Paranoid, psychotic patients lose touch with reality as the outcome of a complex series of interlocking events. Because of biological disturbances in their brains, they begin to perceive things that do not exist. They begin to find meaning where none resides. Their rational minds attempt to make sense of the inexplicable and develop delusions that fully explain the anomalous series of perceptions that impinge upon them. Although the final product, a psychotic disturbance, is a complex one it often starts with problematic perceptual disturbances. For example, a person may start to hear voices telling him that people are out to get him. The voices may prove their bona fides by warning him of dangers. The voice may point out the hidden meaning of what might have once been random events. The voice may show the person that the commentator on TV is directing his words directly at the person. Armed with such "proof" of the fantastic plots being arranged against him, the patient becomes ever more vigilant and finds more and more evidence of his own senses that confirm his worst fears, until finally he is forced to accept that , yes, there is a conspiracy at work directed against him. Full blown psychosis follows shortly thereafter.
Note that once one's perceptions have been corrupted, all else logically follows.
Just as an individual can become deranged when his sensory apparatus betrays him, so too can a society be made psychotic when its sensory apparatus is corrupted. Consider this excerpt from an examination of the events surrounding the Spanish-American War and the role of WIlliam Randolph Hearst and "yellow journalism" following the explosion and sinking of the U.S.S. Maine:
"There is no war," Remington wrote to his boss. "Request to be recalled."
Remington's boss, William Randolph Hearst, sent a cable in reply: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." Hearst was true to his word. For weeks after the Maine disaster, the Journal devoted more than eight pages a day to the story. Not to be outdone, other papers followed Hearst's lead. Hundreds of editorials demanded that the Maine and American honor be avenged. Many Americans agreed. Soon a rallying cry could be heard everywhere -- in the papers, on the streets, and in the halls of Congress: "Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain."
Our media is failing us in ways that are much less warranted and equally as egregious as William Randolph Hearst and his ilk.
EJ Dionne offered an interesting criticism of our media in his column:
A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.
Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don't. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.
The power of the Limbaugh-Gingrich axis means that Obama is regularly cast as somewhere on the far left end of a truncated political spectrum. He's the guy who nominates a "racist" to the Supreme Court, wants to weaken America's defenses against terrorism, and is proposing a massive government takeover of the private economy. Steve Forbes, writing for his magazine, went so far recently as to compare Obama's economic policies to those of Juan Peron's Argentina.
Democrats are complicit in building up Gingrich and Limbaugh as the main spokesmen for the Republican Party, since Obama polls so much better than both of them. But the media play an independent role by regularly treating far right views as mainstream positions and by largely ignoring critiques of Obama that come from elected officials on the left.
This was brought home at this week's annual conference of the Campaign for America's Future, the progressive group that supports Obama but worries about how close his economic advisers are to Wall Street, how long our troops will have to stay in Afghanistan, and how much he will be willing to compromise to secure health care reform. In other words, they see Obama not as the parody created by the far right, but as he actually is: a politician with progressive values but moderate instincts who has hewed to the middle of the road in dealing with the economic crisis, health care, Guantanamo and the war in Afghanistan.
I think that EJ Dionne is correct that the Media has a slanted agenda, but his reasoning is faulty. The Media hardly tilts right, however, it does go out of its way to elevate the most outrageous of Obama's critics and their most outrageous comments in order to depict the Republicans as dangerously right wing (racist, social Darwinians, radical anti-abortionists, fundamentalist Christian [which to the secular elites is a priori evidence of disturbed cognition].) The fact that they inadvertently promote the viewpoints of those they mean to savage is secondary. Dionne is also correct in noting that criticism of Obama from the left has a hard time finding its way into the national media. This is probably because they correctly intuit that if Obama's policies are too closely identified with his supporters on the far left, middle America will get much more nervous than they are already. (Please note that repeated surveys consistently show that President Obama is much more popular than his policies.) Thus, the media has tacitly agreed to support Obama's stealth approach to single payer government run health care, for example, recognizing that getting to their destination incrementally assures success while an overt attempt to go "all the way" would lead to failure.
Another symptom of psychosis is negative hallucination, ie when you fail to see what is right in front of you. Fabius Maximus has collected a series of Media descriptions of a well publicized event and documented the failure of the American press to see what was right in front of their eyes:
We’re ignorant about the world because we rely on our media for information
It’s often the little vignettes that show the nature of America’s broken observation-orientation-decision-action loop (the OODA loop). In this case, step one: seeing events. The US media presents a sanitized version of reality, to avoid challenging our preconceptions or spoiling their narrative. Getting America back on track requires fixing this problem.
Today we have a telling little incident from Treasury Secretary Geithner’s trip to pacify our Asian creditors. The European media tells the story. Too bad most Americans did not hear of it.
“Chinese assets are very safe,” Mr Geithner said, answering a question after his opening address at Peking University this morning. His answer was greeted with laughter by the students, who question the wisdom of China spending huge amounts of money on US bonds instead of improving domestic living standards.
...
A summary from The Gartman Letter, 3 June 2009:
But the US media avoided any reporting of the laughter that greeted Mr. Geithner’s speech. None of the US television stories reported laughter; none of the US newspapers {other than the NY Times} reported the laughter; none of the US magazines covering the trip reported the laughter — but the laughter was loud; it was palpable and it was very, very real. Simply put, the US fiscal circumstance has become a laughingstock, and we do not say that lightly.
But we’re not alone in remaining ignorant of this episode. The Chinese press didn’t report it either. Of course, China is a tyranny run by the Communist Party. What’s our excuse?
Our Media is very protective of Barack Obama's image. After all, were they to reveal that a core policy of his Treasury Secretary, "the only man for the job", is a cause for mirth among those who we are relying upon to execute his policy, this might raise questions about the wisdom of what passes for our current economic policy. This might reflect poorly on the Press, who have done so much to present a rosy picture for their readers and viewers of the President, as well.
It has been apparent for a long time that our MSM "narratives" have only a passing relationship to the underlying realities they have so carefully attempted to frame. When the body politic receives mediated sensory impressions that are widely divergent from reality, omit significant data points, or invent them, our understanding of the world becomes impaired. Fantastical explanations for prosaic data find easy purchase, and conspiracy theories gain vibrancy in the absence of informed commentary; that way lies ruin.
Our MSM are failing us in fundamental ways. For American democracy to survive it becomes more crucially important than ever that we expand our sources of news about the world that is shrinking by the day. There is great resiliency in our system and in our people. I firmly believe that most people are not fooled most of the time, but when the sensory inputs are disordered, the output can become dangerously erratic.
For another example today of a particularly cynical replacement of news by narrative, take a look at Ken Allard's article, Protesting the New York Times' Pulitzer:
It was an ironic way to begin the Memorial Day weekend, but on May 22nd I formally protested the 2009 Pulitzer Prize awarded to the New York Times.Its prize-winning story was published last April under the title, "Behind Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand." The report's story-line: a secretive program organized by Donald Rumsfeld targeted the military analysts who often appeared as part of television's coverage of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
...
... when the Times' story ran - my face appearing on the front page with eight other military analysts - it was journalism at its shabbiest. Their scoop was hardly a scoop but their profoundly slanted story was defamatory - a classic example that badly told tales yield only incomplete truths. But after carefully re-reading its 7,800 words, I was even more appalled to discover that the story never once mentioned that a book called WARHEADS even existed! Such a deliberate omission would be shocking in any undergraduate college with an Honor Code worthy of the name. But the Times had an obvious responsibility to give readers an alternative to its one-sided editorial judgments that were often vicious.
Read the whole thing; if the New York Times were an actual newspaper and still capable of shame, they would be deeply chagrined by their corruption of the journalists' craft.
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