RESOLVED: Print (and broadcast) media have devolved to the point that they have become primary drivers of the divisiveness that characterizes American politics today.

DISCUSS: Our focus "article" consists of ChatGPT responses to a series of inquiries (from me) along the lines of the above resolution as a working hypothesis. Our discussion will center around the support, refutation and/or refinement of the proposition.

You may have noticed. Soon after a discussion about most any political matter, the other party sometimes exhibits a certain look. It's less the look of one who is genuinely and intently listening to the substance of what is being expressed than it is of a certain calculation i.e. are you on Team Red or Team Blue? Just try it sometime when it comes to someone outside your "tribe" whether the subject happens to be, say, race, climate change, energy policy, transgenderism, immigration, universal base income or pretty much anything that relates to "traditional American values."

The proposition itself serves as a kind of threshold test when it evokes a knee-jerk response like "Aha, correct, just look at the corrosive effect of (choose one) (Fox news)/ (MSNBC)!" There's the tell. Failure at the time to even acknowledge any countervailing media bias would seem to reflect a certain blind spot i.e. one side news/other side propaganda. Our discussion invites honest reflection by all "sides."

We might start with our previous look at the way social media covertly operates below conscious awareness in the form of the targeted manipulation as we discussed in MM 11/30/20 Media Bias (with the linked documentary The Social Dilemma).

The manipulative power of language, of course, is as old as print (click: MM 11/14/16 On Language featuring George Orwell’s classic 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. Language, you see, is vulnerable to manipulation such that the very meaning of truth and lies in this “postmodern” age could be neutered (MM 2/26/18 Postmodernism) and indeed spun (MM 2/13/17 Culture Of Spin).

So here we are, opposing teams, like two drunks chained together trying to throw each other under a train, wondering why we feel this political disorientation that borders on insanity. Perhaps those of us on the ground have less agency than we thought, more bit players in a bigger narrative (one in which we have all been subjected to “gaslighting,” a reference to a movie we’d discussed in MM 11/6/17 Gaslighting).

Before you scoff, consider the extent to which media-driven agendas have played out in the past. We might cite, for example, the way most every war has been “sold” to the public through various top-down deceptions (MM 9/25/17 Vietnam Comes Home; then, the Middle East). Just consider the current media accounts of Ukraine in that context. We might spend another minute or two reviewing the incalculable damage wrought by the tragedy of certain other domestic sales jobs (MM 12/5/22 Pandemic Unmasked).

It then comes down to who/what might benefit and who/what might suffer from this, er, management of perception. There's the commercial factor, of course, evidenced by the sudden focus on click counts starting in 2010.

Whether it be the sale of a product or an ideology, though, media pieces seem to have become more sensational, headlines sometimes not even supported by the respective underlying articles. The amygdala, over the neocortex, is the target. Media to the people: let's you and him fight.

Yes, it’s easy to be cynical, but If Member Monday stands for anything, it stands for engaging in critical thinking MM 4/27/20 Critical Thinking, especially now that the nation itself is being simultaneously threatened by both pinwheeling identity politics and institutional statism.