The White House Nonstop Propaganda War

[jpertello]

Inside the Bush White House's Nonstop Propaganda War
By Mark Dery, AlterNet
Posted on July 10, 2008, Printed on July 11, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/90850/


Scott McClellan is having a "Matrix" moment -- the moment when you wake up, with a jolt, from the reassuring fictions of the media dreamworld to the face-slapping reality of unspun fact. Remember that scene in "The Matrix" where Laurence Fishburne parts the veil of illusion -- the computer-generated simulation humanity experiences as everyday reality -- to reveal the movie's post-apocalyptic world for the irradiated slag heap it really is? Like that. "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," he tells Keanu Reeves, a riff on the postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard's pronouncement, in his book Simulations, that we live in a "desert of the real" -- an ever-more-virtual reality where firsthand experience and empirical truth are being displaced by media fictions. He offers an example tailor-made for the Bush presidency: "Propaganda and advertising fuse in the same marketing and merchandising of objects and ideologies."

more:

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/90850/?ses=2db38793fd2f80a47719ffa2f24ca9a5