"National election campaigns are media events. Media run
them. Media pump ratings. They produce the soap opera. They construct
the illusion. Many people hate hearing this, because they prefer to
believe the few candidates who can actually win are real. No one with
that much face time on national television is real." (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)
I've
just completed a flurry of articles on how elections work as media
events in the US. But why leave out other countries, where the process
is essentially the same?
You have to look at these major election seasons as television series produced by the major networks.
Then it begins to make sense.
The casting of characters tends to follow the same pattern, over and over. You have two
major
candidates (for president, premier, prime minister). Writing their
parts is a bit of a challenge, because any intelligent person can see
there is really not much to choose between them.
That's a ratings
killer. The networks need opposition and sharp differences. So while
both of these "leaders," behind the scenes, are Globalists and favor
huge corporations and huge government bureaucracies, "free trade,"
sending jobs overseas where workers will toil for virtually no pay in
execrable conditions, etc., the networks will find issues on which they
disagree.
Then you have a cast of minor characters running for
the top office in the land. A couple of them are fiery and feisty, more
"radical" or "radically conservative" in their views. They'll never
make it, but hope springs eternal, and a significant proportion of the
population is drawn to them---for a while.
The television
networks, as usual, adopt the horse race mode of reporting. Because,
when all is said and done, that's the main theme: who is going to win?
Who really cares about exploring the issues in depth? There's no juice
or excitement there.
But watching two creatures gallop along a track toward the finish line moves the adrenaline.
And
the networks, day after day, can point to what the candidates are doing
or wearing or saying that is affecting their position in the race.
Did candidate A just utter a possibly politically incorrect phrase? Let's interview three experts and find out.
Did
candidate B once have dinner with a financier who cheated investors out
of their life savings? No? It was lunch? A brief breakfast? Hmm. A
professor of statistics explains how long a brief breakfast averages
out to be.
Why has candidate A shifted from wearing blue to red?
To
bolster all this, we have the polls, which seem to be taking place
three times a day. Numbers to report. Breakdowns of the numbers in key
voter areas of the country.
Meanwhile, the networks keep
searching out differences between candidates A and B. A's wet dream is
wholescale bombing missions. B prefers thousands of drone strikes. Of
course, this difference isn't presented that way. B is a "peace
candidate." A is a "hawk."
A wants the "free market." B wants
government to create millions of new jobs. On closer inspection,
they're both pushing the dominance of mega-corporations. But there is
no closer inspection in the television series called
Election.
At
the root of all this insanity is the fact that television networks
produce the series. As long as the viewing audience tunes in, as long
as the ratings are respectable, the illusion continues.
The
viewer, the voter, projects his hopes and dreams on to the television
image of a candidate. It never occurs to him that a) he is now a fan of
a soap opera and b) his adored candidate is part of an immense
political system in which only minor deviations from the norm are
permitted.
Entering that system and participating in it is like
walking into a tailor's shop where, by magic, the customer (participant,
candidate) automatically shrinks to half his former size in an
instant. And from there it only gets worse.
Television is there
to obscure the actual size of the political system and its culture. The
soap opera highlights the two major characters (candidates), as if they
alone can work great changes in the direction the oil tanker called
Politics takes.
Television
relies on the fact that a majority of the population favors watching
competition--- rather than learning about the collaboration, behind the
scenes, between characters who seem to be on opposing sides.
The election IS television.Why is that not understood?
Perhaps
for the same reason people can sit in a dark movie theater and look up
at a large screen and forget, for a few moments, that they are sitting
in a movie theater.
They are captured by the story and the images and the characters. And they want to be captured and taken away.
They
want to believe, in the case of elections, that they are participating
in something important simply by watching television.
You might
say election campaigns are the original reality-shows. They're soap
opera, but the main characters are not actors. (Of course, they
are actors.)
Perhaps you remember the 1972 American film,
The Candidate,
starring Robert Redford. The key moment occurs as Redford, who is
running for a seat in the US Senate, watches a commercial he claims to
favor, one that expresses his real convictions. Within moments he
realizes it's a dud. He comes across as a stammering lightweight. No,
from now on, he'll have to accept ads in which he appears authoritative
(but vague), on top of his game, and handsome. The die is cast. He is
now an artifact of television.
And then there is the best film ever made about television:
Network
(1976), written by Paddy Chayefsky. The embittered, half-mad,
disintegrating news anchor, Howard Beale, assaults his viewing audience:
"We
deal in illusions, man...We're all you know. You're beginning to
believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think
that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. In God's
name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion."Unfortunately,
the television audience is insulted if someone tells them the
characters they're watching are synthetic and artificial.
Something
strange is happening here. It's more than the flicker of the images or
the frequency or the brain wave-states television induces. It's a
counterpart to what people dream when they're asleep.
The story lines of dreams, the vividness, the intimate proximity to characters.
At
the extreme edge, it's what makes people who watch candidates on
television write them adoring fan letters (just as they write letters to
convicted killers in prison). It's what makes people dress up at night
to sit in front of their sets and watch late-night talk-show hosts---as
if the hosts could see them in their living rooms.
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is more compelling.
The whole television exhibition called
Election is, in every moment, a living rolling artifice of melodrama. Staged from end to end.
Consider this exchange, in the 1997 film,
Wag the Dog, between movie producer, Stanley Motss, and the shadowy White House agent, Conrad Brean:
Motss:
What do you think about lining the President up for the Peace Prize?Brean:
Our job's over come election day.Motss:
Yeah, but c'mon...Brean:
What,
just for the symmetry of the thing? [Motss nods] Well, if Kissinger can
win the Peace Prize, I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up and found I'd
won the Preakness.Motss:
Yeah, but our guy did bring peace.Brean:
There was never a war.Motss:
All the greater accomplishment.The
believable political face of the candidate is turned toward the camera,
and television records it and sends it out to the millions. The other
face, the secret face, is never shown on television; or if it is, the
audience misses it, because they are trained to think only good
political intentions are displayed on the screen. And they believe
these intentions are the substance of election campaigns; the things
worth voting for; the things the winners will try to bring into being in
the world.
The audience believes television is democratic.
Therefore, how could it deceive? Democracy is the only fair system ever
devised.
Such illusions pile up and up.
When one fades, another takes its place.
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