How do people who watch 5 hours of TV a day think critically about critical issues? They don’t. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:
“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit
“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.
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.
Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump hush money trial, which panders to the public’s voracious appetite for titillating, soap opera drama, keeping the citizenry distracted, diverted and divided.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.
Everything becomes entertainment fodder.
As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, Americans spend five hours a day watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching more than 50 hours of television a week, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the largest percentage of TV watchers every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.
Some debate about the Einstein incident where a colleague came in and said nothing is real so AE slapped his face and asked was that real?
It reminds me of the shaking up the ants in the jar meme while they loot everything down to the foundations.
Too many boat anchors drooling over telescreens leads to an unhappy ending for the shining beacon of corruption.
I view it as fun time or hobby the sifting and rapid reading helps as all domestic enemedia are those six ways to Sunday of getting back at you (h/t-CS) “intelligence” agencies who don’t love mom or apple pie or freedom.
They are showing the hairy bulging SCROTUS of demockracy debating Emmanuel Trumpstein immunity from prosecution and they showed Kagan comments about him talking to generals and wanting to stage a coup with the ending…is that immune.
There is your 5 hours a day teevee watcher in action.
The “wise Latina” chimed in with something but this metal album is turned up loud.
Those same generals that wanted to give China comrades a heads up if Trump was making an OJ move for the Strangelove endzone with the nuclear football…is that immune?
This just in from Slim Pickens:
Yeeeee Hawww!