Is Matt Taibbi's perspective on the Lamestream insightful?

31 August 2017

I have trouble estimating who causes more trouble . . .

. . . thoughtless and bigoted people, or the profiteers who manipulate them.

Matt Taibbi, figures the latter:

[I]ntramural ethical wars within our [media] business may just be deflections that keep us from facing bigger problems – like, for instance, the fact that we have been systematically making the entire country more stupid for decades.

We learned long ago in this business that dumber and more alarmist always beats complex and nuanced. Big headlines, cartoonish morality, scary criminals at home and foreign menaces abroad, they all sell.

We decimated attention spans, rewarded hot-takers over thinkers, and created in audiences powerful addictions to conflict, vitriol, fear, self-righteousness, and race and gender resentment.

Donald Trump didn't just take advantage of these conditions. He was created in part by them.

What's left of Trump's mind is like a parody of the average American media consumer: credulous, self-centered, manic, sex-obsessed, unfocused, and glued to stories that appeal to his sense of outrage and victimhood.

We've created a generation of people like this: anger addicts who can't read past the first page of a book. This is why the howls of outrage from within the ranks of the news media about Trump's election ring a little bit false.

What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment? Sensitive geniuses?

We spent years selling the lowest common denominator. Now the lowest common denominator is president. How can it be anything but self-deception to pretend this is an innocent coincidence?

I agree with Taibbi — but let's ask two broader questions

Whose responsibility ultimately is it, not to be manipulated?

And how should society encourage the development of less hypocritically self-destructive ways of thinking and acting?

Because . . .

Focusing on the media (as implied scapegoat) puts the culprit label and its possible fix in arguably the wrong place.

Capitalistic society is not primarily interested in developing capable governance or a better reasoned society. Money is the goal. And that means catering to whatever tactics sell to the often mean-spirited impulses that we possess.

Although I agree with Matt Taibbi that American media are intentionally perverse, I doubt that fingering them is going to defeat their money-gobbling impulses. Certainly not any more than such appeals have changed the way our equally reprehensible national politicians act (with the mighty U.S. Supreme Court's enthusiastic blessing).

The moral? — As long as the United States assumes that profit should be society's sole focus, nothing will change

I see nothing on the horizon, given how monumentally silly our culture and its laws have become, that forecasts favorable redirection.

As others have pointed out, the tumult we see revolves around angry (often stupid-acting) people picking on other irritated groups. President Trump is, as Taibbi pointed out, a good representation of the reigning American mentality.

In short, the problem with brainwashed herds of sheep is that they're both. Asking wolves (who herd and shear them) to self-correct is optimistic.

The problem is our system and the unexamined social and economic philosophies that underlie it. Lucre-worshipping pack-congregating animals, by definition, do not think.

It gets indicatively worse:

[W]hen asked what people liked most about Trump’s presidency, the ones who approve of his performance actually cited his personality and conduct four times more often than his policies. In other words, those who like him like him because of his unseemly, unpresidential behavior, not in spite of it.

That group represents about one-third of the Republican party . . . .

According to the Pew survey, they only comprise 16 percent of the population.

So surely the other 65 percent of Republicans, the ones who find Trump’s personality and conduct unseemly, would not want to vote for congressional and Senate candidates who align themselves with him, right?

They are among the 65 percent who find the president a ghastly embarrassment to their party, but that won’t stop them from pushing their candidates to embrace him and his style of politics [ here quoting David M. Drucker in Vanity Fair]:

“Your heart tells you that he’s bad for the country. Your head looks at polling data among Republican primary voters and sees how popular he is,” said one Republican strategist . . . “It would be malpractice not to advise clients to attach themselves to that popularity.”

[T]he GOP establishment . . . is apparently willing to do whatever it takes to perpetuate the toxic politics of the man it perceives as “a bad guy.”

Brainless power-seeking in nasty-nasty herd animals.

The Lamestream may have encouraged our American herd's toxicity, but it did not create it. Historically, such darkness has always been there. The self-destructive implementation of our political and economic system just reflects that.

PeteFree.com

Is Matt Taibbi's perspective on the Lamestream insightful?