For those of you who have found it too wearying to work out the ins and outs of US politics, here is a good opportunity to straighten out those kinks in your reasoning.
Bear in mind, though, that whenever anyone tells you that they're trying to help you straighten out your thinking, by all means give them a listen. But also be very careful that they're not slanting their reporting to the benefit of some particular view, and that's the case here, too. And it is also the case when I go on one of my rants, or even when I explain something that seems to be in a reasonable 'voice'.
Particularly in politics, the lines of motivations are very tangled. There is nothing that this speaker says that I have not realized, without any external prompting, a year or two, or even a decade or two ago. But Matt Taibbi really seems to me to gather up all the threads that sometimes elude us, and explain things in such a way that we can be a little less frustrated about the day-to-day news, wondering whether we're missing something.
I stumbled on this video by Matt Taibbi just last night. It is very clear and lucid, and is intended for a very general audience. It is basic information, information that will be invaluable for several kinds of people:
* People who just do not like the wholesale prejudiced atmosphere we have now, where we almost have to avoid people with one sort of opinion, and only talk with those who have our point of view. We know this is unhealthy, and you'll begin to see that this state of affairs was actually--possibly unintentionally--manufactured by Business Interests.
* People who do not like to have to think for themselves, and need their prejudices figured out for themselves by experts. (This was intended to be funny, but honestly, it is very tiring to have to unravel the twisted motives of people we see in the news, particularly when these motives change daily!)
* People who used to have friends of all types: white, black, conservative, libertarian, liberal, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab, Russian, European, British, Irish, Mexican, etc, and deplore how things stand today, where it seems almost a felony to want to talk to these people again.
The basic problem has been that, back in the Sixties (as Matt T. explains,) both Radio and TV news services were at pains to capture the largest possible audience. This meant presenting the news with as little emotion as possible, not appearing to support any particular side. Doing this even-voiced reporting ensured that you did not alienate any sector of the audience.
Once the sources of news proliferated, and in particular, once the Internet became a source of 'news', but more accurately, a source of opinion mingled with news, it became more profitable for each news service to select a particular demographic, and focus on getting a solid grip on them. The most successful of these news services (Fox News) learned that the best strategy was to make their target audience mad about the news, and keep them mad, and only show them news that kept them mad. That should be enough for you to figure out the rest without Matt Taibbi's help, but for the more feeble among us, Matt goes above and beyond the call of duty, dotting every i and crossing every t. MSNBC is the same as Fox, except that they focus on keeping Democrats permanently angry. Today, he explains, every news source has identified its target audience, and relentlessly pursues the objective of permanently keeping their tempers simmering, by selecting the news stories that support that anger and hate. So, unless you switch your news sources around, you're never going to hear about good things happening around the world, or even around the continent (North America, to be exact) that may take you off the simmer, and miss a juicy advertisement. As someone once said, the responsibility of every business is to maximize its profits, and not worry about the well-being of its workers, or the good of society. Good businesses have to be bastards. (As if I didn't have it in for business already, here is one more nail in the coffin of my good feelings for business.)
The people who don't waste energy on getting angry are: Business Interests. As long as they can sell their advertising, as far as they're concerned, hate is good. Small businesses are not party to this cruel strategy; and in any case, it is the news services that really keep the news anchors' toes in line with this strategy for maximizing their advertising profits. As Matt explains, once the news anchors arrive at a winning formula, the advertisers hate when the news anchors depart from it, because the profits begin to plummet immediately. A happy audience is not an audience glued to the TV, and biting its nails.
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