In England, I was disgusted by the newspapers, which both seemed nakedly prejudiced and determinedly gutter-browed, and were patently willing to lie at the drop of a hat to push whatever barrow they were pushing that week (why is it that hats are so much easier to drop than anything else? are they that cheap and disposable? Is the universal constant of attraction higher for hats?).
Anyway, I more or less got used to ignoring most of the British papers, and relied on the TV, which was superficial but less blatantly bent, and on the Economist, whose biases are fairly gentle and well-known, and I'm used to adjusting for those. Ironically, the paper I probably enjoyed most was the Daily Telegraph, which is ferociously right-wing, to the point of self-parody (plus having the best bridge column of any of the papers).
Over here, the prejudices are at least mostly a lot less open. I except Fox News, which is not so much a TV channel as a permanent paid political announcement in shoddy disguise (and was specifically set up & funded by right wing billionaires to try to ensure their perpetual dominance), and to some extent MSNBC (a cable channel), which spasmodically makes gestures towards what passes for liberalism in this country, & has the only genuinely left-wing shows available, such as they are (of course this is just trying to serve a perceived market gap, not driven by ideology at all).
Of course, America has gone so far right in the last 25 years, that what passes for left-wing here would comfortably fit in the National Party back home, or the UK Conservatives ... but still gets called socialism or communism.
What is even more problematic, and less digestible, is that all the news media* here are now driven totally by the profit motive, without regard to standards, taste, or any slightest interest in truth. This was not always so, editorial opinion & evaluation used to be important, but that has all gone by the board, in the most ruthless fashion.
As a result, any vile and contemptible lies that get uttered, if they are 'shocking' or controversial enough to attract audience, are picked up and repeated into this enormous echo chamber, a dozen, a hundred times, before they are ever examined for any shred of truth: and any discrediting of them is always laggard and partial, and usually overwritten by the next wave of utter preposterous outrage.
This has accelerated enormously since the election last year, which has seemed to drive a tenth of the white population here utterly stark raving mad, so that they believe that anything the congress might do, any law, is a horrible tyranny and vile repression: apparently because the government is run by a black man, and of course he will do all the utterly contemptible and vicious things to them, that they have been doing to his people for the last four hundred years. They are working themselves into such a hysterical flat-out temper tantrum that I wouldn't be surprised to hear of some simply popping off with strokes and cardiac arrests from sheer ill temper.
But, the crazies will always be out there. Lord knows when Bush was in office (I won't say in power), there were certainly plenty of left wing crazies spouting tyranny & revolt and other nonsense.
The difference since the last election is, these crazies get front page coverage, and lead off the nightly news - every damn night! Corrections, apologies, modifications, if any of those even occur they are buried at the back of the paper or broadcast, while the headline is still more poison. Not because the journalists or editors believe it, just because it sells, it makes money.
Even worse, if that is possible: when anyone in the current government makes any announcement or argument, the media will go out and find someone to say the contrary, no matter how ludicrous the so-called opposition person might be (and believe me that can be ludicrous enough to make Monty Python look like a documentary**).
The result seems to be public confusion and dissonance on an unprecedented level. It has raised the level of rancor and bitterness to an unbearable level - and of course, if the Democrats lose the next election, they will not just respond in kind, but raise the ratchet another level again. It's hard to see where that would end, but it can't be anywhere good.
The thing that most infuriates me about it all, is simply that since being elected, President Obama has been pursued a doggedly centrist, limited policy and trying to encourage cooperation and reduce the rancor of politics, but the Republicans are having such a tantrum that the electorate rejected them, simply because their policies demonstrably, indeed spectacularly, failed to work in any dimension, that they are refusing any sort of cooperation, even when it is obviously in the interests of the country and in their own interests.
Oh well, all I can do is keep preaching the sensible, try my best to fight the lies I hear repeated at the office every day, and keep my head straight. I have to admit, its probably worse here than almost anywhere else in the USA, as Arkansas is so crushingly conservative.
Funny, though, before last November, I had the impression that racism in this country had diminished***, whereas all it has done is learned to be less obvious and more spiteful. Oh well.
* I would except the news blogs from that, by and large
** Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and the preposterous Glenn Beck spring to mind. Beck in particular is so far gone in delusion as to be quite certifiable. Palin, I should add, seems to have gone from serious politician to posturing figurehead in record time.
*** Of course it is, by population, as the white population gradually shrinks in proportion, but that's an awfully slow way to eliminate it.
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How apposite - this quote seems to be totally on point:
Washington Post television writer Tom Shales shares an anecdote:
I have a short antidote. I mean anecdote. Years ago I was phoned & asked to be on some news show, this happened a lot in years past, and first I was quizzed on the topic to be discussed. And what I said essentially was that I thought both sides of the argument had validity and that it wasn't a clear cut black&white issue. Bam - that was the end of THAT conversation. They wanted someone who totally adhered to ONE view or the other, not somebody who could see both sides. I think this is a very real problem that results in a lot of yelling where there should be an "exchange of ideas."
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