An impressive look at our assumptions about Mainstream Media sources versus the new burgeoning superstars. “The term “mainstream media” has long been used to refer to established journalism outlets in the United States. In recent years, it has also been used in a more critical context, including by former President Donald Trump, other politicians and members of the media… Read More The Fall of the Mainstream Media? By What Metric?
Digital media analyst Hito Steyerl in another context has stumbled onto important, undeniable truths. She writes, In this new age of artificial stupidity, technological disruption has turned destructive. Its greatest victim is reality itself. “This rise of artificial stupidity is the antithesis of, or rather the millions of shabby little cousins to, artificial intelligence. Just… Read More The rise of artificial stupidity
Cynical news media daily turn many a local story, especially calamities, into national or international stories for political and financial purposes. The media bosses reap all the profit by spreading fear and shattering nerves. Motives are often far from noble despite all the self-righteous pretense. Henry David Thoreau anticipated this and there is lesson in… Read More Thoreau on “News” Media As the “Ruling Powers”
“The television screen [or, similarly, Internet / Netflix ‘entertainment’] has become the retina of the mind’s eye…the battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the Videodrome. “Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is… Read More Perception, Reality and the Videodrome
Right-Wing Extremism, Gov’t Report Warns… Feb. 2023. Author Douglas Murray published a scathing review of the British government’s counter-terrorism Prevent program, which has apparently reported that authors like George Orwell, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis can radicalize readers. In his column, Murray described how Britain’s Prevent program was founded to support counter-terrorism efforts, but has gradually… Read More Reading ‘Lord Of The Rings’ And ‘1984’ Could Lead To…
Loneliness in the West. “Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work — but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.” Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have… Read More Bowling Alone
Thomas Hobbs writes. “In the introductory voice-over to Woody Allen’s film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), the narrator quotes Macbeth’s lines: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In an interview with Commonweal just after the release of the film Whatever Works (2009) and… Read More Nihilism and Guilt American Style Revisited
And Frankenstein. “…Jesus is approached with the offer of a worldwide TV network, and “The Dead Sea Videotapes,” in which archaeologists centuries hence discover a cache of tapes, films, and other evidence of our contemporary society, and reach shocking conclusions. “Future historians,” says Muggeridge, “will surely see us as having created in the media a… Read More Malcolm Muggeridge on The Fourth Temptation
For some reason I thought it was another book about our frivolous TV shows and general culture (Seinfeld, Larry David’s vicious Curb Your Enthusiasm —pick your nonsense— and I already knew this about the culture. But then things got darker. Very recently I somehow bumped into this reading. I listened. I couldn’t have been more… Read More I’ve had the book for decades. But I never read it. “Shows About Nothing.”
It was Aldous Huxley who, very early, saw sexual decadence combining commercial interests with political manipulation in the emerging media. And he knew what that would mean for a culture. “Aldous Huxley in his 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World depicts a culture in which pleasure is compulsory and engineered to eliminate intellectual challenge and to… Read More Aldous Huxley, Sex, and Corporate Psychological Manipulation
BBC: “Did big tech know I was gay before I did? … I was watching a lot of Netflix and I was getting more and more recommendations for series with lesbian storylines, or bi characters. These were TV series that my friends – people of a similar age, with a similar background, and similar streaming… Read More Is Big Tech & Media Coming Out About Shaping Our Perceptions?
Everything is changing. The Medium Is so ubiquitous we often become unaware of it. Which is no small part of the problem. We dwell totally within technological media today and observe it less and less. But (practicing Catholic) Marshall McLuhan saw it clearly and tried to warn us of what was coming — and how… Read More Marshall McLuhan, Prophetic Witness, 1966-7.
Tucker Carlson cancelled by Fox News. Opinion. Updated. NEW YORK (LifeSiteNews) — “Conservative media titan Tucker Carlson and Fox News on Monday “agreed to part ways” effective immediately. Carlson’s last broadcast was April 21, giving the hugely popular host no opportunity to bid farewell to his audience. An announcement from Fox News shared on social media… Read More Are Moral Truths and Free Inquiry Being Outlawed in America Today?
David Halberstam’s The Fifties: “Selling The American Way” “The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of… Read More Videodrome. When the Seven Deadly Sins of Excess Morphed Into “Progress”
For more and more people, work appears to serve no purpose. Is there any good left in the grind? [The] bullshit employment has come to serve in places like the U.S. and Britain as a disguised, half-baked version of the dole—one attuned specially to a large, credentialled middle class. In “Bullshit Jobs” (Simon & Schuster),… Read More The Bullshit-Job Boom
What makes Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski chief Party Propagandists par excellence? I think it is how with the utmost arrogance and without the slightest attempt at fairness, nuance or balance, they set up their guests with ever-leading questions in such a scripted way as to guarantee the political answers they seek. Day after day… Read More Joe and Mika. Who Needs Big Brother?
McLuhan, 1969: “There’s nothing at all difficult about putting computers in the position where they will be able to conduct carefully orchestrated programing of the sensory life of whole populations. I know it sounds rather science-fictional, but if you understood cybernetics you’d realize we could do it today. The computer could program the media to… Read More Marshall McLuhan on media manipulation of peoples and nations
The liberal media’s double standards on political violence are horrifying. Brendan O’Neill, Spike Online.Chief Political Writer.31st October 2022. It was the mention of zip ties that got me thinking. Apparently the man who allegedly broke into the San Francisco home of Nancy and Paul Pelosi on Friday was carrying zip ties. A possibly crazed individual… Read More Paul Pelosi and the Violence We Care About
“…democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. “Democracy and freedom will be the theme of… Read More “Democracies Will Change Their Nature”
Muggeridge on the Media.June 19, 2017. “IN the 1970s, British journalist and author Malcolm Muggeridge insisted that television news involved deliberate deception. During lectures on the media in London in 1976, he stated: “I remember once returning to my hotel in New York and noticing on the way that a crowd had assembled outside what was… Read More Muggeridge on the Media [and Control].
… of Traditional Religious Belief into the Pathological. Observing the not so subtle subtexts in media and their impact in our lives. This Dr. Thomas Hibbs lecture was titled Religious Liberty and Popular Culture Thomas S. Hibbs (November 3, 1960) is an American philosopher and the 9th President of the University of Dallas, a Catholic liberal arts… Read More U.S. Media Framing Belief as Pathological
“Have you ever noticed how television and print media will scream themselves hoarse in news documentaries, editorials and heavy analytical pieces about “rising pornography, crime, violence, gunplay” etc.? And yet in the same TV Guide announcing the latest special on “The Crisis of Sex and Violence in America,” there will appear an advertisement for “Miami… Read More Media Inducing the Double-Mind
St. Pius X: It is of great importance that the priest should combine his daily divine meditation with the constant reading of pious books, especially the inspired books. That was the command that Paul gave to Timothy: Attend unto reading. The same lesson was taught by St. Jerome when instructing Nepotianus on the priestly life:… Read More St. Pius X on Spiritual Reading & Pope Pius XII on Media
…an empathetic informed dialogue. See also James Lindsay’s New Discourses site.
“It used to be a big deal for America to be at war. When eight thousand American troops spent three days shooting Cubans hiding behind palm trees on the island of Grenada, apparently to rescue six hundred medical school students, the country was transfixed. War! Shooting! Helicopters! Awesome! The press swarmed over the island and… Read More “Totally Without Ethics” — from “Hate Inc.” by Matt Taibbi
Catholic Critique 