Media Meta-Theory: Why's The Liberal Media Liberal?

Also see the Leftist Washington Post's Copycat Article Here.

If you like this, you may also appreciate "Why Journalists Lie."

Surely the question has crossed your mind before. You have a sneaking suspicion that the liberal media isn't quite reporting the facts straight, but they're not quite lying to you straight out - are they?

While the techniques of deception are legion and can often be seen by the vast majority of the more trusting among us only in hindsight - you know, those of us who have lives and don't make a career out of finding new ways to spin your attention to real life into something more interesting than your wife and kids - 

I'm going to take just a moment from my current project to do my best to break it down a little.

I've written it before, but Neil Postman has done a great job of fleshing out how television, and the nature of photojournalism, has a great way of tricking our brains into thinking that what isn't relevant or applicable to our lives really is. I'm going to expound on Postman's theory a little. We humans are natural creatures. Blessed as we are more than any beast, we have a flesh nature which is easily deceived. How's that diet going for you? After being banished from the Garden of Eden, God gave us these brains that keep us eating as much as possible whenever we see food. Don't get me started on the lengths marketers go to make that juicy hamburger look even jucier, or that splash of milk even more inviting for cereal. (Often, hair tonic is used, because it stands up to the hot lights of a shoot better. And that big leaf of lettuce on the burger is sometimes propped up with little rolls of paper towel.)

Bottom line? The nightly news, your favorite sitcom idiots - all of it is dependent upon your natural body beginning to salivate when you see - not a juicy burger, not the latest low-calorie, rich and creamy dairy temptation - but you are, if you think about it, being tricked, on a primal level, into the beginning stages of digesting, what? Well, a vacuum tube, or an LED display. Thankfully, we know it's just a television, so we don't eat the electronics. But those electronics wouldn't exist - that is, there wouldn't be any market for them if - in a roundabout sort of way - you didn't make a rather unconscious or subconscious decision to submit yourself to the trickery of the magic electronic box that shows you hamburgers, and get-rich-quick schemes, and jewelry you can buy over the phone, and game shows of other suburbanites just like you getting rich quick, all of it very effortless. Another way of putting it - this decision we make, or have been trained by repeated media exposure - which, by the way, America initially found quite an odd phenomenon- this decision to submit our natural brains and bodies to the unnatural, man-made, artificial stimuli of made-for-television meat patties and cash windfalls, and world events packaged perfectly, almost as if in a Christmas gift, a 1920x1080 box for us to open and close at will with the push of a button, unleashing an endless series of pixel flashes accompanied by meticulously synchronized noises of corresponding timbre, pitch, and velocity --

On a very primal level, if aliens were to study us humans watching television, I think they would conclude that, aside from the box triggering brain cycles which studies have shown resemble that of a drug addict - the box is, in its most essential use, a tool that we allow ourselves to be hypnotized by.

Think about it. One of the most common methods of hypnotic induction are shock and awe. A sentence, or series of sentences, which is entirely light on content, but which emphasizes structure while emphasizing primal sensory appeal. The purpose of the light content - be it Ronald McDonald's fending off a Hamburgler, or the meaningless names of the latest murder victim on your block (let's face it. Name all the murder victims you saw on television- exactly!) Hamburglers and real-life chain-gang names, ages, and address all simply there, in effect, to induce you into the hypnotic, patterned trance of the ever finer, ever more interesting, ever more softly glowing pixels. Because, after all, a story about real people getting murdered in your town is simply as good an excuse as any to fixate on the hunk or hottie - or more recently, the masculine-looking female with the pseudo-authoritative voice saying things before you.

And while you may not remember the locale of that restaurant the car crashed into, or the name of the superintendent who did that thing - the next time you pass a McDonalds, you think to yourself, ah, ha! McDonalds! I know that! Burgers. I'm salivating and I don't know why. And oh, I sure hope that Hamburgler isn't up to his old tricks, you sly dog, you!

Now granted, this is a rather dismal picture of news reporting. And mind you, this is not why anchors go into news reporting.

Particularly those who participate in the oxymoronic profession of "broadcast journalism" are sold on the art by appeals to their vanity.

Peggy Wehmeyer, I believe, is at WorldVision now. But she once told a college audience that getting up to report the news on television at a Texas station she used to work for was like dressing up for a cocktail party in the wee hours of each and every morning.

And she confessed that you can't be a family-oriented person and do that kind of thing. You have to be selfish. Because you don't have time to do anything else when you're running out the door and making what a modern-day anchor or anchorette makes.

After seeing some of the most highly regarded in the field at work first-hand, I can confirm first-hand that this is really the case. It's an industry that, at the lower levels- and by that I mean the on-the-ground anchors and reporters party to executing and facilitating this primarily electronic hypnosis, is comprised of divorcees, and family-disillusioned skeptics out to undermine the very values that, for one reason or another, they perceive failed them. I'm not without vanity, and I can see and feel the pressure to conform to the system both internally as well as I observe it externally in some of the colleagues whom I've been privileged with - or scarred by - working side-by-side with.

So what does any of this have to do with liberalism? And here's where the anchor may not be able to connect with my explanation, because it does require a degree of wisdom that is only acquired by certain removal from the insanity of systematically, themselves hypnotically, absorbing and regurgitating content 24-7. And here, it helps me to withhold judgement from this process of mass electronic hypnosis that the news anchor or reporter is party to inducing by recalling that generally the ability to hypnotize is predicated upon, to a degree, one himself being hypnotized. As it has been said, those who are hurt, hurt. Those who are treated well by others, treat others well. Those who are bullied, bully. And let me ... suggest ... that those of us who have been hypnotized - well, you get the idea. Of course you do!

I'm going to try to wrap this up, as I need to get back to the writing. But bottom line here, conservatism is predicated upon delayed gratification. All value creation is predicated upon delayed gratification. Not eating everything in sight. Not buying that sparkling diamond just because you saw it on television and, though you're just smart enough to not try to reach into the TV and grab it, unfortunately, you're not smart enough - and neither am I - to realize that we're being distracted from a very primal desire that our willful suspension of disbelief will not allow us to consciously realize. All of which is to say that admitting that your caveman brain really hasn't evolved at all. Because you're still dumb enough to salivate at the image of the burger, which has already stimulated a mild shot of the hormone into your bloodstream triggering your "go-get-it-and-eat-it" primal response.

How does this drive liberalism? It comes down to that idea of Neil Postman, regarding television's false promise of instant gratification.

And I mean "liberalism" in the modern sense of the word, as we know it today. Liberal does have good connotations - I mean liberal in the sense of rebelling against God, of pride in homosexual behavior, of pride in aborting children, and other hedonism in general - which, by the way, Sanger stood for rather unapologetically. It was either she or one of the founders of the abortion movement who fought for the "right to be lazy."

There is no instant gratification in real life. Life is hard, and you have to get up off the couch, out of the comfort of your home, or restaurant to accomplish great things. People fought and died (it's a mere cliche to us, sadly) to assure us of our right to eat doughnuts in peace. The pilgrims risked death to sail here. And with no happy meals when they arrived! It took Abraham Lincoln's contentious wife the better part of the day to make soup, before he suffered for his convictions.

Liberalism is the promise of removing all pain. It's the promise of a playground where nobody gets hurt, and furthermore, no effort is required in order to maintain a culture of kindness and generosity - as if humans will naturally be good and decent and kind to each other in the absence of any guidance or leadership or authority whatsoever. Does that sound familiar to you? It should. Why? Because that's the way the story always ends on television. The criminals are always caught, and if they're not, well, darnit, they had a darn good reason for running that meth lab out of the public school where they taught. They had an imaginative but very good reason for doing things to an animal - or person they're not married to - that no human should ever do. And yet, it felt good. It was their first reaction. And that primal impulse is what drives the deviated ethos of the liberal "value" system. If a man feels he should engage his seed of life in sexual stimulation with the waste orifice of another man, well, by golly, he ought to do it, without regard to logical, rather than impulsive thoughts like, is he causing himself more trouble down the line. Is he gratified in the moment? Yes? Well, then, very good. Is all that matters. Should he shag up with two women at the same time? Never mind that they'll be at each other's throats or perhaps hate themselves later. It feels good right now.

It feels good right now. Doesn't it? Of course it does. Is the depth of thought of a hypnosis subject, incapable of knowing who he is or anything beyond what the constant, steady glow of his trance-inducing object of fixation suggests. Be it, eat at McDonalds, or, God wants you to sodomize another man. It feels good, doesn't it?

Instant gratification. It's as good a lie, as good a destructive dream to distract oneself from reality as any. And it's the foundation, perhaps, of all hypnosis, none-the-least television programming. Programming. Think about that word for a second.

And you might just realize, that it isn't the television - that's being programmed.

Also check out the next post related to this one, about the "personalities" behind your news, "Why Journalists Lie."

And for more cutting-edge media theory, click here, or cut-and-paste into your address bar: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/bible-believers-guide-anti-christian-media-peter-vadala