Matt Taibbi hits it out of the park in this issue of Rolling Stone....
Honestly I never thought of media manipulation in the way that he presents it here. Here's a few "snippets" for your enjoyment but I do encourage you to read the whole piece...
The net effect of all of this is to make the electorate exquisitely sensitive to constant prodding and poking by media stimuli, and what people don't notice is that that prodding and poking is tirelessly moving them in the same direction, toward a safe, inoffensive middle, away from anything that
smells controversial. The endless onslaught of tiny scandals trains the
electorate to be hyper-responsive to temporary, superficial outrages while
simultaneously chipping away at their long-term memories, their inclination to
look at the big picture, their ability to grasp subtleties of opinion and
policy.
snip
We're getting to be the same kind of people. We can't focus for more
than ten seconds on anything at all and we're constantly exercised about stupid
media-generated non-scandals, guilt-by-association raps, accidental dumb
utterances of various campaign aides and other nonsense — while at the same time we have no energy at all left to wonder about the mass burgling of the national
budget for phony military contracts, the war, the billion dollars or so in
campaign contributions to be spent this year that will be buying a small
mountain of favors for the next four years. And we... shit, I don't even know
what I'm saying anymore. I'm just tired of this tone that's always out there
when these scandals break, like we can't fucking stand the existence of this
Wright fellow for even a minute longer, not a minute longer! — when we all know
that come Monday, or Tuesday at the latest, Jeremiah Wright will be forgotten
and we'll be jumping en masse in a panic away from the next media-offered shadow to fall across our bow. What a bunch of turds we all are, seriously. God help us if we ever had to deal with a real problem.
I'm not sure that I totally buy the implication that the media purposely does this to us. I'm not sure that there is a conspiracy as such to make us lose our "collective memory" but I am pretty sure that it has to do with the phenomena that we've known about for years.
That is the media must constantly compete for our attention in order to attract viewers which equals audience share, which equals higher advertising rates and more money, more money more money...Hence....we move from scandal to scandal instead of moving from issue to issue.
Matt writes a good article...it's fun to read.
