{"id":60585,"date":"2016-10-17T11:30:23","date_gmt":"2016-10-17T16:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60585"},"modified":"2016-10-14T09:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-10-14T14:32:00","slug":"welcome-to-the-new-samizdat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60585","title":{"rendered":"Welcome To The New Samizdat"},"content":{"rendered":"

During the heyday of dictators, the entire media was turned into a public relations apparatus for the government.<\/p>\n

It was all-pervasive; there was really no legally escaping it. \u00a0All the means of communication – visual, written, even musical – were turned to the service of the dictator.<\/p>\n

Art? \u00a0Yeah, you betcha.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Remember all that jabbering about artists being bringers of peace, a group of walking safe spaces, from the piece about the de-facto arts colony in Northeast Minneapolis, earlier this week?<\/a> \u00a0Sorry, folks; artists are no less likely to trade their freedoms for thirteen pieces of silver than anyone else would be under the circumstances.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Hell – one of the greatest murderers of artists of all time was, himself, an artist. \u00a0He was obscure – some might even describe him as a “failure” as an artist, the kind of person who’d have an artists garret in a converted seed warehouse in, I dunno, Northeast Munich. \u00a0 \u00a0Art is no protection against dictators, thugs, tyrants, and the whole idea of your nation sliding down the primrose path to dictatorship.<\/p>\n

For all the best of reasons, naturally. \u00a0For the children. \u00a0For affordable tuition and healthcare. \u00a0For punctual trains.<\/p>\n

The film industry was co-opted, to serve the master, too.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Feminists should take note: \u00a0Leni Reifenstahl, the single greatest female filmmaker in cinematic history, did her most notable work for the Nazis (to be fair, she may have spent the rest of her very long life trying to redeem herself for it). \u00a0 Watch her most famous piece,\u00a0Triumph Des Willens<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(Triumph of the Will); in between the icy realization that you’re watching World War 2, the Holocaust and the near destruction of Western civilization getting underway, it’s a pretty amazing movie. \u00a0Watch the first four minutes of the video; one of the most amazing bits of exposition in the history of documentary film. \u00a0We take for granted many of the cinematographic, structural and compositional aspects that were first introduced in this deeply creepy and – admit it – utterly stirring (if you ignore the people who are its subjects) documentary.<\/p>\n

OK, how about the news media? \u00a0 Isn’t their job to\u00a0afflict\u00a0<\/em>the comfortable, and\u00a0comfort the afflicted?\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Turn off that Betamax with\u00a0All the Presidents Men<\/em> on it. \u00a0Around the world, throughout history, the mainstream news media is among the first to be either silenced (they’re easy enough to find!) or co-opted (they’re people, more or less, and they act in their own self-interest, which is by no means always noble). \u00a0The mainstream news media is no more protection from authoritarianism, dictatorship and tyranny than a Lakota rain dance is.<\/p>\n

“But that was then, in the ’20s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s; it was over there, in Europe, right?”<\/p>\n

“It could never happen here. \u00a0Could it?”<\/p>\n

I love the sound of pollyannaish preconceptions dying horrible deaths.<\/p>\n

Democrat Realism<\/strong>: \u00a0 Yeah, you could say the media sucks up to Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

\"hillary\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Not content to merely mythologize the present like Riefenstahl, Hollywood seeks to rewrite the past – airbrushing Hillary Clinton’s origin story<\/a>\u00a0(even for little kids<\/a>), turning Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date into a personality-cult artifact<\/a>, and among many other examples,\u00a0completely shredded the facts and the subtest of Dan Rather’s fall from Olympus.<\/a>\u00a0 In a\u00a0gloriously brutal review of\u00a0Truth, <\/em>by\u00a0Christopher Orr in that noted conservative tool,\u00a0The Atlantic,\u00a0<\/em>we see this pullquote…:<\/p>\n

The movie loudly, hectoringly stresses the importance of always \u201casking questions\u201d\u2014my notes include, among others, the lines \u201cQuestions help us get to the truth,\u201d \u201cYou stop asking questions, that\u2019s when the American people lose,\u201d and \u201cYou\u2019re supposed to question everything, that\u2019s your job\u201d\u2014and yet the very quality it celebrates in its protagonist is that she never questions whether or not her reporting might have been wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…which wonderfully sets off this entire subject.<\/p>\n

In an election season where the “newspaper of record”\u00a0committed what was once an unpardonable journalistic sin by letting their subject control their coverage of…her<\/a>, and where a\u00a0major cable network gave the Clinton campaign a leg up in the debate\u00a0<\/a>(talk about overkill), where leaks old<\/a> and\u00a0new<\/a>\u00a0vividly show our worthless “elite” media colluding to shape coverage<\/a> for Democrats<\/a>, trying to\u00a0subvert institutions that weren’t enthusiastically compliant enough<\/a>…<\/p>\n

I’m not saying that the American media is the same as the Soviet or Nazi-era German media.<\/p>\n

I’m saying that they’re voluntarily exhibiting a level of obeisance\u00a0that other nations’ media throughout history had to be strongarmed, browbeaten and threatened into providing.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the heyday of dictators, the entire media was turned into a public relations apparatus for the government. It was all-pervasive; there was really no legally escaping it. \u00a0All the means of communication – visual, written, even musical – were turned to the service of the dictator. Art? \u00a0Yeah, you betcha. Remember all that jabbering […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tc-media-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60585"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60615,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60585\/revisions\/60615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}