Sunday, July 22nd., 2018
"...The bottom line is simply this: Americans should beware of letting others—whether they be television news hosts, political commentators or media corporations—do their thinking for them. ..."
“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours... When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”Americans have a voracious appetite for TV entertainment, and the Trump reality show - guest starring outraged Democrats, power-hungry Republicans, and a hodgepodge of other special interest groups with dubious motives - feeds that appetite for titillating, soap opera drama.
- Professor Neil Postman
After all, who needs the insults, narcissism and power plays that are hallmarks of reality shows when you can have all that and more delivered up by the likes of Donald Trump and his cohorts?
Trump is inclined to denounce any news agencies and reports that paint him in a less than favorable light as “fake news,” which leaves only the Fox News channel to carry the president’s torch for media integrity.
Yet as John Lennon reminds us, “nothing is real,” especially not in the world of politics.
In other words, it’s all fake, i.e. manufactured, i.e. manipulated to distort reality.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
Likewise, “The Trump Show” keeps the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today....
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