Wednesday, May 16, 2018
fake views as narrative mode of fakery throughout markets
This is § c of “Section 3: Fake views exploit the appeal of valid drama.”
The “genre” of fake news tropes a more general issue of fakery in media—”junk media,” it’s called, which is hardly new: Unreliable sourcing (“the more general problem of misinformation” [source A]) is as old as “tabloid” press, now commonly as “low-quality information online” [A]. Media “vehicles” have been serving dramatically hyped content/products for as long as there has been marketing.
For decades, entertainment media (overt dramas, comedy, mystery, etc.) have been basically vehicles for pre-sold advertising for which the video program is segmented to afford the “breaks”—even TV network news programs survive by adapting themselves as show business. (Fears about ABC World News when ABC was to be bought by Disney have been actualized: David Muir is The Talent [the well-coifed hunk] who has to be plopped into the middle of catastrophes from time to time, so that he seems to be a journalist, though all he does is play “David Muir is here.” And all TV anchors, looking warmly into the camera, are “so glad to see you,” because that maps into viewer opinion that one is so glad to see them, because there is always “breaking news, right now, as we speak. So, stay with us—.” And don’t we all need a break.)
So, entrepreneurial and corporate mapping of fakery into political marketing and scamming merges itself into a consumer normality that easily accepts hype as ordinary fare. “Of course, there is no reliability and truth.” Just that “warrants” naturalizing entertainment. “If everything is hype, what’s the problem?” Validity surrenders to taste (or truthiness, whatever).
Therefore, the public can be predisposed to regard high-standard media as just more posturing in a world where even that becomes hype. Ergo, Trumpland: Map common fakery onto high-standard media to “discredit unsympathetic news stories” [A] and delegitimize incriminating criticism that is based in high standards of evidence, analysis, and evaluation. That is especially effective for annulling the complexity (thus ambiguity) of controversial issues for the sake of grooming one’s political “base” to feel comfortable with “blue collar” literacy, provincialism, xenophobia, etc. “Everything is marketing, baby.” Even international treaties, human rights, yadda, yadda.
Next: Section 3d: “identity mirroring compels viral-ity among filter bubbles”
