The Cult of Propaganda

This is mostly a rerun/repeat of a previous blog from last year that focused on Fox News, but with a few updates. (See DOMINATION OF THE MEDIA, NOT AN ENDGAME IN ITSELF).

Now that the Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBG) is vying for a larger share of the news market across the United States, the need to sound the alarm bells is stronger than ever. With all that we are learning about the corruption within the Trump Administration, (see 501 Days in Swampland by Joy Crane and Nick Tabor https://tinyurl.com/y89zqrml) it’s safe to say that SBG will likely get their Xmas wish list granted in full. Once that deal goes through, there will be large swathes of the American public who will have no other recourse than to SBG for their local newscast.

Most weekdays I listen to the first hour of NPR’s show On Point. Invariably, but especially during the last fifteen months or so, I’ve been fascinated at the Conservatives who call in. Where in the past the occasional Conservatives calling in would have sound arguments based on a different set of organizing principles, I’m surprised these New Types of Conservatives even listen in on the show. Not because the program shares any particular viewpoint but because none of the factual information presented by On Point’s panel of journalists and commentators ever seems to pierce through the veneer of false facts these New Types Conservatives have absorbed from other, more dubious sources. It’s as if we had been listening to two separate broadcasts.

The effect is jarring. It tells you the severity of the impasse, we, as a society, find ourselves in these days. As books like Madeleine Albright’s Fascism –a Warning, or Yascha Mounk’s The People vs Democracy, Why our Freedom is in Danger…remind us of late: we are in very troubled waters. Picture the hellhole of Syrian refugees the world over. The possibility of losing all the ground the world community painstakingly cobbled together after the calamities of two World Wars is so real we can taste the bitterness such loss would bring to all of our lives.

Having raised a generation on false equivalencies and alternative facts, Fox News’ spoon feeding of the Orwellian Pablum has weaned a cohort of the electorate away from reality, unable to recognize differences of opinion from actual facts. And now, SBG is banking on the freedom of the press and some Trumpian cronyism to add their own biased sound bites to the propaganda swamp.

Since none of us are immune to propaganda—a reminder to re-read Orwell’s 1984 if you haven’t in a while—we are now faced with an almost cataclysmic conundrum. How do you retract from and reeducate a populace who has come to believe the claptrap that has been fed to them as legitimate news? How do you let them know that they’ve been inculpated into a propagandist cult? When the inconvenient truth of science and logic and verifiable facts has become the bogeyman, where do you go from there?

 

As standard bearers, the Trump Administration has returned the Federal Government to a Boss Tweed Tammany Hall. Is there even one Trump Cabinet member who isn’t trying to destroy the very Department they’ve been assigned to lead? Imagine purposely hiring an illiterate person to teach school. Hiring a pedophile to run your daycare. Letting a pyromaniac run your local fire department. These irreconcilable traits should render the actions of these Cabinet officials felonious.

But in the Trump World we live in, where real news is fake news and fake news is real news, a timetable for reckoning is up in the air. Obfuscation rules unless each and every citizen pays very close attention to the details.