The perception game

I only rarely watch the news networks, and never the regular news broadcasts. The primary reason is that I don’t like advertising, and watching CNN is total immersion in ads. But I get a whiff of what’s going on by watching Jon Stewart and visiting Crooks and Liars.

In avoiding television news, I have the advantage of being better-informed than the average viewer. But maybe that’s just fantasy, and maybe my take on it is wrong.

But here’s what I get from it all: There appears to be a mighty partisan debate going on. Republicans are all over Democrats for their left-wing extremism, Obama being a socialist and all. It’s a highly energetic debate done in quick sound bursts between advertisements – if it can’t be said in thirty seconds, it can’t be said. Fast talkers dominate the airwaves, people face off and talk over and past one another for hours on end.

It’s like that old story about elephants making love – there’s a whole lot of shaking here on the ground, but the real action is higher up.

This media show leaves us with the impression that we have a two-party system. Maybe that is intentional. But we don’t have any such thing. Because Republicans and talk radio hosts attack Democrats as they do, it leaves us with the impression that there is a real leftist alternative to right wing nuttery.

It’s deceiving. Democrats are nothing like they are portrayed on TV and radio. They are the only refuge for liberals and progressives, but the party is run by corporatists, and only corporatists are christened as “viable” when elections roll around. Anyone with an ounce of fight in him is marginalized.

So we have this amazing spectacle of the Obama Administration carrying forth with just about every Bush policy (who carried forth with every Clinton policy after Clinton had carried forth with every Bush policy), and at the same time the widespread perception that something new and different is going on, that we had a change in governance.

I can think of no other way to phrase it: It is perception management, aka “thought control.”