Eleven

[Stinky The Clown]

Should we really be surprised and appalled at the tone, the volume, the ferocity of the rhetoric today? Really?

Let's go back a few decades. Three television networks; maybe an independent station or two in the larger markets. Two newspapers in most metropolitan areas. A dozen or so radio stations. Washington had politicians who were actually friends across the political divide. Media was unconglomerated and largely independent.

Messages were more subtle. Messages were clear. A tactic to be heard above the rest was to lower your voice and speak softy. E.F. Hutton based a series of commercials on the premise.

Soon enough, cable was the hot topic. Would people who now got their television for free be willing to pay for it? Home Box Office became HBO and HBO became a status symbol. "Did you see the move they ran on HBO last night?" Ted Turner took a concept and made it a franchise. News, 24/7. A perfect platform for in depth discussion. Now there was a platform by which television news, long criticized as less informative than its print media brethren, could now see a way to not only match them, but to surpass them, to supplement news with moving images to describe, to illustrate, to expand, to elucidate.

If one cable station doing news was a good thing, why not another, thought Rupert Murdoch. If cable news was such a great way to bring news to people, why not use it to sway them to ways of thinking favorable to your interests? Murdoch decided to stick with the word "news" even as he knew he was no longer concerned about bringing it to American homes.

On a separate track, the shadowy owners of a shadowy radio company began buying up inexpensive, relatively low powered AM radio stations for less than the value of their aging equipment and rusting antenna towers out there in America's "heartland." An overweight former top 40 DJ made "Rush" a household name, using one 5,000 watt station after another, each broadcasting with no human intervention, as if, no, in fact, on autopilot. Newt Gingrich held up the country by stopping the government.

Rush and Rupert made that a good thing.

Mister Microsoft joined the party. Talk Radio begat Shout Television. People were making millions shouting past each other. Audiences of one or two, sitting mindlessly at home, cheered for one side or the other when pointless verbal points were scored. Cheap-to-produce television cheapening the value of American politics.

Concurrently, we got web sites, and then blogs, and tweets, and friends, and feeds. The term Information Overload had been coined long before this, but only now did it make sense to the common man.

You had to be louder to be heard. Internet "loud" generally means "outrageous." There are more blogs than a person can visit in a lifetime. They need "draw." They need outrage.

I am guilty of that, as are many who post on this board, and those who post on other boards of all types. If you want to be "heard" you need to get eyeballs to what it is your write. Human nature being what it is, jaw dropping rhetoric wins all the time.

Politics as war became the frame when cable became the game.

War became blood sport when being heard became more important than being right or reasonable.

Maybe we really are all guilty.

After all, we all turned it up to Eleven, now din't we?

[Stinky The Clown]

1. Morning kick

[dbt]

2. Clown kick and Bozo Rec.

Your analysis is razor sharp; I am stealing the phrase Shout Television and royalties will be discussed later.

The role of corporations in bringing on today's toxic atmosphere should not be discounted, IMO. It ain't like Ru$h or the other propagandists are operating in a vacuum--they have backing from obscenely large Money.

Until and unless the corporations decide to call off their dogs, there will be no civility of discourse (yelling gets more listeners), no return of the Fairness Doctrine, not even a discussion of what to do about the easy availability of handguns and large-capacity ammo clips.

Corporations own the White House, The Senate, The House of Representatives and The Supreme Court. Five corporations control everything we see, hear and/or read in this country.

They helped Loughner pull the trigger, sure as shootin.'

[Stinky The Clown]

3. Final self-serving kick