ari_ormstunga (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ari_ormstunga) wrote2023-03-07 07:16 am
ari_ormstunga) wrote2023-03-07 07:16 am
Politics as Reality TV
One thing that has become clear is that modern politics has been shaped quite a bit by trends in television. I suspect that it is easier to see if you are more disconnected from visual mass media, especially TV shows. Aside from catching a few glimpses of shows in public now and again, I haven't watched TV regularly in about a decade. Before that, I wasn't a regular TV watcher, but my (now former) spouse was, so it was usually part of the backdrop of my life to some extent. Nowadays, my kids stream cartoons fairly regularly, but without commercials. I'm not always thrilled with it, but I'm not a tyrant and try to make reasonable concessions to my family's wishes. TV is a part of most people's lives and I think everyone has to make their own decisions about the role of this technology in their lives.
I recently watched most of Tucker Carlson's recent expose on the events of January 6th (I prefer transcripts but sometimes I do watch various news clips and the like). Obviously, Tucker was creating a counter-narrative to the narrative the January 6th committee created using cherry-picked images. The mainstream media is frothing at the mouth about this, even though it is exactly what they, and the J6 committee did to begin with!
When the reality TV phenomenon kicked off, I was exposed to various shows (I watched the first three seasons of The Real World on MTV voluntarily for reasons that now elude me, demonstrating that in some small way I have grown and developed slightly better taste in entertainment over the years). I spent some time reading about how those shows were created, and the techniques described were obviously utilized in creating the narrative around "J6".
Participants in the shows described how the editors selectively edited footage to create narratives and storylines that, while they obviously occurred, were portrayed to create drama, storylines, and characterizations that didn't really fit the reality of what was happening. With hundreds of hours of footage to play with, editors were able to force the messy events of "real life" into something that resembled a dramatic narrative. Everything that was depicted happened, but context was left out, scenes and dialogue were smashed together, and sometimes producers sort of conspired to create extra drama so they'd have some good material for their show (cough Ray Epps cough cough).
I'm sure, hypothetical reader, you can see where this is headed. When the J6 committee hired a TV producer to edit the films into a narrative and the whole thing was run by Deep State swamp creatures to attack the King in Orange and his weird cultists, I for one, got the idea that maybe this wasn't going to be an austere and reasoned attempt to establish the truth of what happened that day. Indeed, what we got was selectively edited propaganda pushed by a media that is more and more basically no different than the state-run media of any other tinpot authoritarian regime.
In the middle ground between the partisan propaganda of both Carlson and the J6 committee is the truth of what happened that day. I'm far more sympathetic to Tucker's version in this case because he has created a corrective to the lies and distortions served up by the Uniparty and their lapdog media lackeys, and he doesn't deny that the events the sham committee highlighted occurred, just that they don't show the whole story, which is obviously true.
I recently watched most of Tucker Carlson's recent expose on the events of January 6th (I prefer transcripts but sometimes I do watch various news clips and the like). Obviously, Tucker was creating a counter-narrative to the narrative the January 6th committee created using cherry-picked images. The mainstream media is frothing at the mouth about this, even though it is exactly what they, and the J6 committee did to begin with!
When the reality TV phenomenon kicked off, I was exposed to various shows (I watched the first three seasons of The Real World on MTV voluntarily for reasons that now elude me, demonstrating that in some small way I have grown and developed slightly better taste in entertainment over the years). I spent some time reading about how those shows were created, and the techniques described were obviously utilized in creating the narrative around "J6".
Participants in the shows described how the editors selectively edited footage to create narratives and storylines that, while they obviously occurred, were portrayed to create drama, storylines, and characterizations that didn't really fit the reality of what was happening. With hundreds of hours of footage to play with, editors were able to force the messy events of "real life" into something that resembled a dramatic narrative. Everything that was depicted happened, but context was left out, scenes and dialogue were smashed together, and sometimes producers sort of conspired to create extra drama so they'd have some good material for their show (cough Ray Epps cough cough).
I'm sure, hypothetical reader, you can see where this is headed. When the J6 committee hired a TV producer to edit the films into a narrative and the whole thing was run by Deep State swamp creatures to attack the King in Orange and his weird cultists, I for one, got the idea that maybe this wasn't going to be an austere and reasoned attempt to establish the truth of what happened that day. Indeed, what we got was selectively edited propaganda pushed by a media that is more and more basically no different than the state-run media of any other tinpot authoritarian regime.
In the middle ground between the partisan propaganda of both Carlson and the J6 committee is the truth of what happened that day. I'm far more sympathetic to Tucker's version in this case because he has created a corrective to the lies and distortions served up by the Uniparty and their lapdog media lackeys, and he doesn't deny that the events the sham committee highlighted occurred, just that they don't show the whole story, which is obviously true.