The Entertainmentization of Politics

In other words, the mainstream media, all owned by massive transnational corporations, are turning one of the most important processes in American democracy, into a profit oriented process, with every intent to influence the results so as to maximize audience attention and interest, as well as produce candidates who are friendlier interests.

Of course, the most obvious specimen is the massive difference in exposure of Donald Trump. When the history books are written, if Trump wins and goes on to become the next Hitler, in eight or ten years, the mainstream media and its owners-- Disney, Comcast, Fox, Time Warner-- will be given major credit for bringing Trump to power. While they spend some time questioning his support of violence they give him massive exposure, giving, often ten times more time to Trump than opponents. They give airtime to surrogates, including longtime anchors like Chris Matthews and Andrea Mitchell, to promote their candidate and belittle the competition.

Several decades ago, the equal time rules required that TV give equal time to all candidates. That was thrown out and things have moved very, very far from that balanced situation.

We ought to all be clear that the mainstream news media are not our friends, not the friends of Trump, who daily castigates them, nor Sanders, Clinton, Rubio, Cruz or Kasich. The MSM is doing what it can to max the revenues they can get selling ads.

It's really bad, so bad that something should be done about it. The problem is, if you are watching real-time news, there are no choices, outside of C-SPAN, which mostly shows hearings, which, with both houses of congress run by Republicans, are pretty bad too not that it's C-SPAN's fault.

Somehow, we need to get independent media to have access to cable and digital and they must develop real-time reporting. I would envision this to be a primarily bottom up system, where people would upload coverage and commentary.

- Advertisement -