(07-17-2019, 04:08 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: How does the media change? I'm not talking about media technology, but about the attitudes.
During the 4T the media* are full of panic, scaremongering is rampant. On the Left it's more about an environmental apocalypse, on the Right more about immigrants, and paedophile panic is widespread on both sides.
Will the scaremongering end with the 1T?
*a nitpick:
media is plural for
medium in the sense of means of communication or expression.
The media of the 4T reflect the time, including the reality of power. Democratic institutions, including the media, are stressed as in no other times. Honest media in a 4T depict objective possible to the extent of their ability, Media under a dictatorial or despotic regime are unreliable propaganda supporting an official view and excluding others; media in a democracy might be compromised with concerns for non=-disclosure of military secrets and denial of access to enemy propaganda.
The extreme polarization of American media establishes that neither side has been capable of excluding the other from pushing its world-view upon people as a whole. We have a bimodal distribution of political views among elected officials with the Left and Right having little overlap on questions of public policy. One side believes that the duty of Humanity is to sacrifice ever more for the elites of ownership and management in the name of economic growth; the other holds that that economic growth implies a faster consumption of resources, greater economic inequality, and the loss of all right to contest the market power of monopoly power. It is
Huffington Post versus
FoX News Channel.
We are in a Crisis mode, but we have gone along with no semblance of any Regeneracy. If the Regeneracy were to fit the agenda of the Right, then America would be well on its way to having a consensus that the common man has responsibility to suffer for the power, indulgence, and gain of economic elites who make personal survival a privilege of questionable value -- that people endure poverty on behalf of elites in return for pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die. A wealth cult with Calvinist garb holds that class position is a consequence of divine Predestination in which a select few get the economic blessing that manifests itself in sybaritic ways of life while the common man gets an animal level of survival. Comply and get rewards in Heaven; fail to comply and you die horribly (execution or slow starvation) and are damned to Hell which looks suspiciously like a fascist nightmare of unending agony. It may be ironic, but the majority of the Left seems to believe more firmly in the rule of law, economic competition, judicial precedent, and rational thought as a reflection of a heritage of benign tradition in politics and economics. Who shall prevail?
Opposing sides that cannot come to agreement on substantive issues yet demonize each other typically characterizes the start of a Crisis Era. America will either have a New Birth of Freedom or it will descend into a nightmare of inequality in both economic result and personal security with a political order that forces complete obedience even in sexuality. After all, the nightmare that the Right wants needs plenty of children to be cheap labor in the dark satanic mills, to become cannon fodder in wars for profit, and to be helpless markets for monopolists in every aspect of the economy -- and of course, to follow the demands of the elites of ownership and management through the political figures that those elites choose on behalf of us all. The Right wants a fascistic corporate state in which the political system represents economic interests with the owners and managers dominating the sectors 'rep[resented'. Such is pure plutocracy, an attempt to restore feudal inequity in the name of national glory.
The last Crisis resolved the political questions other than race ("Jim Crow" inequality survived intact) quickly because the economic meltdown lasted long enough to break the ability of the economic elites to buy the political system. This Crisis gave us the opportunity to prevent a slide into the despair characteristic of the dreadful period from the latter part of 1931 to early 1933, but at a cost of allowing the economic elites to have the means to buy the political process. We now have Donald Trump as the culmination of such consolidation of political power among America's economic elites. Americans sold their souls to avoid the threat of a 1930's economy and may have sold out their freedom. Like many in the center-Left, I cannot decide whether I see Trump as more a schemer or a bumbler, but scheming into a War for Profit that turns into apocalypse and bumbling into one make little difference in result.
I have drifted far from discussing how the media will look -- but in the end they will reflect the reality that the elites dictate or that the People demand. Should the media become servile to an authoritarian cause, then they will be as corrupt as everything else through their corruption.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
