Every single news anchor wants to be the one who gets the best, most remembered lines. They want to be the ones that say, "The flash, apparently official… President Kennedy died at " or Peter Jennings on 9-11 being lauded for his all day work on a horrible tragedy or filming footage out a hotel window around bombings.
Few people remember who reads off good news or neutral news…but for these news anchors, immortality lies in being the ones who deliver the bad news. Every one of them would love the Ukraine thing to get worse , just that much worse, before it gets better… because they want to be the ones that “comfort a nation.”
So yeah. We watched the media all but cheer on the coronavirus and present scare tactics about how the vaccine is losing effectiveness… and just hoping for the next variant to be worse. And then Ukraine fired up, and now they’re literally asking questions about whether or not we should just go straight to world war III. And this is ABC, not OANN or Newsmax or something. It’s very clear what they want out of this.
The generations that remember the Great Wars are, for all practical purposes, gone, and today most people don’t remember Vietnam either
Instead we have a military/diplomatic/media world where every 20 years there is a new corpus of young-adult soldiers spies & reporters who want something exciting to put on their résumés
Having quickly forgotten the lessons “fascism is bad” and “disease is bad”, I suppose it’s not surprising that America has moved on to forgetting that global thermonuclear war is bad, too.
I know what you’re getting at, and yeah post-modern, post-structuralist and post-marxist thought(s) looks to be on the surface trying to create a solution that’s primarily linguistic, creating a territory (kind of) that ‘solves’. I see a surface similarity as well with the behaviour of journalists, but the similarity is more a result of both trying to function/change (be relevant) within control societies. But there is a lot of theory coming out of those streams that is trying to point more towards action (and I don’t mean accelerationism), like ‘The invisible committee’ essays, Marcello Tari’s ‘There is no unhappy revolution’ and Joshua Clovers ‘Riot, Strike, Riot’. If journalists pointed more towards action that would be good, but then they’d be activists and not journalists. I mean its not like journalist and activist are mutually exclusive terms. Unfortunately at the moment the most effective journalist/activists are on the other side.
of cockroaches discussing
humanity one big
regal looking roach
had the floor and he spoke
as was fitting in blank verse
more or less
says he
how came this monster with the heavy
foot harsh voice and cruel heart to
rule the world
“I’m tired of this shit.” It’s boring, just move on." “I don’t know of anybody who died of it recently.” “Tucker Carlson says…” Shall I go on? No, it’s not over and it’s not going to be at any foreseeable point in the near future, but our attention span is way to short to see that. I think the model we need to be thinking of is not the 1918 influenza, that blew up and went away, but the Black Plagues of the middle ages, that came and went repeatedly over a very long period of time. Of course, we can actually do something about that now, but we have chosen not to to. Because 30% +/- of our population are somehow enjoying (?) the chaos.
Don’t get me wrong… I there is a lot of value to be had in the postmodernist philosophy… Foucault was correct about a lot of things. But far too many mediocre white dudes who think they are the smartest asshole in the room use such concepts to obscure far more than they explain. It’s not complete shite, but there are people who USE the complexity of postmodernism to promote shite things. If it’s not revealing something, then what the fuck is the point, if not to make some people feel smarter than others… Nothing is going to be solved by people speaking in a way that obscures everything. As someone who is a lowly part time academic, students don’t need high level thinking about the way society functions that they can’t understand… There is nothing wrong with making things clear and plain, and in my experience, the people who want to keep things obscure are doing so to keep themselves in power and others out.
Well, isn’t that part of the problem @beschizza is discussing - that journalists see themselves as “objective” outsiders? That is a problem of modernity though, that was exacerbated by postmodernity, I’d argue.
In this case, it seems to me that such a question is showing an eagerness on the part of some journalists to want to be correspondants in a big exciting war that is like the first and second world war. Biden, by contrast, seeks to avoid that, because he’s an old man, with kids and grandkids, and doesn’t want to see them vaporized in a nuclear exchange… The reporter is ignoring how high the stakes are and is acting like Europeans prior to the first world war, who saw it as a grand day out…
first off, I don’t see at all how its up to Biden - he seems along for the putin ride like the rest of the world. Nobody but putin is going to start throwing nukes.
And the world against russia is not a world war. If china decides to back up putter, then we have a world war. So its up to putin to put us the path to mass destruction, its up too china whether the rest of the world gets dragged in.
I’ll just point out it’s not 30% of the news media that has moved on from covid , it’s almost all of it. This thing is still very active in blue states and blue cities. A Canadian Furry Con just last weekend was a superspreader event despite the hotel requiring 100% vaccination. And where is that in the news?
It’s not the 30% that never acted like this was a thing that’s the problem now. It’s the vast majority of everyone else convinced that it’s over now.
