Media

The Rage of the Prince-Electors

by

During the Middle Ages, in the time of the Holy Roman Empire, there was a small group of men known as the Prince-Electors.   They, and only they, got to choose the next Emperor.

We have something kind of similar in America today.   There is a cluster of influential and would-be-influential people who fervently believe that–while they might not get to actually selected the next President–they should have the authority to decide who may and who may not be considered for the Presidential role.   These Prince-Electors include national journalists, Ivy League professors and administrators, and high-level government officials.   Their primary means of action is via the control of communications channels.

The sense of entitlement is clearly displayed in an article by Robert Reich, in which he basically asserts that speech-control by social media is necessary to protect democracy.    Reich clearly believes that he, and those he considers to be his peers, should have the right to decide what Americans can read, see, and hear.

Many years ago, I was talking to a wise executive, who said something has that stayed with me:

When you’re running a large organization, you’re not seeing reality.   It’s like you’re watching a movie in which you get to see maybe one out of every thousand frames, and from that, you have to figure out what’s really going on.

This is very true in business, and it’s even more true in politics.   The control of what Frames people get to see, and in what sequence, is a source of enormous power.

This power reaches its zenith, of course, in totalitarian societies, where people are prevented from sharing unapproved Frames via threats of arrest, long prison sentences, and even execution. China under Xi and Russia under Putin are pretty close to this condition.   Vitaliy Katsenelson, in one of his essays on Russia and Ukraine, remarked that many of his friends back in Russia seem like they are living in the Truman show…ie, a totally controlled and imaginary environment.

We are not presently in that situation in the US, and Reich’s analogizing of Trump’s tweets with Putin’s information control is obscene.   (The whole piece is very 1984-ish…to ‘war is peace’ and ‘freedom is slavery’, add ‘censorship is democracy’.)   There are still enough independent sources of information in the US that people who make an effort can still break out of the walled gardens (complete with serpent) and formulate their own impressions of what is going on.   But momentum is powerful, and people are busy.   The frame selection role is very powerful.

There is real anger, on the part of the Prince-Electors, that anyone would dare to challenge their control of information flow…note the long-standing fury at the very existence of Fox News and talk radio.   I am sure the rage today is raised to a higher level, in the wake of Musk’s plan to acquire Twitter outright as opposed to merely taking a Board seat.

See my related posts Comm Check,   Do the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop Approve?,   and this book review.

Done With Disney

by

I posted a couple of weeks ago on this blog how distressed I was at the turn that the management of Disney’s corporation had gone of late and having made a personal decision to delete Disney from my range of entertainment interests. Now it seems that Disney management is going full woke and full steam ahead … which, OK, is the choice of corporations to make in their sphere. If management of Disney wants to go all-gay all the time, in catering to a bare 2-3% of the public, it’s their company, their choice. Maybe not a good one, but theirs to make.
Now, what isn’t OK is for a corporation to come out full-throated political in the case of Florida’s law limiting what can be construed as sex ed to the elementary school set; this aimed at kids barely aware that there are differences between boys and girls. Believe me, parents and grandparents feel very strongly that such lessons are wildly inappropriate to the point of being construed as sexual grooming. Normal parents (and grandparents) will not put up with lesson materiel which is almost guaranteed to damage children, especially as a fair number of elementary school teachers seem prone to overshare regarding their own sexual conduct.

Read more

The Hash-Tag War

by

I’ve been cynically amused over the past couple of weeks at how efficiently the Laptoperati and Twitter-fixated media Powers That Be have swung to “Russia Bad-Ukraine Brave & Noble!!! Eleventy!!” since the Russian invasion-attempted-occupation-re-occupation of the place began in a big way nearly two weeks ago. How can it now be World War III already, when we still have our Covid-19 decorations still up? Watching practically every media outlet swing into action in being all sympathies for Ukraine and all-hate on Russia is … astonishing. All the parties who would have been lighting candles, holding vigils for peace, and lecturing us about how war is not good for children and other living things, and no blood for oil have changed tune without missing a beat, hardly. Suddenly Vladimir Putin is the enemy of all that is good and decent, and everyone is rushing to declare sympathy with and support of the Ukraine, declare anything Russian to be double-plus-ungood, and throwing Russian cats out of cat shows, Anna Netrebko out of the Met, and vodka with a Russian-origin brand-name down the drain. Celebrity fools with pretensions to adequacy issue hysterical demands that Russia be thrown out of NATO, or that NATO enforce a no-fly zone over the Ukraine never mind that Russia wasn’t a member of that organization and instituting a no-fly zone would almost instantly involve the United States. The turn-around is purely astonishing to behold; a hashtag/social media war on steroids.

Read more

The Bodyguard of Lies

by

It’s screamingly obvious to anyone save perhaps the most gullible in a present-day university history program, that attempting to research the events and conduct of a war and figuring out what is happening while the war is still ongoing is an impossibility. Were the defenders of Snake Island all killed in a Russian barrage … or are they alive, and prisoners of war? Is the Russian advance going as clockwork towards their goals … or are they being turned back? Have Ukrainian fighter aircraft shot down a Russian transport aircraft? Successfully ambushed a Russian column on an unspecified mission here or there in the conflict zone? Who is coming out ahead, dead or alive, on the ground or in the struggle for the eyeballs and sympathies of the outside world, watching with unswerving attention? What are we being told, and what is there to gain from us believing it?
The grim truth is really, we can’t really believe much of what we see or hear about the war in the Ukraine at present. No armchair generals at this group blog, merely a collection of somewhat well-informed amateur (and perhaps a sprinkling of professional) analysists trying to make sense of what we can see, dimly through the fog. Truth is a nugget of pure gold somewhere in that fog and dirt; finding it may be more a matter of pure luck.

Read more

The Odessa Steps

by

The early Soviet propaganda movie, The Battleship Potemkin, culminates in a prolonged and shocking sequence of local citizens men, women and children gunned down by remorseless Czarist soldiers on Odessa’s famed harbor-to-town staircase. The sequence remains a shocker. (And is still studied in film schools, apparently, for being ground-breaking effective and technologically ahead of the time.) Historically, there was never such a massacre on the Steps, but the sequence served as a kind of cinematic shorthand for State brutality aimed at essentially harmless, unarmed, unthreatening civilians in a public place; civilians who were seen to be defying the authority of the State. And so the armed minions of the State acted because even the mildest defiance of Authority on the part of ordinary workers and their families is a stab at the heart of those Authorities. They cannot brook defiance, and so out come the armed police, just as they have this week in the streets of Ottawa with regard to the truckers protesting vaccine mandates. All the forces of the law, with the cheerful approval of the Canadian established media, the intellectual and ruling class it’s really rather breathtaking, this concentrated venom and enthusiasm for breaking heads and bones, all aimed at the workers participating in a civil and well-organized street protest. (It would seem that as far as the RCMP are concerned, Dudley Do-Right and Constable Benton Fraser both have left the building so much for Canadian ‘polite.’)

What will happen now that the ordinary working stiffs of Canada have been so casually abused by their native ruling class; threatened with having bank accounts frozen, their means of earning a living confiscated, themselves arrested, while their pets and children given over to the tender care of animal shelters and the child “protection” authorities? How far will this protest go now, bouncing down the Odessa Steps like a runaway baby carriage? It could be that Canadians, with the ethos of being polite, courteous, and truthful, may be truly shocked, shocked to the point of open rebellion over being consistently lied about and bullied by their ruling elite. In America, our own flyover country residents are perfectly accustomed to being abused as stupid, red-necked rubes by our own elite class. It’s what we have come to expect of NPR, the political ruling class, the New York/Hollywood cultural axis and the inside-the-Beltway-Washington DC denizens; what we have come to expect of them anyway. It may be a new and shocking development to ordinary, working-class Canadians, this contempt for the working class, though. Comment as you wish.