Many Who Voted for 'Values' Still Like Their Television Sin
The New York Times > Business > Media & Advertising > Many Who Voted for 'Values' Still Like Their Television SinNYT has been running a series of articles on conservative politics vs. liberal culture. I'm not sure why NYT is so surprised by this - isn't it clear that the nation swung right due to fear and safety rather than traditional moral conservatism? As a culture, we're straddling a divide between fear and hedonism. We want to feel protected on the one hand. We recognize that the nation is no longer secure. However, we want to hold onto our uniquely American brand of indulgent entertainment. It seems almost reactionary to me - the more insecure we feel, the more we dive into indulgent, cheap, sexual TV programming. I mean, the drama just keeps increasing, and we are getting more and more absorbed into our cheezy TV shows. The sexual sleaze on TV increases proportionally to the IR hype on the outside. The more we see, the more we want to forget about it. So we flip from Faux News to that Housewives show, from extreme international insecurity to extreme sexual insecurity and lust. Interesting dichotomy. Now that I think about it, there does appear to be a correlation. Maybe these NYT articles are highlighting an important point after all.
Problem is, they're operating off an old paradigm that conservative politics => conservative media. These journalists need to get their skulls out of the 1950's. The world today is more nuanced, more complicated. Links between politics and culture aren't as straightforward as the old theories profess. We're living in a world composed of shades of grey, where national insecurity can actually lead to hypersexuality, where partisan polarity is a media construction rather than a sociocultural truth. Media simplifies. Media writes according to digestible paradigms. Result: a whole bunch of flat and/or irrelevant articles, aka. information noise. This is the problem with mainstream media. These people mean well, but their definition of accuracy is unfortunately somewhat stale.
posted by Andrea @ 3:05 PM
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