Commerical Media: Then vs Now (Hint: Now is pretty bad )

Hat tip to the always enlightening Moue Magazine (my daily reading; visit often) for their link to ChangeAny1thing in an excellent post about growing up in a house where parents (to their credit) limited the family’s exposure to commercial media. From the article:

I bet. Look, I grew up on 1970’s television. I can probably re-enact every Gilligan’s Island plot and can quote the Brady Bunch at will (I guess; no one’s asked me in a while).

I watched hours and hours and hours of television.

And here I am, 41 years old and a rather well-adjusted member of society (most of the time, anyway). So what’s my deal with the endless rants about smashing the TV?

Here’s the thing: There was a difference between commercial entertainment then and the media monstrosity we’ve got now. A big difference. Spending hours at the mercy of mellow 70’s passive entertainment - on maybe five different channels, tops - is admittedly troubling, and may be the reason I never became a lawyer, let’s say. Ultimately not the best way to spend a childhood (God knows).

But: Spending hours and hours (and hours) with hyper-realistic, psychologically manipulative, adult-oriented, sexualized, super-violent, and emotionally intrusive material - across 500 channels or whatever - is a whole different thing. And that’s what we’ve got today. In the 70’s watching too much television was a troubling social concern. Today it really does threaten our democracy.

Of course, we can’t look back at newsreels from the 50s without cracking up at the horn-rimmed, slicked- hair, t-shirt squares bemoaning the dangers of rock ‘n roll. Turns out Elvis wasn’t the end of civilization as we knew it, after all.

But it’s a whole new ballgame today. Just consider the sneering, nasty tone of commercial entertainment, which alone is enough to make us want to toss the thing in the closet and run to the nearest library. That’s even before we consider the disinformation that passes for “news” (70% of Americans blamed Iraq for 9/11 - enough said) or the consumerist blatherings that spin us into thinking that a fulfilled life is defined by a pursuit for self-gratification. And I’m just getting started.

Popular culture can be – and has been – truly great, and even great art, especially when it represents an organic response to modern living. But when it exists as part of a pre-conceived marketing plan, it’s manipulative crapola. More and more of today’s commercial entertainment – which after all comes by way of a shrinking handful of media conglomerates - carries a “hidden agenda”. It’s getting harder and harder to know what’s really being sold with the entertainment we’re getting, with viral videos of “amateurs” that turn out to be music label plants on YouTube, or “news” shows that do in-depth “features” of films produced by another department of the television network. Or military “experts” who appear objective but are planted, pro-war messengers instead.

Democracy remains the best form of social arrangement we’ve got. But just as businesses need well-defined property laws or a well-run postal system in order to operate best, democracies require a well-informed public that can make thoughtful, wise decisions. Otherwise, who knows what might happen? We could end up with a president we want to share a beer with instead of a well-qualified leader. Shudder. Just imagine what might happen in a world like that.

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