thoughts on media coverage of Palin

[Sendo]

I had a sort of epiphany today on my lunch break. I was thinking about how the McCain Palin ticket is whipping people into a mob lynch frenzy and I was wondering how the corporate media was helping that if all it did was emphasize Palin's foolishness.

And then it hit me. The media lauded John McCain but they can't publicly laud Palin without making their propaganda blatant. So what they did was mask all of her policy flaws and emphasize on her perceived country bumpkin-ness. This has worked wonders. By demonizing common men, implying that Bush was stupid but not evil, and that "smart" liberals like Clinton are messianic, they have become full snobs. This has put common people on the defensive and rally to Palin who comes off as "one of us". The leap to thinly (if at all) veiled racism is no leap at all. The campaign to emphasize her as a fool has strengthened the illusion of a liberally biased media, removing suspicion among some people over its corporate or reactionary nature.

[DancingLarry]

Yes, that's essentially the mechanics of how that media manipulation works. The underlying principle is this: the more reliable the force or political actor is to reinforcing bourgeois hegemony, the more the media works to present them as populist tribunes of the working man and woman. Orwell was altogether too accurate in his dissection of the mechanisms of hegemony.

[Sprinkles]

I had a sort of epiphany today on my lunch break. I was thinking about how the McCain Palin ticket is whipping people into a mob lynch frenzy and I was wondering how the corporate media was helping that if all it did was emphasize Palin's foolishness.

And then it hit me. The media lauded John McCain but they can't publicly laud Palin without making their propaganda blatant. So what they did was mask all of her policy flaws and emphasize on her perceived country bumpkin-ness. This has worked wonders. By demonizing common men, implying that Bush was stupid but not evil, and that "smart" liberals like Clinton are messianic, they have become full snobs. This has put common people on the defensive and rally to Palin who comes off as "one of us". The leap to thinly (if at all) veiled racism is no leap at all. The campaign to emphasize her as a fool has strengthened the illusion of a liberally biased media, removing suspicion among some people over its corporate or reactionary nature.

I think you're right here.

The problem with a political system which is almost literally based on Duverger's law is that the media can hardly portray one half of the entire political system as it really is; completely incompetent and dangerously insane. So in order to come across as neutral, the news must present both sides as being equally valid somehow. And since Republicans and the corporate news both pander to the lowest common denominator they try to frame the Republicans as being ordinary regular folk instead of the actual elitist interests they represent.

I personally think the entire "culture war" and the claims of a supposed liberal bias in the news is a direct result of this increasingly impossible task for the media.

[Sendo]

unfortunately being in the center is considered the same as objective. There is no such thing as objectivity in journalism. We must realize this. But unfortunately, liking moderate policies is equated with fairness. Worse yet, that center is not the center of Americans' political spectrum or a center between Americans and Washington, but a center between Dems and GOP, who themselves are so far to the right of common people, let alone rev leftists.