Here’s the real red-state/blue-state dichotomy in a nutshell…
The red states are full of media addicts who — on average — consume anywhere from 10-15 hours of commercial media each and every day. The blue states are full of media addicts who — on average — not only consume 10-15 hours of commercial media each and every day, but also produce almost all of the commercial media everyone consumes.
Yes, the contextual message of corporate mass media is largely progressive, but only because corporate media is institutional media, and Western institutions of any meaningful size right now are — with a few notable exceptions — almost exclusively progressive. Precisely why progressive media and progressive causes are so uniquely dangerous right now.
But all forms of media come with explicit biases. Not the contextual kind we hear about ad nauseum from talking heads on FOX News. Not the obvious progressive media bias denied ad infinitum by CNN, MSNBC, PBS, and NPR. No, unlike the manufactured media biases of corporate media, the biases inherent in various media don’t exist to entertain us or sell us products we don’t even know we need. They sell us the firmament of entire societies. Structural media biases, the ones we don’t hear about, don’t run in the shallows where we can see and hear them. They run in the deeper currents of a pervasive and eternal media ecology…
Mass Print Media…
The printing press destroyed Western theocracies. It promoted linear thought and reason as Enlightenment tools to replace theocratic power with something more populist and forgiving. It gave rise to nation states and the Age of Reason. It produced the scientific method, and the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions.
The fundamental social bias of print as a mass medium is democracy, regardless of political bias. No mistake, therefore, that freedom of the press — as enumerated in the Bill of Rights — remains a critical component in any true effort to protect democracy. Unfortunately, however, print as a mass medium surrendered long ago to the rise of another — far more pervasive and powerful — form of mass medium. Indeed, the Age of Reason ended more than a century ago with the rise of…
Mass Electronic Media…
No coincidence that Mussolini, Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, Hitler, FDR, Stalin, and Churchill rose to power with the introduction of radio as a mass medium. Like all electronic mass media since, radio greatly amplified the larger-than-life personalities of the day. But instead of reason and linear thought, it promoted emotionalism, tribalism, and endless distraction, and paved the way for television and digital to do the same — on exponentially more powerful and more invasive platforms.
Unlike print, the fundamental social bias of electronic mass media wants nothing to do with democracy. It seeks power and control, not as errant or wayward objectives of occasional tyrants and madmen, but on a structural level, deep below the glittering facade. The fundamental social bias of electronic mass media, regardless of political bias, is fascism.
