Truth
"By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth."
-- George Carlin
Truth is a funny word. It isn't always a funny thing, but the word is misused so often it would be humorous if it weren't so serious. Seriously, how often do people claim they are speaking the truth when everyone knows they are not. How often do we read a headline and say to ourselves, "that doesn't make sense!" Advertisers say their product is "NEW and IMPROVED" but it is simply wrapped in a new package. Newscasts claim "Breaking News!" when it is actually yesterday's news.
The truth is, it is almost impossible to discern the truth about anything anymore. Or was it ever? I lived in an era back in the fifties when it was normal to believe whatever Walter Cronkite said on his CBS Evening News. To believe whatever my teachers told me in class. To believe it when my parents told me if I ever got suspended from school I would be grounded for two weeks.
For most of my life I read the newspaper every single day. I would read the paper over breakfast, along with my morning coffee. Over time I started to realize much of what was written was designed to grab my attention. It was the job of the newspaper editors to grab your attention, and make sure you came back for more the next day. It wasn't their job to educate me, it was their job to engage and entertain me.
My search for the truth only got serious when I started to realize I was purposely being misinformed. I was being transformed. I was the subject of a broad experiment in social manipulation. That was when I began to understand that the media, something that had always fascinated me, was actually rearranging my perceptions.
As a young man I had experimented with drugs. I experienced hallucinogenic episodes, so I was familiar with how the human mind can fool itself. How perception is malleable. I studied advertising, and how repeated mental impressions could affect people's behavior.
Sometimes we have to purposely go back in our mind's memory, dig into our subconscious, to reveal how we misinterpreted events. How we acted on things, that in hindsight, probably should have been handled differently.
The truth is…well, let's just admit, we may or may not know the truth, now or ever. But in the interests of time, we go with what we got. Or what we think we got…
The Drudge Report
The DrudgeReport aggregator website was founded in 1995 by a frustrated Hollywood gossip news reporter, as a weekly subscriber online newsletter, it grew to be one of the worlds most influential news aggregators, attracting 30 million visits per day. The relatively small website at the time exploded on the world wide web when Matt Drudge decided to break a story that Bill Clinton was secretly sexually entertaining a young female White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
DrudgeReport.com proved to be a groundbreaking template for real-time news reporting in the internet age. Its influence in culture and politics cannot be overstated. The evidence is in the vast array of aggregators and news summary sites and the way TV, podcasts, and even radio have copied the format of blaring salacious headlines and hyperlinking viewers to the content originators. It became the default daily newspaper for the world.
DrudgeReport lists hundreds of links to newspapers, polls and ratings services, magazines, news outlets, political party and office holder information sites, op-ed writers and commentators. It is a single hub for sourcing up-to-the-minute news and opinion.
Matt Drudge has become a multimillionaire and a curmudgeon of political intrigue. He circulates amongst the heavyweights in the Washington Beltway as they look at him with weary eyes, knowing he can have enormous influence on their careers. He does contribute his own op-eds occasionally, but the majority of his page is devoted to other ideas and points of view. He is considered a rightwing conservative but some evangelical conservatives suggest he is personally far too liberal on many social issues.
The fact is the Left refers to Drudge as "a muckraker and yellow journalist" because he gives an alternative to the left leaning FrankenMedia. The news aggregator format itself is one of the most influential developments resulting from the growth of the internet. Drudge correctly anticipated the way most people would use their internet connection. Instead of reading newspapers and watching daily newscasts on TV, millions of people simply log onto his website, or others like it, and choose which sources, and what stories, they want to see.
For over 25 years, Drudge Report has continued to dominate online viewership, beating all major cable news programs in audience share. In the past year, the Drudge Report website was visited over 8 billion times!
If there was a seminal moment when both politicians and citizens began to question the accuracy and bias of media news outlets, it was when DrudgeReport emerged as a major force in how Americans gather their news. His approach not only rubbed off on thousands of online purveyors, it started a process of revealing how disingenuous most of the major media channels were.
The Rub? DrudgeReport content was initially, and to a lesser degree still is, referred to as mostly "conspiracy theories". I started looking at it at the turn of the century. That is when I gave up on the daily newspaper routine. Since then I have bookmarked dozens of social media platforms that I use to keep myself abreast of the 'real news'.
The Tower of Babble
I have been a talk radio fan for decades. I began listening to Rush Limbaugh in 1989 when he was still broadcasting from Sacramento California. As his influence began to spread, so did the genre. Before long there was a plethora of talkers to choose from and I found myself channel surfing to find a new voice and talk format. I literally lost interest in pop music, except when I was driving in areas with no AM signal.
Over the years the concept of audience participation exploded across media segments. The whole nature of civic involvement changed and evolved. Talk shows gave a voice to the everyman. Suddenly we were no longer just a faint voter. We had power as a group and we had a say about many subjects that had eluded us in the past.
Rush had a major impact on Washington. The more participatory the audience became, the more secretive and manipulative the politicians became. As listeners and viewers pushed for more accountability and transparency, the less the beltway was willing to give us.
Sound familiar?
The media itself began to take sides. Some, like conservative AM radio, tried to reflect and amplify the concerns of voters. Others, like most television news operations, became entangled in ratings battles, and because of their growing dependency on corporate financial support, assumed the role of public relations agents for the political elite, huge groups of indentured union members, students and poor urbanites. Because of the extreme costs of operating massive studios, supporting huge payrolls and paying celebrity salaries for talking heads, they had to create train wrecks to draw audience share. Advertisers could care less about traditions. What they want are eyes and ears, and the more dependent those audiences are, the better.
The media quickly learned that making their audience loyal was the challenge. Talk radio was doing it by focusing on what thinkers were interested in. Mass media on the other hand, found an even larger and more malleable audience with non-thinkers. Folks that wanted mostly distractions, entertainment, superfluous information and gore. They catered to the "middle" politically, and also found that that group wanted validation too. So they began to pander to them, telling them "what they wanted to hear" that the world was safe, that their children were smart, and that the government would take care of them.
"Mainstream Media" morphed into predominantly game shows, situation comedies, infotainment, and advocacy programming. The lines of distinction were smeared and the truth of reporting was distorted to make stories fit a narrative and a sound bite time limit. If the goal is to stupify and mesmerize your audience, it is much more effective to present only shallow storylines, surreal action sequences and attention grabbing headlines with little or no serious analysis or followup.
Scandals were particularly attractive and they tend to go on for months or years, like television soap operas. Many news reporters made their career out of milking political or cultural scandals among elected officials or celebrities.
I would argue that the emergence of a growing talk radio audience forced many traditional news programmers to lean towards what has become the "Fake News" phenomenon. More recently, the power of talk radio united the working class across Fly Over Country (a term that mocks mid west conservatives) and contributed mightily to the success of Donald Trump.
Since the emergence of talk radio, the blogosphere, and podcasting, plus the ubiquity of social media platforms like FaceBook, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and hundreds if not thousands of others, our information stream has become a tsunami of innuendo, scandal, blasphemy and misinformation. It is literally impossible to sort it all out…
The Rub? The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is that it scattered languages all across the world, making it impossible for people to unify. Maybe the world wasn't united and speaking the same language when the internet came about, but it has effectively scrambled information, making it impossible for people to determine the truth.
We are living in a new era of tribalization. The internet is just a modern version of The Tower of Babble, but instead of scattering garbled language, it is distributing garbled information.
***
-- George Carlin
Truth is a funny word. It isn't always a funny thing, but the word is misused so often it would be humorous if it weren't so serious. Seriously, how often do people claim they are speaking the truth when everyone knows they are not. How often do we read a headline and say to ourselves, "that doesn't make sense!" Advertisers say their product is "NEW and IMPROVED" but it is simply wrapped in a new package. Newscasts claim "Breaking News!" when it is actually yesterday's news.
The truth is, it is almost impossible to discern the truth about anything anymore. Or was it ever? I lived in an era back in the fifties when it was normal to believe whatever Walter Cronkite said on his CBS Evening News. To believe whatever my teachers told me in class. To believe it when my parents told me if I ever got suspended from school I would be grounded for two weeks.
For most of my life I read the newspaper every single day. I would read the paper over breakfast, along with my morning coffee. Over time I started to realize much of what was written was designed to grab my attention. It was the job of the newspaper editors to grab your attention, and make sure you came back for more the next day. It wasn't their job to educate me, it was their job to engage and entertain me.
My search for the truth only got serious when I started to realize I was purposely being misinformed. I was being transformed. I was the subject of a broad experiment in social manipulation. That was when I began to understand that the media, something that had always fascinated me, was actually rearranging my perceptions.
As a young man I had experimented with drugs. I experienced hallucinogenic episodes, so I was familiar with how the human mind can fool itself. How perception is malleable. I studied advertising, and how repeated mental impressions could affect people's behavior.
Sometimes we have to purposely go back in our mind's memory, dig into our subconscious, to reveal how we misinterpreted events. How we acted on things, that in hindsight, probably should have been handled differently.
The truth is…well, let's just admit, we may or may not know the truth, now or ever. But in the interests of time, we go with what we got. Or what we think we got…
The Drudge Report
The DrudgeReport aggregator website was founded in 1995 by a frustrated Hollywood gossip news reporter, as a weekly subscriber online newsletter, it grew to be one of the worlds most influential news aggregators, attracting 30 million visits per day. The relatively small website at the time exploded on the world wide web when Matt Drudge decided to break a story that Bill Clinton was secretly sexually entertaining a young female White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.
DrudgeReport.com proved to be a groundbreaking template for real-time news reporting in the internet age. Its influence in culture and politics cannot be overstated. The evidence is in the vast array of aggregators and news summary sites and the way TV, podcasts, and even radio have copied the format of blaring salacious headlines and hyperlinking viewers to the content originators. It became the default daily newspaper for the world.
DrudgeReport lists hundreds of links to newspapers, polls and ratings services, magazines, news outlets, political party and office holder information sites, op-ed writers and commentators. It is a single hub for sourcing up-to-the-minute news and opinion.
Matt Drudge has become a multimillionaire and a curmudgeon of political intrigue. He circulates amongst the heavyweights in the Washington Beltway as they look at him with weary eyes, knowing he can have enormous influence on their careers. He does contribute his own op-eds occasionally, but the majority of his page is devoted to other ideas and points of view. He is considered a rightwing conservative but some evangelical conservatives suggest he is personally far too liberal on many social issues.
The fact is the Left refers to Drudge as "a muckraker and yellow journalist" because he gives an alternative to the left leaning FrankenMedia. The news aggregator format itself is one of the most influential developments resulting from the growth of the internet. Drudge correctly anticipated the way most people would use their internet connection. Instead of reading newspapers and watching daily newscasts on TV, millions of people simply log onto his website, or others like it, and choose which sources, and what stories, they want to see.
For over 25 years, Drudge Report has continued to dominate online viewership, beating all major cable news programs in audience share. In the past year, the Drudge Report website was visited over 8 billion times!
If there was a seminal moment when both politicians and citizens began to question the accuracy and bias of media news outlets, it was when DrudgeReport emerged as a major force in how Americans gather their news. His approach not only rubbed off on thousands of online purveyors, it started a process of revealing how disingenuous most of the major media channels were.
The Rub? DrudgeReport content was initially, and to a lesser degree still is, referred to as mostly "conspiracy theories". I started looking at it at the turn of the century. That is when I gave up on the daily newspaper routine. Since then I have bookmarked dozens of social media platforms that I use to keep myself abreast of the 'real news'.
The Tower of Babble
I have been a talk radio fan for decades. I began listening to Rush Limbaugh in 1989 when he was still broadcasting from Sacramento California. As his influence began to spread, so did the genre. Before long there was a plethora of talkers to choose from and I found myself channel surfing to find a new voice and talk format. I literally lost interest in pop music, except when I was driving in areas with no AM signal.
Over the years the concept of audience participation exploded across media segments. The whole nature of civic involvement changed and evolved. Talk shows gave a voice to the everyman. Suddenly we were no longer just a faint voter. We had power as a group and we had a say about many subjects that had eluded us in the past.
Rush had a major impact on Washington. The more participatory the audience became, the more secretive and manipulative the politicians became. As listeners and viewers pushed for more accountability and transparency, the less the beltway was willing to give us.
Sound familiar?
The media itself began to take sides. Some, like conservative AM radio, tried to reflect and amplify the concerns of voters. Others, like most television news operations, became entangled in ratings battles, and because of their growing dependency on corporate financial support, assumed the role of public relations agents for the political elite, huge groups of indentured union members, students and poor urbanites. Because of the extreme costs of operating massive studios, supporting huge payrolls and paying celebrity salaries for talking heads, they had to create train wrecks to draw audience share. Advertisers could care less about traditions. What they want are eyes and ears, and the more dependent those audiences are, the better.
The media quickly learned that making their audience loyal was the challenge. Talk radio was doing it by focusing on what thinkers were interested in. Mass media on the other hand, found an even larger and more malleable audience with non-thinkers. Folks that wanted mostly distractions, entertainment, superfluous information and gore. They catered to the "middle" politically, and also found that that group wanted validation too. So they began to pander to them, telling them "what they wanted to hear" that the world was safe, that their children were smart, and that the government would take care of them.
"Mainstream Media" morphed into predominantly game shows, situation comedies, infotainment, and advocacy programming. The lines of distinction were smeared and the truth of reporting was distorted to make stories fit a narrative and a sound bite time limit. If the goal is to stupify and mesmerize your audience, it is much more effective to present only shallow storylines, surreal action sequences and attention grabbing headlines with little or no serious analysis or followup.
Scandals were particularly attractive and they tend to go on for months or years, like television soap operas. Many news reporters made their career out of milking political or cultural scandals among elected officials or celebrities.
I would argue that the emergence of a growing talk radio audience forced many traditional news programmers to lean towards what has become the "Fake News" phenomenon. More recently, the power of talk radio united the working class across Fly Over Country (a term that mocks mid west conservatives) and contributed mightily to the success of Donald Trump.
Since the emergence of talk radio, the blogosphere, and podcasting, plus the ubiquity of social media platforms like FaceBook, Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and hundreds if not thousands of others, our information stream has become a tsunami of innuendo, scandal, blasphemy and misinformation. It is literally impossible to sort it all out…
The Rub? The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is that it scattered languages all across the world, making it impossible for people to unify. Maybe the world wasn't united and speaking the same language when the internet came about, but it has effectively scrambled information, making it impossible for people to determine the truth.
We are living in a new era of tribalization. The internet is just a modern version of The Tower of Babble, but instead of scattering garbled language, it is distributing garbled information.
***