Friday 6 November 2020
A drum for the rousing of the people
She had lost her faith in journalism as a drum for the rousing of the people against wrong. Its beat had led too often to the trickster's booth, to the cheap-jack's rostrum. It had lost its rallying power. The popular Press had made the newspaper a byword for falsehood. Even its supporters, while reading it because it pandered to their passions, tickled their vices, and flattered their ignorance, despised and disbelieved it.
Jerome K. Jerome - All Roads Lead to Calvary (1919)
Mass media - it’s a rum business isn’t it? Supposedly widely disbelieved and despised, but effective enough to unseat* Donald Trump, a reasonably competent and upfront US president in favour of an obviously unsuitable phony.
Supposedly it was Trump’s horribleness** which caused his media problems, but that wasn’t it at all. To my mind his core problem is that huge numbers of middle class people need the simplicity and the virtue signals so copiously supplied by phony politics and the media. They need the media fairy tales and they insist that the horrible enemies of happy ending fantasies be crushed. So that’s how they vote - they vote Disney.
We see the same perennial problem over here in the UK. High level political phonies such as Tony Blair leave trails of destruction which can take a generation to put right. Some of it will never be put right. Trump leaves no trail of destruction but it doesn't help.
And always we get yet another phony and still the mass media promote them. The media need phonies because they are newsworthy. They have to be – there is no point being an obscure political phony. Even Jeremy Corbyn knows that.
Trump tried to make himself newsworthy and succeeded, but did it without media support and in the end his obvious ability wasn't quite enough. He couldn’t be capable and newsworthy at the same time. That turned out to be a remarkably powerful disadvantage.
*Not certain at the time of posting.
**A technical term embracing almost all of the criticisms put forward by Trump’s political opponents.
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5 comments:
Trump is a deliberate bullshitter, not caring whether his words are true or not. This was a winning strategy at first, and led to him becoming a moderately successful Republican president who ruffled lots of feathers. What's interesting now is how enemies cry bullshit, but conveniently forget the stuff that didn't happen: a wall along the Mexican border, economic recession, war with China - or indeed with anyone else.
Tower Hamlets have a lot to learn from the debacle in finding all those 'lost' votes...
We see the same perennial problem over here in the UK. High level political phonies such as Tony Blair leave trails of destruction which can take a generation to put right.
Can you expand on and explain this a bit?
Sam - I like the way Trump exposed the US political divide and showed his supporters what they are up against politically. Particularly the ruthless nature of the US establishment, its control of the media and lack of interest in ordinary working people.
Scrobs - all very murky. Clearly there are problems with fraud, but how extensive they are is not clear.
Tammly - I'd begin with mass immigration and Blair's lack of interest in all the extra hospitals, GP surgeries, houses, roads, electricity, gas supplies and so on needed to accommodate it, quite apart from unpredictable social and political consequences. This one may or may not turn into a disaster, but it can't be put right.
Yes I see. I'd add to that the obsession with 'tick box' culture; and the squandering of resources on a massive scale.
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