly never will be, addressed by the pinhole representational gatekeepers of mass media. That's a terrifying prospect. More terrifying, however, are the insolent moves to disenfranchise the regulatory, administrative and welfare states--all to further empower commercial forces that have backlashed and are antagonistic against the people of the United States.

It's probable that the United States has begun a qualitative shift away from democratic governance, one from the political to the economic. The two modes of governance and rulership are in no way similar. And people indeed experience the contradiction. But this sort of observation is nothing new: political theorists have been warning of this shift for decades. The result of capitalism--too much of it--having so much power to coerce the political, so much influence over it, and such strong motivation to shift away from a demos into something altogether undemocratic. . . .

. . . seems to have been missed by the US's "official commentators". There are mavericks out on the fringes, particularly on the so-called left, but even these stances are often muddled--and muddied over--by interests who want to confuse the meanings of "left", "right", and the latest odd hybrid bird called "centrism".

All three are distinctly informed by capitalism. The left is portrayed as favorable to government as poised against capitalism; the right is seen as favorable to capitalism as poised against government; and centrism, ostensibly in favor of "moderation", is really little more than capitalists attempting to step into the picture directly as pretenders to the identity of "the adults in the room". The latter equals "more capitalism for us". Unsurprisingly these ideological stances don't have to be informed by capitalism, but it seems the commercial mass media is tacitly joining forces with those that find democracy inimical to their purposes. The emphasis on the economization of the political--and the politicization of the economic--simply does not bode well for the future of a republic already under intense pressure from authoritarian governments worldwide.

How to address large scale disenfranchisement from the political, and the disenchantment with democracy, both results of overwhelming economic coercion and propaganda spread by mass media? It's not to ignore these problems. Nor is it to mistake the reasons for growing reaction against such distortions. But that's what is dished up for us every single day when we enter the zone of mass media's pinhole representation of the world.

Traditionally, when economic conditions begin to create a zeitgeist of misery as occurred in 1789 France and 1917 Russia, such disenfranchisement has manifested directly against capitalism or against economic coercion. Most revolutions of misery and of physical necessity are directed at the obvious sources of poverty, joblessness, homelessness, and even against status orders based on one's financial station. However, after the last round of mass public dissension, which began in the anti-Vietnam antiwar movement's attacks against The System, it seems as if today's moneyed elites are especially cautious to shift the blame away from their behaviors and activities within the diminishing polity. Why not shift the blame against the owners of the government, the American people themselves?

Pretense, pretense, pretense.

We see this blame-shifting and scapegoating all the time: How many times are those who dissent against libertarianism-inflected "conservatives" attacked as "socialists"? And who knew that anyone who critiques capitalism is automatically a socialist?

Yes, these issues are not only quite convoluted but also subject to all kinds of deception and confusion generated by propaganda turned against the one public force that can limit this stage of too much capitalism: the government. Recently, for example, payday lenders of all groups to honor, are confronting the Supreme Court over the Consumer Financial Protection Board, an adjunct to the executive branch that was designed to aid consumers in the wake of the 2008 economic collapse. Much of that collapse involved big banks and financial institutions defrauding consumers who--well, isn't this a surprise?--don't have PhDs in finance or economics.

How to put such a move in simple words? "American people, you have no right to defend yourselves against fraud conducted by powerful coercion by economic actors!"

Rising dissension and a decades-long culmination of increasing financial despair, the usurpation of financial and economic security for profit, unnecessary joblessness and lousy wages and, possibly worst of all, the denigration of those hit hardest by a capitalist juggernaut as "stupid" or "ignorant" or "know-nothings" may not always be the zombie of the right's lividly surreal interpretations of these phenomena. The reactionary backlash likely will shift sides when those presently expressing rage, alienation and outright nihilism come to the realization they are being used by forces quite similar to those that have taken so much away from them and their families. In fact, as said before, the campaign to bamboozle these people seems like a desperate move to keep those forces misdirected and at bay. A desperate move. As in desperation.

More pretense. As in The Great Pretender. The Great Pretender is a parishioner at the Church of the Holy Wallet, a fundamentalist subsidiary of the American Business Association of Troglodytes.

When I looked on in horror at the mass assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, I wasn’t surprised that nearly all the cable stations, the newspapers, the magazines, even the blogs, and all the propaganda sites that pretend to be news organizations would focus on Donald Trump.  Rather than look for root causes, the cable news stations in particular--even today--choose to focus on the demagogue and reactionary forces aligned with his whimsy. They're seditionists. They go on trial. They are condemned to prison. Then it all simply goes away. Problem solved. Just as in on any network television cops and robbers drama. Shoot the problem to make it go away: Isn't this what people are taught to do by the TV set? Kill the bad guys, put them away, and then go have a beer at the local saloon.

Lots of ink has been spilled along the rightist fringes about "liberal elites" and "expertise".  But when you live in an economically shattered locality, only to see experts telling the rest of the country all about what you're directly encountering as if what is occurring to you, your family, your neighbors, your neighborhood, your coworkers, friends, and even strangers all around you is nothing but a pleasing abstraction to sound off about on the TV set--the expertise tends to not reach you.  Nor should it.  The representations cannot fully nor wholly mirror the realities you face.  

The rightist propaganda machine has been adamant at scapegoating "the liberal elite", mainly because scapegoating Liberalism is a means to the end of displacing them with, um, the money men.  The moneyed elite encapsulate an ideology all their own.  Even if some vote Liberal and others conservative, the real agenda is: more money for themselves.  Democrats are just as bad as Republicans in kowtowing to deep pocketed interests for favor and campaign cash.  

When was the last time Great Big Reaganite George F. Will ever found himself forced to live hand-to-mouth in an urban wasteland?  Or Will's truculently self-interested landlord?  Why doesn't the eminent newspaper columnist tell us of his travails in trying to keep enough instant potatoes in the cupboard as winter howls outside his doorway? 

Oh look: Fancy pants is speaking for us all.  Really?  While I am relatively untouched by that kind of ire, I do know people who are angered by people in comfortable, air-conditioned offices telling people who are financially decrepit all about "personal responsibility".  

Only weeks ago, editorialists across the political and ideological spectrum piled onto the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank in Northern California.  Many on the right fringes suggested the problem is Silicon Valley itself.  This tack is an instrumentalization of what looks to me to be an attack on the ability of vast numbers of Americans who now can communicate across national and even international borderlines to discuss events like the 2008 economic downturn or how the financialization of capitalism is turning our relationship with capitalism into a carnival act.  A market speculator feeding frenzy took down the SVB.  One report indicated market speculators were blaring BREAKING NEWS, all caps, on Twitter before the crash.  It reminded me of us kids out playing football when on shouted "DOGPILE!"  

And, BAM!  Another reason to shut off the Internet and play keep-away from the American people.  

Only weeks ago, for example, I read editorialists across the so-called political spectrum all piling onto the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank because Silicon Valley Bank, in collapsing, did something wrong.  Did it?  What I couldn’t help but notice is that, well, there seems to have been a market speculation feeding frenzy that literally shut down SVB in a matter of hours.  

One observer noted that some market speculators were blaring big BREAKING NEWS on Twitter IN ALL CAPS.  

What would have been a more accurate Twitter exclamation? See? The regulations we sabotaged and the administrative organs we defunded didn't work.

And...what do the statistics tell us?   Can we quantify the issue some more?  After all, quantification, calculation, numeration, ratiocination, and what supposedly passes for Reason are all quite pop in today's political carnival. And almost all of these supposed values point in one direction:

To the making of money. Ironically, advocates of the infamously weird Austrian School of sham economic ideology condemn the governments of the world for "Progressivism" and its use of statistics and abstractions in order to better interpret phenomena. According to Austrian pookies, only individuals can act. Groups do not act, sayeth the Hayek. Only the individual can act. And thus any tool that involves any abstractions beyond pricing, and supply and demand, are inaccurate, coercive and thus oppressive.

But really. Let's ask the experts on CNBC, a leading business foghorn. What do the experts say? Oh look. The economy is going great guns, they tell us, but also that it's so puzzling why so many Americans don't think the economy is doing well at all.

Quantify me, tax free.

In many a respect--if respect is an appropriate word for what goes on in mass media's servility to big money--rising dissatisfaction deserves an answer, not a dodge. Many, perplexed by, say, the pandemic, turn to a variety of "officialized" fonts of information for clues as to what they hardly can comprehend. But mass media, in dealing with representations and the stereotypic nature of representations, can only tell part of the story.

The late Italian philosopher and semiotician Umberto Eco called this strange enslavement to mass media "hyper-reality". It's like reality, but isn't reality. And if the media is focusing on Donald Trump leaving and entering buildings as if he's being coronated, then it's possible that to many, this is by far the most important development of 2023. It might be. But probably isn't.

As for the Internet and the growing political attacks on social media platforms, late in the 1990s, when the Internet was something both new and exciting, I remember how during a casual conversation I told a friend that my money was on the probability that sooner or later, the powers that be would go to great lengths to shut down what we now call “social media”.  After all, throughout history, one of the great dynamics of many powerful states and empires has been a rivalry between the elites and the plebeian or common people. All too often, those of great wealth in an aristocracy move to find ways to divide the masses of commoners because their larger numbers constitute a threat to aristocracy. This is how tyranny begins. It's also where the phenomenon of demagoguery appears.

Yes, Donald Trump was stepping out of the limousine, or was riding a golden escalator down to the commoners to "fight for them". Whatever. It's the same old game with people like Robespierre, the crassly myopic ideologue who instigated the French Terror in 1792.

What happens in countries where the deep-set concerns of the common people are either ignored or excused away by those who have a stake in keeping the common people over a barrel? What happens when a scapegoat is found, and used, and then doffed? What happens if a strong reaction borne of anger, distrust with convention, with academic abstraction, with expertise, erupts into mass violence? 

Does "ignore it until it goes away" actually work as an operative principle?

Who, really, should we fear? If one has been booted out of "the Official America"--as many common Americans believe as their concerns over financial disarray and depredation continue without out any positive answers from those who are abusing them--where does one go? That's easy to answer if an oppositional melange arises to give those who believe they have been evicted or booted out of the public discourse both haven and protection.  When democracy has been wrested from the hands of those it was developed to protect, it is only logical an opposition will arise to fill in the gap left behind as the democracy, under new management, withdraws into a kind of insularity where fortune, wealth, prestige, status and elitism "protect" those pulling all the strings. What is frightening in this is that the opposition is not only aiding in the creation of numerous problems in government, it is bucking for an alternative to democracy: authoritarianism.

What happens if one commits oneself to reading the political science and philosophy texts that inform both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution?  What if one reads Thomas Paine, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Locke, Burke, Montesquieu?  When that occurs, one can’t help but see the crazy contradictions that are currently alienating entire neighborhoods and households only short distances away from anyone who looks..  But some will never buy any such revelations in regard to this strange shift. The product is too expensive.  Where is the bottom line? How far has democracy fallen? Is there any paydirt beyond a payoff? Who changed the US flag to the Jolly Roger anyway?