This is the first and hopefully the last time I link favorably to Jonathan Chait. But his article at New York magazine is great. The point, in a nutshell, is that the media is liberally biased (no news there) – conservatives’ worst fears have come true; that media has an impact on culture rather than just being a prism through which prevailing culture is reflected; the medium can be seen as a source of political capital for liberals to refer back to. It contains memes, tropes, and entrenched arguments which evoke knee-jerk scoffs among liberal ideologues which allow them to bypass the detailed argumentation that is more often required of conservatives. Conservatives have lost the culture war because they have been routed by this medium.
Chait makes, in my mind, a stunning admission at the end of his piece: “But they [conservatives] do have a point about one thing: We liberals owe not a small measure of our success to the propaganda campaign of a tiny, disproportionately influential cultural elite.”
I’ll excerpt some more below:
…Brazil had, over the course of four decades, experienced one of the largest drops in average family size in the world, from 6.3 children per woman in 1960 to 2.3 children in 2000. What made the drop so curious is that, unlike the Draconian one-child policy in China, the Brazilian government had in place no policy to limit family size…The researchers zeroed in on one factor: television.
Television spread through Brazil in the mid-sixties. But it didn’t arrive everywhere at once in the sprawling country. Brazil’s main station, Globo, expanded slowly and unevenly. The researchers found that areas that gained access to Globo saw larger drops in fertility than those that didn’t (controlling, of course, for other factors that could affect fertility). It was not any kind of news or educational programming that caused this fertility drop but exposure to the massively popular soap operas, or novelas, that most Brazilians watch every night…
…Nearly three quarters of the main female characters of childbearing age in the prime-time novelas had no children, and a fifth had one child. Exposure to this glamorized and unusual (especially by Brazilian standards) family arrangement “led to significantly lower fertility”—an effect equal in impact to adding two years of schooling.
And then, conservatives and liberals juxtapose their economic arguments when it comes to the influence of the media:
The denials generally take the form of a simple economic aphorism. The entertainment business is a business, so if its product leans left, it must reflect what the audience wants. One oddity of the Hollywood-liberalism debate is that it makes liberals posit the existence of a perfect, frictionless market, while conservatives find themselves explaining why a free market is failing to function as it ought to. (Here is the rabidly conservative Shapiro, sounding like Ralph Nader: “The market in television isn’t free … The issue is one of control. The corporations have it. The American people don’t.”)
And while dog whistles are being heavily discussed, Chait shows us where the liberal media has only to make passive references to entrenched memes in order to conjure up the proper images with which to tear down conservatives. It’s not a dog whistle; it’s a bugle, a clarion call:
Now, of course, the Republican Party has nominated a presidential candidate possessing both a Swiss bank account and money in a Cayman Islands tax haven, and television and film have so deeply ingrained the popular distrust of these things that Democrats need only chant the phrases in order to make him bleed.
Maybe it’s pointless to try to figure out the degree of stunningness involved. What it is though is an admission that can be made from a secure spot. Liberalism has nested itself and it is protected on all sides. Chait et al can now go about admitting that the media works this way. That, after decades of denial, is frustrating in and of itself.
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reality has a liberal bias
the medi amust be liberal to protect socity from naziism white sipremacy and other evils
Anti-Racist, are you committed to promoting justice?
I think, and hope, that “anti-racist” is a troll, mocking liberals with his vapid sloganeering and deliberate misspelling.
“heil hizzle mein nizzle”: fucking greatest handle ever.
re: msm. they are the enemy. treat them as such, and you will find the way to defeat them. pretend they are something they’re not, and they will continue eating your lunch.
They’re inseperable – the two downlow negroes (one imaginary) have been in love since meeting in the prison GED program.
excuse me, inseparable… their terrible spelling is rubbing off on me now, lol.
The market is the interaction of supply and demand WITH money. You can demand as much as you want, without money your demands are worthless. Also, the more money you have, the more you can afford to ignore the market, as you ARE the market.
sucks for you guys that whites will soon be a minority
america is turning intio a Nation of Color
everyone agrees that that is a good thing
america will be what is is supposed to be NOT what it is ( a white supremacist nation)
once we whites have lost our primacy and privielge there will be no more crime and misery
“In the forties, a faction of Hollywood conservatives formed the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Its purported role was to suppress the phantasmal threat that Communists would “pervert this powerful medium into an instrument for the dissemination of un-American ideas and beliefs.””
Interesting to see Chait refer to Hollywood leftism as a “phantasmal” threat to traditional American ideals in the very same article where he acknowledges Hollywood leftism has destroyed or marginalized traditional American ideals.
Actually, reality has a conservative bias. Nazism, Fascism, et al are leftist totalitarian doctrines.
I think a frank admission that the media is overwhelmingly left has become more common as it’s become more obvious over the past few years. The liberal monopoly began to crumble when Dan Rather lost his job due to the efforts of a few bloggers because of fraudulent documents CBS was trying to pass off as the real deal before the 2004 election to unseat Bush. Pre-internet era that would have worked and become part of history. No one would ever have known the truth (no telling how often this was pulled on us successfully before the internet).
Mark Halprin made a similar admission about campaign coverage a few weeks ago. Increasingly, the MSM will have to admit their bias in order (paradoxically) to maintain their limited and diminishing credibility.
Many people overlook asymmetric warfare and memewar/mindweapons. In 1000 AD nobody would believe that in 1900 Europe had the world by its balls. In 1900 AD nobody would believe that in 2012 all seemed lost. The Middle-East and China seem to be very powerful, but have internal problems that only a new religion can cure. I have such a religion. It rests on both euthanasia and eternal hell and damnation. This is a very powerful combination.
NJ Supermarket shooter Terence Tyler now being identified as black:
http://hinterlandgazette.com/2012/08/bridge-pathmark-supermarket-shooter-identified-exmarine-terence-tyler.html
Looks like our download friend(s) were wrong.
if mr. tyler is black we must ask ourselves what “we” : that ; white society did to make him lash out
Maybe He was promoting Justice brother. I am seeking from white boy chuck information that will facilitate additional communication. Your talent must be allowed to shine Anti-Racist.
They do have a tremendous influence. Ths ZOG media is the most powerful weapon of mass destruction in the world’s history. The very best evidence of this is the success of the holocaust fable.
But I’m not afraid.
They have not won. Their reporting is almost completely useless to thinking men. You have to read between the lines, and see what they aren’t writing. The best and the strongest will look other places. Our society cannot be run by slaves and demands growth.
Now and in the future, people want answers. You can’t get a real answer from a MSM source today. We alone can expain why the divorce rate skyrockets, why South Africa and Zimbabwe starve, why Detroit fails, the Fed, and so on.
I do think Leftists should comment. Echo chambers are boring.
@Ryu
Yes. Oil sheiks are remarkably stupid. They buy MSM by the billions, but the cunning Jews have counter-cultural Conservative websites. And those are believed by the people.
It’s also frustrating because you realize that he’s only admitting it because it’s absolutely impossible to deny anymore. For example, there’s the fact that nobody even thought about gay marriage five years ago, but now it’s supposed to be the defining issue of our time. There’s really no other explanation for how that could have happened. Even people who support gay marriage can’t pretend that people just spontaneously changed their minds about it overnight.
The left understands full well what it’s doing. The revolution was lost over and over and over again, from 1840 on: man the barricades, change the government, besiege and strike – eat the rich – and, most frustratingly, change the State and have a Revolution, only to have it always inevitably fall apart. Worse, when they did have power, they made colossal, usually genocidal wrecks out of it. No governments were more murderous or corrupt than the socialist and communist ones. Feudal Europe, or even Japan, was preferable.
So now, it’s all down to culture. So when it all slips into the toilet, they get to rebuild.
All of the lefty progressives’ projects are based on one thing and one thing alone: Ripping apart the fabric of society. Actually replacing it with anything is incidental. The point is a nihilistic, Anti attitude: Not just anti capitalism or economics or racism or pollution – just anti everything. They’re so anti, so militantly against everything in existence, that the contradictions would see them murdering and killing each other with glee if any faction came to power.
Environmentalists accused of racism for promoting fewer people; enrivonmentalists hating people and wanting them exterminated; hippies advocating for jobless futures where we all sit and pray and get high; unions busting for jobs that won’t come because, well duh, they’re unions all over the place; public-sector unions screaming about capitalism but addicted to the taxes capitalism allows; feminists literally undermining and discarding and demonizing men, all men all the time, and then mainstream women wondering why men are just giving up; some complaining about the low birth rate, some about how there are too many people.Judging other cultures is bad, unless you’re judging your own. If a Muslim complains about Muslim culture, they’re just falsely identified – really, it’s okay if their society puts them in burkas or beats them to a pulp if they won’t wear them. It’s a Cute, Cultural Quirk we Just Don’t Understand. Moral values are so passe. So therefore, feminism should say nothing about anything anywhere. Wait, except that if rapes happen every minute in South Africa at high levels, it means a white 16 year-old kid in New Hampshire is a dangerous monster like all men, look at South Africa it’s true, all men are evil power-hungry butchers. Muslim men marry 9 year-olds and force them to have sex! Men are Evil! Islam has nothing to do with it! If you say so, you’re Racist, even if Islam isn’t a race, and just shut up!
Environmentalists whining about immigration. Immigration enthusiasts whining about how we have borders – hey, borders are immoral (but just for us – El Salvador is not immoral for keeping outsiders out).
Using capital letters is Imperialistic. use all lower case. it’s fashionable and shows how uberradical you are. we’re all on the cutting edge now.
The left has no intellectual, social or cultural capital. It was morally and philosophically bankrupted in the 1960′s.
Their command of the media is entirely a cultural accident: All elitist, all the time. Most of these elites are so insulated and distant from the effects of their beliefs that they can’t even see them when shown the logical outcomes.
It’s a comment on the true strength and power of American society that it can manage with so much intellectual and social parasitism. It’s a wonder that there are any educated blacks at all, who have the slightest bit of pride in themselves or their accomplishments, with how the liberal establishment, the governing elite, spend so much time and energy undermining any sense of achievement blacks might otherwise have. It’s amazing there’s any tax base left at all, or even one job not in the parasitic public sector. Or that there’s even one dollar coming into the system, with so much administrative redistribution going on.
But this power the media has is temporary. It, too, will pass. People will stop digesting much of it. It’s already happening with news on the internet: Everyone I know is now aware of black urban mobs and the race war they seem to have started. Everyone talks about it privately, even people in small towns.
Note that almost every call for censorship and censorship of the internet in the past 10years has come almost entirely from the LEft. Now that they control the mainstream, it’s time to shut everyone else down.
Expect that to reach a crescendo. IN any case, nothing will happen: there’s enough lingering resentment at the lies that pass for perceived truth that people won’t easily surrender it.
Yet.
“reality has a liberal bias”
In a way, I agree with anti-racist. Pretend you have to coexist in a giant bubble with 50 hardcore conservatives and 50 hardcore liberals.
Conservative plays for dominance would include alpha male bro hugs and cheek pats, cool alpha dominant posturing, escaping to their own elite world to masturbate to reciprocal values, and on the extreme end: eugenics, fundamental religious shaming, and rebel-yell isolationism in the woods. Hell, the USA was founded by escapists from “reality” aka aristocratic europe.
Liberal plays for dominance include flamboyant proclamations of fuzzy idealism (“You should love everyone!”) , which are precedent for radical racial and sexual tolerance under the guise of appealing to said fuzzy values, social artillery barrages meant to completely ad hominem destroy a conservative’s reputation, and on the extreme end, calls for genocidal approach to child-rearing, family values, and tradition.
Conservatives and liberals have both rejected the one most powerful play for dominance that has ever existed. If you agree that the current reality has a liberal bias, then there is only one non-liberal reality that can counter the tide: social-wide VIOLENCE.
right-wing meta troll:
“reality has a liberal bias”
then why do liberals have to work so hard to color the news?
color. heheh.
The article is about liberals in Hollywood, not in the media
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