The Media And Elections

Remember that no matter how much you may dislike a given candidate, the real enemy is the media. The media is the god to whom all bad candidates pledge obedience. As much as candidates try to play the media, in the end it is always the media that plays them.

I even feel sorry for Donald. Seriously. Watching Chris Matthews goad Trump into making an inane comment (as if he needed encouragement) was hard to watch. Donald, even Donald, was trying to avoid a nonsensical question, but eventually Matthews wore him down and got the sound bite he wanted.

Hillary too. I’m not talking about conservative talk show radio, which does an unspeakable butcher job on her while not dealing with the relevant issues that they could actually pin her to the wall on. I’m talking about the mainstream media. No matter how Hillary tries to portray herself, the media always paints her unsympathetically.

Of course, while I feel sorry that they are both victims of the media, they are after all guilty of playing the game. Instead of trying to put forward an appearance that the media will accept, she should worry more about being herself than projecting the right image. And Donald Trump has been playing a game this whole time, knowing how base and immoral the media is that they will lap it up like the sick puppies they are. He had to have known, or should have known, that eventually the media would turn on their favorite circus monkey once the routine got old. Live by the media, die by the media.

Perhaps with this current presidential campaign, though, the populace is finally starting to get it. Perhaps they see that the problem is not so much the candidates but what the candidates have to do to get the attention of the media. I truly believe that the citizens, both liberal and conservative, have finally realized the most corrupting influence on politics today, a media that prefers sound bites to substance so that they have more time for commercials. News organizations that feel no moral obligation to actually report the truth but to bring in more viewers by titillating their audience. Perhaps with the advent of the internet, we are so flooded with click-bait that we now feel we have to sort through all the nonsense in order to find what is meaningful to our lives.

It is the media that has made the election cycle the cesspool it has become. If the media were doing their job, they would winnow out the wheat from the chaff rather than throwing it all on the fire in order to create spectacle. The media is interested in one thing, and that is money. To that end they reduce the amount of reporters they have to pay, avoid controversial issues that they would have to commit to, and accept news uncritically from whatever source is willing to give it cheaply, no matter how untrustworthy they may be. Thus the government, corporations, any powerful figures—the exact people journalism is supposed to protect us from—are able to use the media as its mouthpiece.

Conservatives have learned how untrustworthy the mainstream media is, though they seem less aware that they face the same issue with conservative media. And I really do believe a new generation, that is perhaps a little more media savvy, realizes the media is nothing more than a device for promoting mindsets the powerful interests want you to embrace. Perhaps it is a little more difficult for us who are older, because we remember media that was able to give us, if not truth, then at least scraps of honesty and bits of enriching programming. But we too are getting to the end of our rope.

It’s not over yet, the media doesn’t realize how far from reality or the needs of the people it is supposed to serve it has gone. In the next few months you will be able to see on exhibition all the skill of the competently corrupt media infrastructure spin out its poisonous web of useless and misleading information. It will present for you a final freakshow that will leave Jerry Springer and Marilyn Manson envious.

But it’s breaking down. No structure built on such shoddy foundations that seeks to reach so high can last for long. True, the damage it will cause as it crashes will be severe, but we’ll all be better off once it has fallen.