The selective mood lighting, the restful blue colors on the set, the inter-cutting of graphics and B-roll footage, the flawless shifts to reporters in far-flung places...it's as if all these supporting features have suddenly been overcome by actors in a stage play who are abruptly stepping out of character. The spell is broken.
Humpty-Dumpty is off the wall and lying in pieces on the floor.
Elite mainstream news is committing suicide. And in a fatuous attempt to save themselves, they are trying a democratic approach. Anchors are sharing more on-air minutes with gaggles of other reporters. But this is counter-productive in the extreme. The News has always meant one face and one authority and one voice and one tying-together of all broadcast elements. It's as if, in a hypnotherapist's office, the therapist decides to bring in colleagues to help render the patient into an alpha-state.
Network news executives are clueless. News directors are clueless. The whole lot of them are too young and too foolish to remember what once made news dominate the public mind.
Plus they are swimming in shark-infested waters. The sharks are independent media.
Bottom-line?
This is a cause for celebration.
The movie called fake reality is packaged rolls of footage in the back of a very large truck moving slowly toward a graveyard.
The elite standard has always been: can we pacify the viewing audience and maintain them in a helpless condition? Now the answer is leaning further toward NO on both counts.
As I say, information mind control, as delivered by elite television news, depends entirely on the elite anchor. His modulated voice and presence and delivery are the glue that holds the illusion together. If by some miracle, the news bosses could raise Walter Cronkite, "the father of our country," from the dead and put him back in the chair, they might have an outside chance of re-establishing their dominance. But too many years have gone by; years of unaccomplished anchors. The horse is out of the barn, the cat is out of the bag.
This is why major news outlets have been appealing to social media/big tech for help, AKA censorship of independent voices. But this desperate attempt is failing, too.
It is crashing on the rocks of vast, uneven, open decentralization of information.
One veteran news director told me several years ago, "We don't have the stars [elite anchors] anymore. The star system is dead. The same thing happened to Hollywood. Now it's happening to us. You could comb all the local news outlets in America, and you wouldn't find one face and voice who could really carry the freight. They've vanished. The up and coming people are lame and weak. We've made them that way. It's some cockeyed standard of equality we've internalized. And now we're paying the price."
Yes, indeed.
They've punched holes in their own ship.
Humpty-Dumpty is off the wall and lying in pieces on the floor.
Elite mainstream news is committing suicide. And in a fatuous attempt to save themselves, they are trying a democratic approach. Anchors are sharing more on-air minutes with gaggles of other reporters. But this is counter-productive in the extreme. The News has always meant one face and one authority and one voice and one tying-together of all broadcast elements. It's as if, in a hypnotherapist's office, the therapist decides to bring in colleagues to help render the patient into an alpha-state.
Network news executives are clueless. News directors are clueless. The whole lot of them are too young and too foolish to remember what once made news dominate the public mind.
Bottom-line?
This is a cause for celebration.
The movie called fake reality is packaged rolls of footage in the back of a very large truck moving slowly toward a graveyard.
The elite standard has always been: can we pacify the viewing audience and maintain them in a helpless condition? Now the answer is leaning further toward NO on both counts.
As I say, information mind control, as delivered by elite television news, depends entirely on the elite anchor. His modulated voice and presence and delivery are the glue that holds the illusion together. If by some miracle, the news bosses could raise Walter Cronkite, "the father of our country," from the dead and put him back in the chair, they might have an outside chance of re-establishing their dominance. But too many years have gone by; years of unaccomplished anchors. The horse is out of the barn, the cat is out of the bag.
This is why major news outlets have been appealing to social media/big tech for help, AKA censorship of independent voices. But this desperate attempt is failing, too.
It is crashing on the rocks of vast, uneven, open decentralization of information.
One veteran news director told me several years ago, "We don't have the stars [elite anchors] anymore. The star system is dead. The same thing happened to Hollywood. Now it's happening to us. You could comb all the local news outlets in America, and you wouldn't find one face and voice who could really carry the freight. They've vanished. The up and coming people are lame and weak. We've made them that way. It's some cockeyed standard of equality we've internalized. And now we're paying the price."
Yes, indeed.
They've punched holes in their own ship.
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