Too bad to be true?
Schadenfreude (shäd′n-froi″dÉ™) – 1) Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others; 2) Malicious enjoyment derived from observing some else’s misfortunes; 3) delight in another person’s misfortune. – Source: American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
Greetings my fellow Americans! Whether by happenstance or otherwise, a review of the history of electronic mass media reveals that the sensational and cultural impacts of both their news and entertainment products have exponentially increased over the past 100 years. And while that increase can be attributable, in part, to the ever-accelerating advances in the technologies behind those products, which have enabled ever broader and more immediate releases, how much can we say is due to other human factors, such as the seductiveness, sensual appeal, and addictiveness of their offerings, as well as the general theme of the stories being told in order to attract, and hold, the attention of a mass audience?
I anticipate that most, if not all, would agree that the orientation of western world “mainstream” media narratives tended to be much more pro-God, pro-family and pro-American in the early- to mid-20th Century than the past 30 years or so. Casual conversations with neighbors, friends, passersby on the street, work colleagues around the water cooler, and even with fellow household members were also likely to be much more oriented around the events of everyday life, and locally-focused, rather than being about a blockbuster movie or song, a national sporting event, the latest episode of a hit Reality TV series, or the latest breaking news from Fox News or CNN.
Sellers of other products and services quickly realized the power of advertising via television when it burst upon the domestic consumer market, and the seemingly mesmerizing effect it was having on the general public. In response they have thrown, and continue to throw, massive amounts of money at the providers of both entertainment and news programming to vie for and gobble up the supply of available time slots, especially those offered during events of mass public interest (the NFL Super Bowl, for example).
As the number of those providers of said programming multiplied, competition for those dollars proportionately skyrocketed, and forays beyond the boundaries of mainstream American culture and society increased, as did the orientation of most programming toward more dramatic, salacious, and negative stories, in the effort to demonstrate, to mega-budget advertisers, a superior ability to attract and captivate larger audiences for their suites of programs (and the highly lucrative interstitial advertising therein). As most, if not all, are also providers of both news and entertainment through their conglomerate affiliations, they also realized that television (and later the Internet) enabled them to more effectively, through strategically placed (and subtly staged) imagery and rhetoric, blend fantasy and reality into narratives with both maximum seductiveness and sensuality, regardless of whether based in any pragmatism or purely concocted. Events flown under the flag of “news and information” could be “produced” with virtually the same flair and attractiveness, and via the same methods of embellishment, as entertainment.
The game show genre of the late 1950s through the early 1990s (intersticed with soap operas, early daytime talk, and morning and noon’ish national and local news programming) laid much of the groundwork for this conflation. Later, shows like Survivor, American Idol, Jersey Shore, Storage Wars, et. al., have set the modern-day standard for what seems to qualify as “reality TV” nationally since at least the early 2000s, but Jerry Springer, Morton Downey, Jr., Maury Povich, and their ilk sprang onto the scene about 10 years prior. The People’s Court debuted way back in 1981, and opened the floodgates to a litany of courtroom-based series with “real” litigants, judges and bailiffs which continues in earnest even today. And this blending of real-life and entertainment was not exclusive to those to the political left of center: Even Rush Limbaugh capitalized on the burgeoning “infotainment” format with his radio talk show which debuted in 1988 (and his relatively brief TV gig from 1992-96), and which Donald Trump used to his advantage with The Apprentice for the fourteen years leading up to his run for the U.S. Presidency.
The line between the real physical world and a fantastic version of it via theater and television has been being gradually and steadily blurred since at least the 1960s, and without many if not most of the viewing public unaware it was even happening. Planet of the Apes, one of the most popular movies of the late ‘60s and ‘70s (starring the great actor and future president of the NRA Charlton Heston, and one which I loved as a kid) became a profound commentary on the potential effects of the Cold War. Soylent Green (another Heston flick) warned us about the looming effects of overpopulation in 1973. On television, we began seeing more and more “news” and supporting imagery of environmental and climatological disasters and crises, as the political rhetoric about “global cooling”, then “global warming” and now “climate change” ramped up. Smokey Bear emerged as early as 1944, and was a cartoon-based mainstay on television-aired government PSAs through much of the 1960s and ‘70s (“only YOU can prevent forest fires”). Woodsy Owl debuted as Smokey’s pollution-fighting counterpart in 1971, shortly after the birth of the EPA. Then came the crying Indian standing in front of smokestacks and next to rivers lined with discarded trash, animated shots of icebergs falling apart while polar bears huddled together on what was claimed to be steadily shrinking ice floes, and birds covered in oil from spills due to tanker and/or rig disasters.
By 1980, the propagandization of television and movies was well under way, and as special-effects production and delivery technology (via the Internet and social media) has continued to improve, the steady diet of highlights of everything declared to be wrong with the western world and culture has ramped up, under the guise of both news and entertainment. High-tech propaganda has become a mainstay of our exposure to the world around us.
We’ve yet to correlate any of this to the real effects on our western culture and American society, and speculate on how to break free, en masse, from this media-induced hypnosis. More on both in Part 3
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