Posted on 07/11/2015 3:35:40 AM PDT by moneyrunner
Bud Norman
Such strangely differing standards of what should be met with indifference and what should be met with offense are by no means confined to the academy, or to those corners of the world only culture vultures still take an interest in, but also define the broader public’s approach to politics.
Thus The New York Times is outraged by the four traffic tickets that Republican presidential contender Sen. Marco Rubio has received over the past 20 years, but seemingly indifferent to the four brave Americans who were killed in an American consulate in Libya that failed to receive requested security from Democratic presidential contender and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton following her ill-fated war against Libya.
Thus the civil rights establishment is aroused to hash-tagging “black lives matter” and rioting in the streets when a black man is killed by police in even the most justifiable circumstances, yet indifferent to the vastly greater number of black men killed by other black men, and further indifferent when that horrible number inevitably increases after the hash-tagging and rioting inevitably hamper law enforcement efforts in poor black neighborhoods.
Thus it is that polite opinion holds the insane profligacy of the Greek government is not only to be tolerated but forever to be subsidized, while a corporation that prefers not to pay its minimum wage employees any more than they produce is considered outrageously greedy.
Thus it is that the mass executions of homosexuals in the Islamic world is met with sincere attempts to understand context and generally with indifference, while some Baptist confectioner’s reluctance to bake a gay wedding cake is met with widespread outrage.
Decades ago a marketing professor told a company that he’d developed a formulae that said for x amount of advertising money you got y amount of sales regardless of the product. He said that to test the theory he’d sell rocks. Google Pet Rock. It was a success and the results exactly followed his formulae.
I think the same is true of outrage. It doesn’t matter how ridiculous it is. Suppose a company, any company, runs out of toilet paper in the women’s bathroom. With sufficient x “advertising” (news coverage) they’d probably be driven out of business or at least forced to put out large sums of money.
Outrage is a function of coverage. One comment from the president along the lines of, “of course the police acted stupidly,” or, “he could have been my son,” is worth all the x you’d otherwise have to invest.
As far as the media goes it’s another name for propaganda. They use emotions to sell their point of view.
Advertising is only worth whoever is willing to believe in it. Though for evil, getting a president to buy into increasingly ginned up outrage stories, and announcing it all over the place, was a masterstroke. It was a perversion of the biblical concept (found in Romans 13) that officials of government have a rightful role in praising what is good.
People go for shadows because they’ve long left acquaintance of light.
“As far as the media goes it’s another name for propaganda. They use emotions to sell their point of view.”
Also, believers in propaganda are loyal consumers of the media product. As such they must be kept supplied so their audience share can be sold to marketers of products.
There was a real counter culture in the ‘60’s. I remember the first time I saw a jeans ad featuring a hippy girl with a peace sign on her pocket. I realized that marketers had discovered the counter culture. From that minute is ceased to be real and became a marketing tool. When the real counter culture disappeared marketers created an artificial one. Most recently it is the rap culture.
When you see a jeans model shooting up heroin then they’ve coopted the drug culture too.
We live in interesting times.
From Pope Benedict, Caritas in Veritate, #75: “What is astonishing is the arbitrary and selective determination of what to put forward today as worthy of respect. Insignificant matters are considered shocking, yet unprecedented injustices seem to be widely tolerated.”
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