But they seem to really like the Airing of Grievances

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Fox News host flips over atheist holiday display: ‘Baby Jesus is behind the Festivus pole!’

"Why do I have to drive around with my kids to look for a nativity scenes and be, like, 'Oh, yeah, kids, look, there's baby Jesus behind the Festivus pole made out of beer cans! It's nuts!"

Doesn't your church have one of those, lady? It's not City Hall's responsibility.

Comments

[oslo.livejournal.com]

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.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Though I agree with many of your opinions, I'd ask you to examine this sentence in light of what you already know about chaos theory, evolution, and emergence: "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."

You're too bright not to see the problem.

It doesn't have to be precisely engineered...think about the organ of sight and the Biblical literalists. Different context, same watchmaker. :)

[oslo.livejournal.com]

We're talking about cable news, not complex organs that have evolved over eons - or the phenomenon of militant ignorance itself.

I don't really know anything about chaos theory, evolution, or whatever you might mean by "emergence," but I do know that applying these things to the media requires something more than a hand-wave. For example, what evolutionary process do you suppose is at work, in producing what we ultimately see anchors like that featured in the OP say? It may be true that the message we see is the message that turns out to sell the most ad space, but that doesn't mean the process hasn't been "guided" by analysts, editors, producers, and executives or that putting its production in evolutionary terms is in any way helpful to understanding its emergence.