Analysis: Each New Medium Gets More Truthful At End Of Life Cycle - And Fox News Illustrates The Death Of Television

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You know how it is on your death bed. Well, if you're not there yet, you will someday. Suddenly, it's oh, I want to make peace with God. Oh, I was in church on September eleventh. Because it's almost over, and you're about to meet your maker.

You may or may not agree with the underlying assumptions that have led the author to this conclusion, but it's difficult to refute the conclusion. Causality versus correlation, then? I'll report, you can decide. Which, of course, is Fox's nice way of saying you're an idiot if you don't accept my logic, because it's logic.

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This is a very simple concept. Each mass-medium that has ever afflicted the American public begins as a cheap opportunist liar, and then progresses to become more truthful until it finally dies out; just like you and I. This is because, you must remember, that media are not people, and are not inherently, as they purport to be, communications tools among humanity. They are shiny toys we like to play with, and delude ourselves into thinking, abashed with lust for their ability to tickle our brains, hearts, and souls - that somehow they possess human properties. Most people, when television was "in," simply crashed in front of the television and then went to find out "what's on," channel surfing and the like. Only later would "appointment television" be discovered. It was the initial process of discovery that would beget "appointment television." The point here, you're not in love with the personalities, you're in love with the concept that there's a device you can turn on and it will preoccupy you from all those end-of-life questions that you're putting off until your deathbed. You're in love with televisions underlying epistemological gospel and life lesson, which is the Gospel of Instant Gratification, brought to you, most often, by the purveyors of the latest technology. It's one big advertisement.

The Newspaper's Arc Toward Conservatism

But I must deliver on my premise here. So, we go back to the newspaper. How did newspapers get big? Benjamin Franklin made no pretense of fairness toward both or all sides. Back in his day, newspapers were ranting vessels for anyone who had the means to buy printing presses suited to the purpose. Journalism rose to prominence on the heels of sensationalism; and that's been its sweet spot ever since. Naturally, after those scalawag "yellow journalists" were found out, you had the more "legitimate" airs being put out rather strongly from the likes of the New York Times, under pretense of being the nation's "paper of record," and whatnot, but such attempts at rationality are so foreign to most journalists that it never lasts for very long. Even as the Times flails today, it clings viciously to its liberalism, however that liberalism is, compared to the sensationalism and blatant attack-dog verbiage of journalism's early days, its heyday, you might call it - are trite. And so I would argue that the New York Times went from super-crazy-liberal, all the way to just mildly liberal. I predict it will continue to drift right - not a monumental conclusion in this conservative resurgence, but again, it illustrates the larger trend. What's that "objectivity" we see in the papers today that we know as thinly veiled leftism? It's merely more thinly-veiled leftism compared with the newspapers of yesteryear (if you account for cultural changes and zero it out). And the newspaper got more nuanced because it had to. It got polite, but at the end of the day, those who operate media outlets are still just leftists playing with toys, so they never really, perhaps, really respect their audience. A little harsh, you might say; I'm still coming to terms with it myself.

Radio's Arc Toward Conservatism

Radio's conservatism is only so obvious and familiar to us today because we lived through its rounding out at a very comfortable conservative place. We've seen how the liberal Air America failed. Who wins on radio? Rush. Hannity. O'Reilly wasn't conservative enough. Glenn Beck. Michael Medved. You know who they are. Not to belabor the point, but radio, too, also started super-liberal. CBS, of course, shocked and awed by broadcasting War of the Worlds as straight news. It also played a role, with the rest of the networks, in pioneering the wussy-man soap opera, targeted at, who else, but the housewife. That's where the evil, man-bashing sitcom grew its roots, in radio. "The Soap Opera." As I said, sitcoms (preceded by radio dramas) are merely, with the advertising, one big long soft-sell, effective precisely because we don't think about them as commercials, the totality of the programming, I mean. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, here. The point - radio started liberal just like everything else, and drifted from the likes of what you'd expect of your dumb sitcom fare of today, toward arguably the most conservative medium we know in our lifetimes.

"And Then There's Television"

Television. The devil's box. The idiot box. The boob tube. Your English teacher was right, it's all of these things. Now - please please please - you've got to keep in mind- because I know what you're thinking. What about those "innocent" classic television programs like Leave it to Beaver, I Love Lucy, and Bewitched. Remember a key premise of this writing, which is that, in the same way we adjust GDP for inflation, we have to adjust the liberal-conservative value scale of the episode according to the shifting values of the culture. So- in other words, yes, television may have appeared to us to look more innocent back then, however, it was extremely subversive when you consider what the culture was like. Mary Tyler Moore, for instance, Maude, all pushing what, at the time, was a super-feminist narrative. Nobody forgets that rancid Three's Company bit. And the list goes on.

And Television, in its traditional sense, is reaching the end of its life cycle. This is why Fox News is dominating. As I said - each medium goes from liberal to conservative just before dying out of significant use. TV, of course, having long lost millennials, and mainly the realm of housewives and deadbeat dads.

"""Social""" Media/Web X.0

Again, I want to help you make sure you see the trees for the forest, here, because particularly when you're living through a given media's life-cycle, it affects the way you perceive it. If it didn't affect us, it wouldn't hold such a powerful sway over our lives. That's why yours truly is here to help you understand what even the producers of the smut don't. If they did, they wouldn't be producing it. At least, I like to believe that.

You have to keep in mind that the real producers of social are those who own the platform. And even I, writing this, am in the middle of Social's cycle, so it is difficult to analyze what we're in the middle of as easily as we've seen papers, radio, and TV.

I want to clarify that I'm talking specifically about Facebook, Twitter, Google, and search; so I'm not taking into consideration for the moment corporate web sites, online shopping, which are all significant but I haven't been able to compartmentalize them in such a way that they align with the above trends. I know it will come to me... give me a few weeks.

As Betty White has said, "It sounds like a huge waste of time." And college students tell themselves this, swearing to get off of this, but they can't. They know it's what a better America used to call a "vice." But they somehow can't resist clicking again, and again, like a mouse in a Skinner Box. And that's exactly what it - and all of this is. Like the TV remote. It's just that with each medium, the clicks get faster. They really all are modified combinations of television and telegraphs, if you think about it. Click, click, click, click, stimuli, stimuli, stimuli. And when you put it in those terms the undignified, dehumanizing nature of it becomes all the more clear.

On a macro-level, and again, thanks for understanding my predicament in attempting to track the values of something we're still in the middle of-

I guess we would start by understanding that each medium, perhaps, just perhaps, gets progressively more conservative--compared to the immediate culture it's a part of. In sum, though, if we don't adjust for cultural norms of the moment, each new medium is more liberal than the last, because culture is progressing toward liberalism as a result of the prevailing liberalizing force that each previous medium has been on culture. Crystal clear, right?

How is Facebook leftist, liberal? You don't think it is, because, well, you're the star of Facebook, and you're not a leftist, are you? Nobody likes to think of ourselves as one, but the very fact that everybody is the star of the show, and that there is no singular moral authority, is in and of itself a leftist ideal. Leftism, liberalism, remember, is disorder. And Facebook, perhaps inadvertently, fed a Baby-boomer-began, millennial-accelerated, resentment of any and all authority, which of course leads to disorder and societal collapse.

So, that's how Facebook started. But in kind of a buyer's remorse of sorts - since each of these new technologies is so ridiculously liberal compared to the real world, and thus attracts the rebellious, unchurched, unfamily types who really hate humanity but have the guilt complex which compels them to "protest too much" about perceived evils and whatnot, but evils which aren't real -

Just like all the media, and you've seen it - Facebook and the rest have all suddenly, as if surprised by just how liberal the medium has the potential to be, has run back toward the safe center. However, just like journalism, then radio, then TV, the damage has already been done. And all of this while....

Googlefication

I don't have a better word for this, but I guess for utter lack of a better and more descriptive term, I'll describe Googlefication as the more total meta-aggregation (or merging/synergizing) of any and all possible Web/social based services into one. Insta, snap, and biggest of all, SEARCH. I say search because search is really the marijuana, the gateway drug of all other "social." (anti-social, of course, like each medium before it). Google's profound hatred of Christians is worse than any other medium in history.

Why? / Conclusion

The reason each medium begins super-leftist compared to the culture and then runs to the right is again, when each new medium is new, it tricks all of us into consuming it by virtue of its newness and unexpectedness faster than we humans are able to understand just how much time we're wasting with it, because it's a hypnotic, conditioning device, each medium more efficient than the last. We need a new medium every so often, crave it, eat it up as soon as it's supplied, because we subconsciously fall for its infinitely more innovative way of captivating our attention more efficiently than the last medium. Today's smart tv's don't just show us a moving image; it makes sure we're paying attention by coming up with ever-new ways for us to confirm that we're paying attention, mimicking human interaction but for all the wrong reasons and with none of the natural benefits.

We are natural beings, and lack the capacity, even as just now frustrated millennials fret about how much time we waste on Social, and pull our hair out in an effort to disconnect despite our addiction.

I do hate to say it but President Reagan may have been wrong regarding the free market and communications. Or if we are to take a laissez-faire approach, government-wise to media technology, which the libertarian in me leans toward, then men of good character in America need to recognize just how susceptible we are to each new generation and each new medium's technological nerd-magicians, and come up with a proactive approach to if not legislating, ensuring as churchmen that these new devices undergo rigorous testing by third-party regulators that we appoint to make sure they stay the heck out of our lives, as we humans are obviously unequipped to deal with them.

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