While the nation is close to a catastrophe of global proportions, the mass media treats us to one spectacle after another. Instead of discussing the jobs crisis or the debt crisis or the worst recession since the Great Depression, we are treated first to the saga of Anthony Weiner's weiner followed closely by a 24/7 immersion in the Casey Anthony case. All cameras were on when Nancy Pelosi stepped before them to announce that she was not going to discuss Anthony Weiner but she was there that day to discuss jobs. Immediately, the mass media cut her off and went back to the studio to discuss Anthony Weiner. Jobs was not an important enough topic that we should want to hear what one of America's leading politicians had to say about it. No, far more important was to keep the spotlight on Weiner's weiner. And in a stroke of genius the media created another spectacle out of the Casey Anthony case. Back to back spectacles; it doesn't get any better than that! Without discussing the merits or the tragedy of the case, suffice it to say that it didn't need to have been made into a media spectacle. The wheels of justice could have ground slowly on without the general American public knowing much of anything about it just as it knows little or nothing of the hundreds of other similar cases that go to court every year. This was totally a media created spectacle.
In his book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Chris Hedges explains what's happening. The media are only interested in the bucks they can command from advertisers based on the number of eyeballs that are glued to the tube. Therefore, they are not interested in reporting or discussing the issues of the day that are affecting whether or not the US will default on its debt or have enough money to pay social security or what is the best way to create jobs. They are only interested in patching together one media spectacle after another because that is where the money is and their only interest is money not the issues of the day. I'm sure they're working very hard right now to find a replacement for the Casey Anthony spectacle now that it is drawing to a close. What'll be next?
The Anthony Weiner saga would have amounted to nothing if the media hadn't gotten involved. There was no sex, consensual or otherwise, but there were pictures and the media loves pictures. And it loves appealing to the prurient interests of the general public. Weiner's resignation was a heads up to the media to find another spectacle and they found Casey Anthony. Instead of people discussing issues of national importance, they are led to the trough of discussion of the many facets of the case, a case which had no significance whatsoever for the lives of American citizens and a case which is replicated over and over again, unfortunately, almost every day of the year so there was nothing even unique about it. So the media had to create the illusion that this was the most important thing an American citizen should be concerned with, at least until it's replaced by another spectacle. Instead of Nero fiddling while Rome burned, we are treated to the spectacle of corporate induced fiddling by the American public while America burns. The public is systematically dumbed down so that media corporations can maximize their profits.
Hedges points out that all this mind numbing television has reduced Americans to a nation of functional illiterates:
Functional illiteracy in North America is epidemic. There are 7 million illiterate Americans. Another 27 million are unable to read well enough to complete a job application, and 30 million can't read a simple sentence. There are some 50 million who read at a fourth-or-fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate - a figure that is growing by more than 2 million a year. A third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives, and neither do 42 percent of college graduates. In 2007, 80 percent of families in the United States did not buy or read a book. ...
Television, a medium built around the skillful manipulation of images, one that can overpower reality, is our primary form of mass communication. A television is turned on for six hours and forty-seven minutes a day in the average household. The average American daily watches more than four hours of television. That amounts to twenty-eight hours a week, or two months of uninterrupted television-watching a year. The same person will have spent nine years in front of a television by the time he or she is sixty-five. Television speaks in a language of familiar, comforting cliches and exciting images. Its format from reality shows to sit-coms, is predictable. It provides a mass, virtual experience that colors the way many people speak and interact with one another. It creates a false sense of intimacy with our elite - celebrity actors, newspeople, politicians, business tycoons and sports stars. And everything and everyone that television transmits is validated and enhanced by the medium. If a person is not seen on television, on some level he or she is not important. It is the final arbitrator of what is important in life.
Hour after hour, day after day, week after week, we are bombarded with the cant and spectacle put out over the airwaves or over computer screens by highly-paid pundits, corporate advertisers, talk-show hosts, and gossip-fueled entertainment networks. And a culture dominated by images and slogans seduces those who are functionally literate but who make the choice not to read. There have been other historical periods with high rates of illiteracy and vast propaganda campaigns. But not since the Soviet and fascist dictatorships, and perhaps the brutal authoritarian control of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, has the content of information been as skillfully and ruthlessly controlled and manipulated. Propaganda has become a substitute for ideas and ideology. Knowledge is confused with how we are made to feel. Commercial brands are mistaken for expressions of individuality. And in this precipitous decline of values and literacy, among those who cannot read and those who have given up reading, fertile ground for a new totalitarianism is being seeded.
And all this is happening because of the capitalist imperative to maximize profits. News and discussion doesn't sell as well as spectacle and illusion. What does it matter if American citizens have a distorted sense of values and are politically and intellectually ignorant if media corporations can continue to maximize profits? Entertainment is more important than political or scientific reality. Facts don't matter. Being mediagenic matters. That's why Michelle Bachmann is way ahead of Tim Pawlenty and Jon Huntsman. People are more interested in her because she comes across as attractive even though she's a whackadoodle in terms of her ideas. If only spectacle and illusion are important, then whether or not we are destroying the environment is a subject not for scientific inquiry but is up for debate with the most attractive and mediagenic, not the most informed, winning. Have you ever seen a reputable scientist discussing global warming on TV? No, but we are treated to the opinions of uninformed ignoramuses on a daily basis whose main claim to fame is that they can persuade us of falsehoods without batting an eye. And they can go on non-stop by the hour.
Spectacle has triumphed over reason when we can be convinced that evolution is only a theory on the same par as creationism, when President Obama's birth place is a subject for debate, when climate change caused by carbon dioxide emissions is only a theory. When people are too lazy to search out the best opinions and facts on any subject, they are pawns in the hands of media manipulators who will amuse them to death in order to maximize profits.
