Monday, January 18, 2016

Reaping

and the sowing so and so's who sowed


Back around the triumph of David Brat, you could tell that an ill wind was being taken for normal. A sort of climate change.

Winning at any cost, laying out the necessary alternative reality to make proposals seem contextual rather than the shrewdly anarchic, synchronized talking points straight out of central command anyone with Frank Luntz's weight in lunchmeat for brains ought to be able to recognize, and delivering them with what passes for joy in this not as yet fully developed form of entertainment: that's the ticket. Learn how to punch that ticket and you'll go far with the plutocrats.

MSNBC and CNN: my how you've changed. Al Jazeera America: you're getting out of the market entirely. Local newscasts which are grateful for 'packages' delivered by national sources reinforce whatever is in the wind, for that is 'newsworthiness' on a budget. Trickle down idiocy.

Reasoned debate is desirable to one set of ears but registers as gotcha to those breaking this climatic ill wind. They suffer from painted-into-a-corner syndrome, having demonized so much for political advantage their reactions are comically predictable. Only it's deadly serious and beyond irony that they are subject to a code, a loyalty to make any syndicate proud.


There is a wretched stasis wherever access and softballs make sweet supply and demand, and the transactions required to make it so are avoiding widespread scrutiny and oversight.

Ratings success is a corrosive measurement for events of the day.

This refraining from causing discomfort in your interviews so you're free to crank up a future one any time you want and call it an exclusive takes brass ones. Calling it journalism is chutztravaganza. With all due respect, some would say, what do you say to those who have said blah, blah, blah? Unquote.

Booking coup: John McCain and oh wow, David Brooks! The rules of stasis dictate that points from their side are run past the other for comment, even if the other side's are really characterizations by one of those 'both siderist' journals (they always seem so reasonable), wipe hands, job well done, drinks on Chuck, rinse, repeat.


What is the liberal, mainstream media? I'm confused. When there was a fully functioning press and some couldn't handle the fact that facts sometimes favor liberals, one expected news gathering giants to suffer the pea shooters and paper warplanes of an ideologically slanted version of reality, but not fundamentally change. When media mastered ratings whoring, this 'liberal' tag began fossilizing before our eyes.

What about Bernie Sanders's history on committees and exchanges with debate moderator, Andrea Mitchell's husband? (If 'exhuberance' is what you thought he tore him a new one of, you have guessed wrong.) Yet conservative think (sic) tanks would still have you believe she's the liberal media.

The press is free by contract with the citizenry. What they make of it is their business, short of libel or incitement to riot. Just as right to work is often code for right to work for less, our free press proves free to satiate the narcissism of the masses, even at the expense of logic and proportion, and report it all from a press room.

One more proof of the morbidity of the liberal media: we really are reaping what we have sowed and there's an archive available to anyone with a nose for integrity to exploit. Somebody poke that cowed old liberal media with a stick.