Re: SANDERS 2020 is seriously dangerous <3
Posted: Sun Sep 15, 2019 9:59 pm
Spontaneous FB comment when I posted the linked article. Thanks. I'm thinking I should do a podcast or regular blog, already. I mean, the former, if it can actually make any money any more via YT etc.
Revised:
The Daily Spectacle
15 Sep 2019
Disney-ABC's "news" division has devoted 68 minutes to stories about Biden in 2019, compared to seven minutes for Sanders. Bernie's coverage comes in behind future also-rans like Harris and Beto, but at least he is tied with Mayor Pete. (https://freebeacon.com/politics/abc-new ... s-in-2019/)
In other words, the corporate propaganda system of 2019 is still working the same way it did in 2015, 2011, 2007...
Let's compare 2019 to 2015, the year before the first primaries of the interminable 2016 election, which most of you may feel never ended. In 2015 the corporate media conglomerates across outlets and formats devoted an average of three times the "news" coverage to the Trump campaign that they did to Clinton's. Trump also got three times more than all other Republican candidates combined. Sanders got less than 1% of the coverage. Disney-ABC's flagship evening "news" program gave him about 20 seconds during the whole year, compared to 81 minutes for Trump, a 240:1 ratio. (https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/abc-wo ... paign-year)
Remember, this corporate media devotion to the Trump campaign began many months before anyone voted. No one in the universe had ever voted for Trump in an election, whereas Sanders was a sitting senator, then as now. If we give any credence to the opinion polls published over the course of 2015, Trump began what was initially a stunt campaign far behind the other Republican contenders, weak as they were.
His advantage was that he has always been a corporate media product and, of course, a long-time NBC producer (current owner Comcast, formerly General Electric). Trump's PR activity over decades, including fourteen seasons as the producer and star of NBC The Apprentice, had established him as a kind of televised ideal of the billionaire "businessman," whether or not he was ever actually either. He had gained the image of a consumer-in-chief, an aggressive playboy who lived and sold the good life, the life every American is expected to desire and to achieve in some measure, if they're not a loser. Almost all of you are losers, obviously.
NBC The Apprentice is a theater of macho cruelty glorifying the capitalist boss as an arbitrary blowhard who knows nothing but is always right. As an owner, the Trump character is entitled to act as dictator over his "property," including the disposable human livestock working for him, as long as they are working for him. Like Reality TV in general, it reinforces the idea that all relations are strictly transactional and proceeds from the relative power of individuals. Human livestock should desire to serve their owner, or more generally do all to win the game under whatever rules the show offers. Poor performance leads to deserved exclusion. Good performance can eventually make a contest winner into an owner with the same privileges. In any game or season, there can only be one winner. The owner decides.
Trump parlayed the prominence gained from NBC into a key gig with World Wrestling Entertainment's Wrestlemania event in 2007, another theater of cruelty that spoke to an important and misunderstood demographic. Then he managed to place himself as the main purveyor of the racist myth that Obama was actually foreign-born and therefore not really the president. In 2015, as a candidate, he served up unhinged white supremacy, misogyny as a matter of sport and pleasure, aggressive xenophobia, juvenile bullying and unpredicable jabs directed at all of his targets. He was also promising to build a wall, "lock her up," win a bunch of future wars, "cut the head off ISIS" and "take their oil."
This was great television, according to statements from corporate media executives like Jeff Zucker (former chief of NBC, then chief of CNN) and Les Moonves (then the head of the Viacom network, CBS). Starting with his campaign launch speech, about Mexico sending rapists and drug-dealers to the United States, the networks gave daily, near-continuous coverage to Trump's every move and tweet, including full uninterrupted broadcasts of his campaign appearances. He rose to the top of the polls in the same period.
The abundance of free corporate media airtime made accessible to Trump at his demand, even as it was denied to other politicians, was the most important factor in setting him up to win the Republican nomination, and we should never, ever forget this.
It didn't matter how much of this coverage was "critical." Exposure matters. It's not just the relatively small corporate TV "news" audience who become habituated to the ogre's presence and the the thought of him as president. The corporate media platform bestows legitimacy, or that is how most people treat it, thus making it so. Who, after all, remains in complete control of the so-called Democratic Party "debates" currently running? The corporate media. It's all their show, their formats, their questions, their framing, their stars doing the "moderation."
The right-wing media was not initially responsible for Trump's rise. Back in 2015, Murdoch-FOX mostly opposed Trump and favored the more conventionally right-wing Republicans. The faux "liberal" outlets of MSNBC (Comcast's joint venture with Microsoft) and WarnerMedia's CNN (a kind of long-running covert co-production with the State Department) provided the more important Trump-boosting services, precisely because they have falsely framed themselves as "liberal" and more objective than the right-wing outets. On any given morning Trump was able to call in to the MSNBC Morning Joe program, ramble and say outrageous things, and set the day's "news" agenda of talk about him. The main Comcast network and long-time Trump sponsor, NBC, affected to fire him after the "Mexican rapists" speech. Then they invited him to host an episode of Saturday Night Live.
The U.S. corporate media's fateful and central contribution to Trump's rise was obscured, however, by the subsequent invention of #Russiagate. Even before the election, they had gone all-in on one of the most comprehensive and longest-running disinformation campaigns in their entire sordid history. This three-year effort functioned to deny their responsibility for Trump by deflecting blame on to fictions that revived the Red Scares after 1917 and in the late 1940s in a post-modern, liberal form. It allowed them to play the role of a "Resistance" to Trump, the American icon suddenly re-cast as a foreign agent. The idea that "Russia" had somehow effected Trump's election also diverted blame from the Democratic Party's failings and reinforced the New Cold War paradigms of the military-industrial complex. The main problem with this strategy was that very few people cared, as its tales were remote from the real problems that most people face. The Russia play was enacted within an echo chamber of these three interest groups (corporate media, "intelligence" and DNC) scamming a minority of highly-educated liberals genuinely appalled by Trump who looked for salvation to Mueller, a retired official from the Bush-era political police and former co-conspirator in the WMD plot of 2002.
Trump the American oligarch and money launderer was mired in corrupt dealings going back decades. He was committing atrocities and pursuing a course toward fascism in office, but the journalists and investigators pursuing #Russiagate allegations sought instead to link him to an endless series of things that did not actually happen and were not consequential if they did, all the while screaming treason. This ultimately delivered the presumably unintended but fully predictable result of strengthening the Trump regime in office. After the co-creation of Trump the "billionaire businessman" and Trump the serious politician worthy of maximum amplification, #Russiagate represents a third era of service by the corporate media to the ungrateful bastard who calls them the "enemy of the people."
More generally, the corporate media has shifted blame on to "social media." The latter move has the effect of discrediting their small-fry competitors and encouraging censorship measures. While criticism of social media tendencies merits its own essay, much of it serves as little more than an alternative form of distribution and promotion for corporate media content, albeit in ways that challenge corporate media revenue streams and conceptions of "intellectual property." Internet platforms allow too many purveyors to report news or mouth off as they please, and do it for free, even earn some cash if they are allowed to monetize their views.
In a less focused reprise of 2015, this year the corporate media have conducted a similar diversion of the attention economy toward the Biden campaign (and to a set of other "centrist" alternatives), contributing to an environment in which Biden's nomination is supposed to seem as inevitable as Clinton's was. At least, that was the case until a few days ago. Biden seems anything but inevitable today, since incidentally he appears to be undergoing a rapid and public mental decline. (I find this painful and poignant to watch and take no pleasure in it, notwithstanding everything odious about the man otherwise.)
Was this guy really supposed to be inevitable? Biden has run for the Democratic presidential nomination on three earlier occasions. He won one delegate in 1984, two in 1988, and zero in 2008 on a total of 81,000 votes. It's not hard to figure out why he is unpopular with Democratic voters. He has the speaking style of Bill O'Reilly and, for the most part, very right-wing politics. Known as the senator from Mastercard, he is responsible for the Anita Hill roasting and the 2005 law that heavily restricted bankruptcy. Of course, he voted in favor of the 2003 war of aggression on the people of Iraq and many other legislative atrocities of the Bush era. His muddled debate talk, blaming problems with the educational system on poor black parenting, fits into a lifetime of outbursts in that vein.
In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sanders first faced a near-total blackout from the corporate media throughout 2015. Then, once he broke through into a two-person race with Clinton, he was subjected to vicious petty assaults and daily smears from both the corporate media and the Democratic Party establishment. State-level party machines rigged voting procedures and delegate counts and the central Party apparatus literally relied on loans from the Clinton campaign to pay the electric bill. With no corporate money, the Sanders campaign broke small-donor fundraising records, received 13 million votes according to the official tallies, and won 22 state contests and nearly half of the legitimate (non-super) delegates.
And this was entirely because of the message: single-payer health care, a pro-worker platform cutting across racial divides, challenges to oligarchy, wealth inequality, and perpetual war, among many other positive, future-oriented policies that especially caught fire among the young. Sanders' success was the proof that content, though suppressed, still matters. He got the votes because of what he supported as a policy program, not who he is (although he's kind of a mensch, which makes him outstanding in the low-standard environment of electoral politics). This year Sanders once again has a record number of small donors and volunteers and a huge set of organizations backing him, and is drawing tens of thousands to his rallies. But Biden's supposed to be the juggernaut!
Revised:
The Daily Spectacle
15 Sep 2019
Disney-ABC's "news" division has devoted 68 minutes to stories about Biden in 2019, compared to seven minutes for Sanders. Bernie's coverage comes in behind future also-rans like Harris and Beto, but at least he is tied with Mayor Pete. (https://freebeacon.com/politics/abc-new ... s-in-2019/)
In other words, the corporate propaganda system of 2019 is still working the same way it did in 2015, 2011, 2007...
Let's compare 2019 to 2015, the year before the first primaries of the interminable 2016 election, which most of you may feel never ended. In 2015 the corporate media conglomerates across outlets and formats devoted an average of three times the "news" coverage to the Trump campaign that they did to Clinton's. Trump also got three times more than all other Republican candidates combined. Sanders got less than 1% of the coverage. Disney-ABC's flagship evening "news" program gave him about 20 seconds during the whole year, compared to 81 minutes for Trump, a 240:1 ratio. (https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/abc-wo ... paign-year)
Remember, this corporate media devotion to the Trump campaign began many months before anyone voted. No one in the universe had ever voted for Trump in an election, whereas Sanders was a sitting senator, then as now. If we give any credence to the opinion polls published over the course of 2015, Trump began what was initially a stunt campaign far behind the other Republican contenders, weak as they were.
His advantage was that he has always been a corporate media product and, of course, a long-time NBC producer (current owner Comcast, formerly General Electric). Trump's PR activity over decades, including fourteen seasons as the producer and star of NBC The Apprentice, had established him as a kind of televised ideal of the billionaire "businessman," whether or not he was ever actually either. He had gained the image of a consumer-in-chief, an aggressive playboy who lived and sold the good life, the life every American is expected to desire and to achieve in some measure, if they're not a loser. Almost all of you are losers, obviously.
NBC The Apprentice is a theater of macho cruelty glorifying the capitalist boss as an arbitrary blowhard who knows nothing but is always right. As an owner, the Trump character is entitled to act as dictator over his "property," including the disposable human livestock working for him, as long as they are working for him. Like Reality TV in general, it reinforces the idea that all relations are strictly transactional and proceeds from the relative power of individuals. Human livestock should desire to serve their owner, or more generally do all to win the game under whatever rules the show offers. Poor performance leads to deserved exclusion. Good performance can eventually make a contest winner into an owner with the same privileges. In any game or season, there can only be one winner. The owner decides.
Trump parlayed the prominence gained from NBC into a key gig with World Wrestling Entertainment's Wrestlemania event in 2007, another theater of cruelty that spoke to an important and misunderstood demographic. Then he managed to place himself as the main purveyor of the racist myth that Obama was actually foreign-born and therefore not really the president. In 2015, as a candidate, he served up unhinged white supremacy, misogyny as a matter of sport and pleasure, aggressive xenophobia, juvenile bullying and unpredicable jabs directed at all of his targets. He was also promising to build a wall, "lock her up," win a bunch of future wars, "cut the head off ISIS" and "take their oil."
This was great television, according to statements from corporate media executives like Jeff Zucker (former chief of NBC, then chief of CNN) and Les Moonves (then the head of the Viacom network, CBS). Starting with his campaign launch speech, about Mexico sending rapists and drug-dealers to the United States, the networks gave daily, near-continuous coverage to Trump's every move and tweet, including full uninterrupted broadcasts of his campaign appearances. He rose to the top of the polls in the same period.
The abundance of free corporate media airtime made accessible to Trump at his demand, even as it was denied to other politicians, was the most important factor in setting him up to win the Republican nomination, and we should never, ever forget this.
It didn't matter how much of this coverage was "critical." Exposure matters. It's not just the relatively small corporate TV "news" audience who become habituated to the ogre's presence and the the thought of him as president. The corporate media platform bestows legitimacy, or that is how most people treat it, thus making it so. Who, after all, remains in complete control of the so-called Democratic Party "debates" currently running? The corporate media. It's all their show, their formats, their questions, their framing, their stars doing the "moderation."
The right-wing media was not initially responsible for Trump's rise. Back in 2015, Murdoch-FOX mostly opposed Trump and favored the more conventionally right-wing Republicans. The faux "liberal" outlets of MSNBC (Comcast's joint venture with Microsoft) and WarnerMedia's CNN (a kind of long-running covert co-production with the State Department) provided the more important Trump-boosting services, precisely because they have falsely framed themselves as "liberal" and more objective than the right-wing outets. On any given morning Trump was able to call in to the MSNBC Morning Joe program, ramble and say outrageous things, and set the day's "news" agenda of talk about him. The main Comcast network and long-time Trump sponsor, NBC, affected to fire him after the "Mexican rapists" speech. Then they invited him to host an episode of Saturday Night Live.
The U.S. corporate media's fateful and central contribution to Trump's rise was obscured, however, by the subsequent invention of #Russiagate. Even before the election, they had gone all-in on one of the most comprehensive and longest-running disinformation campaigns in their entire sordid history. This three-year effort functioned to deny their responsibility for Trump by deflecting blame on to fictions that revived the Red Scares after 1917 and in the late 1940s in a post-modern, liberal form. It allowed them to play the role of a "Resistance" to Trump, the American icon suddenly re-cast as a foreign agent. The idea that "Russia" had somehow effected Trump's election also diverted blame from the Democratic Party's failings and reinforced the New Cold War paradigms of the military-industrial complex. The main problem with this strategy was that very few people cared, as its tales were remote from the real problems that most people face. The Russia play was enacted within an echo chamber of these three interest groups (corporate media, "intelligence" and DNC) scamming a minority of highly-educated liberals genuinely appalled by Trump who looked for salvation to Mueller, a retired official from the Bush-era political police and former co-conspirator in the WMD plot of 2002.
Trump the American oligarch and money launderer was mired in corrupt dealings going back decades. He was committing atrocities and pursuing a course toward fascism in office, but the journalists and investigators pursuing #Russiagate allegations sought instead to link him to an endless series of things that did not actually happen and were not consequential if they did, all the while screaming treason. This ultimately delivered the presumably unintended but fully predictable result of strengthening the Trump regime in office. After the co-creation of Trump the "billionaire businessman" and Trump the serious politician worthy of maximum amplification, #Russiagate represents a third era of service by the corporate media to the ungrateful bastard who calls them the "enemy of the people."
More generally, the corporate media has shifted blame on to "social media." The latter move has the effect of discrediting their small-fry competitors and encouraging censorship measures. While criticism of social media tendencies merits its own essay, much of it serves as little more than an alternative form of distribution and promotion for corporate media content, albeit in ways that challenge corporate media revenue streams and conceptions of "intellectual property." Internet platforms allow too many purveyors to report news or mouth off as they please, and do it for free, even earn some cash if they are allowed to monetize their views.
In a less focused reprise of 2015, this year the corporate media have conducted a similar diversion of the attention economy toward the Biden campaign (and to a set of other "centrist" alternatives), contributing to an environment in which Biden's nomination is supposed to seem as inevitable as Clinton's was. At least, that was the case until a few days ago. Biden seems anything but inevitable today, since incidentally he appears to be undergoing a rapid and public mental decline. (I find this painful and poignant to watch and take no pleasure in it, notwithstanding everything odious about the man otherwise.)
Was this guy really supposed to be inevitable? Biden has run for the Democratic presidential nomination on three earlier occasions. He won one delegate in 1984, two in 1988, and zero in 2008 on a total of 81,000 votes. It's not hard to figure out why he is unpopular with Democratic voters. He has the speaking style of Bill O'Reilly and, for the most part, very right-wing politics. Known as the senator from Mastercard, he is responsible for the Anita Hill roasting and the 2005 law that heavily restricted bankruptcy. Of course, he voted in favor of the 2003 war of aggression on the people of Iraq and many other legislative atrocities of the Bush era. His muddled debate talk, blaming problems with the educational system on poor black parenting, fits into a lifetime of outbursts in that vein.
In the 2016 Democratic primaries, Sanders first faced a near-total blackout from the corporate media throughout 2015. Then, once he broke through into a two-person race with Clinton, he was subjected to vicious petty assaults and daily smears from both the corporate media and the Democratic Party establishment. State-level party machines rigged voting procedures and delegate counts and the central Party apparatus literally relied on loans from the Clinton campaign to pay the electric bill. With no corporate money, the Sanders campaign broke small-donor fundraising records, received 13 million votes according to the official tallies, and won 22 state contests and nearly half of the legitimate (non-super) delegates.
And this was entirely because of the message: single-payer health care, a pro-worker platform cutting across racial divides, challenges to oligarchy, wealth inequality, and perpetual war, among many other positive, future-oriented policies that especially caught fire among the young. Sanders' success was the proof that content, though suppressed, still matters. He got the votes because of what he supported as a policy program, not who he is (although he's kind of a mensch, which makes him outstanding in the low-standard environment of electoral politics). This year Sanders once again has a record number of small donors and volunteers and a huge set of organizations backing him, and is drawing tens of thousands to his rallies. But Biden's supposed to be the juggernaut!