My cynicism bubbleth over

If you catch me, in some green and pleasant carbuncle, beating my arms against the earth, face down, febrile, crying “It’s retarded!  For fuck’s sake! Why does it work?  IT MAKES NO SENSE”, you’ll know I’ve been watching too much of the news.  Today’s examples come from John McCain and Barack Obama’s political campaigns.  I have nothing against either of them – it’s the campaigns, I find it extremely dull, and depressing.  Moreover the fact that things like showing your kids waiving at a video screen that has no eyes to see, and public tough talk on foreign policy, can, in themselves, affect public sentiment towards you. It makes baby Jesus weep.  In my head at least.  I’m not suggesting it’s ubiquitous.

It’s like PR: Say, for instance, a star wants to seem more family friendly – it’s arranged so that they’re photographed on a family day out, or eating an ice cream in the park (where have you heard the ice-cream line before?), and, it’s not that it’s fake; it could reflect reality, but that the pictures are just snippets, tiny parts of a picture that you won’t see the whole of.  Because, by necessity, we can’t all know each other. The specific problem is the degree to which people base their judgements on such superficial illustrations of complicated things. The news media shares blame for reporting things in such uncritical terms; by and large, unless the correspondents are total fuckwits, they know it’s a game.  They’re playing it too.  They know how complicated the world is really.

Based on how PR - through ice cream in the park, tough talk, waving at electronics, etc. - affects public image, the public must lap it up.

Are we really that retarded?  Isn’t it all a bit exploitable?  What would happen if people told the truth?  (It’s usually far more complicated than you think, you fucking dolts).  They’d fail.  Hard.  Yeah, I’m that fucking cynical.

And the worst thing?  You’d think celebrity news is inherently more dishonest than coverage of really important things, like the next leader of the free world, but it isn’t.  Celebrity news has evolved to the point where the viewer/consumer is in on the game too, rather than excluded.  Take Perez Hilton or TMZ or MrPaparazzi – they’re honest about PR.   Pictures of Gordon Brown eating an ice cream in the park?   Perez Hilton would draw cocks on the pictures in MS Paint.  The rest of the media would report them unedited.