The problem with the media message that feeds the militant ignorance that dominates so much of our country's culture is that it's too precisely engineered to be merely the emergent nonsense of a bunch of half-processed preconceptions and biases that it appears to be. The people who write the lines that come out of Gretchen Carlson's mouth must know what they're doing, because if they were as stupid as their writing might otherwise suggest that they are, they would occasionally slip and let something unorthodox slip through.
It's such a fascinating phenomenon, when observed directly. Every cable news channel is trying to achieve a kind of attention-span bank-shot - not so much interested in informing the viewer as keeping them watching, which requires a slightly different blend of "information." Yes, yes, again we have the nonsense about the "war on Christmas," and then flip over the The Daily Show and you can see it yet again skewered just like it always is. This is not the stuff of "militant ignorance," though it might make an easy representative target. It's like accusing the producers of confederate flags of racism.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2013-12-11 04:44 am (UTC)It's such a fascinating phenomenon, when observed directly. Every cable news channel is trying to achieve a kind of attention-span bank-shot - not so much interested in informing the viewer as keeping them watching, which requires a slightly different blend of "information." Yes, yes, again we have the nonsense about the "war on Christmas," and then flip over the The Daily Show and you can see it yet again skewered just like it always is. This is not the stuff of "militant ignorance," though it might make an easy representative target. It's like accusing the producers of confederate flags of racism.