jerry

I liked your Borders story. I noticed the exact same thing in Costco yesterday. All sorts of anti-Bush books piled high all over the place with no counterbalance whatsoever. Kitty Kelly’s new book was prominently displayed and people wer flocking to it. Never mind that it has been widely and thoroughly debunked in the blogosphere. People don’t read the blogosphere.

There’s a deeper problem involved here. We used to have lots of independent bookstores, which meant lots of independent minds making book selections for their customers. We used to have lots of independent newspapers, which meant lots of independent minds writing editorials for their readers. Now we have a couple of big bookstore chains which own almost all the bookstores in almost all the towns across the land, making the same choices for all of the readers everywhere in the country. Now we have a couple of big newspaper chains who own almost all the newspapers. We have one single big chain owning almost all the radio stations. Now we have only a very few minds controlling the entire flow of news and information. Regardless of whether they are right or wrong, since these few people making all the decisions travel in the same limited social circles in the same small geographic locations they are very likely to come to the same conclusions. That’s human nature. We are social creatures and the “reality” we perceive is a function of the narratives being told by the people around us.

This is a very anti-democratic situation. We have created a “media elite” which has its hive-mind thoughts but which, really, is very unrepresentative of the nation as a whole and in some cases even of the truth itself. Then the media elite imposes its views on the rest of us whether we like it or not, whether it makes sense to us or not, whether it is even true or not. There’s a lot of anger being exhibited on this thread because the media elite are in the dominant position and we’re in the subordinate position and we’re acting like those monkeys Catherine mentioned.

We the People have brought this on ourselves. It’s cheaper to buy at Barnes and Noble, it’s cheaper to read only stories from the AP instead of supporting a local team of reporters, so in the name of economic efficiency, in the name of getting richer, yay verily in the name of the free-market and the value of private property, we have in effect destroyed our democracy. Those of you who believe the blogosphere is going to fix this problem are deluded. The blogosphere is going to provide an outlet for some of us who are like-minded (and maybe we’re the crazy ones) to get together and create our own social reality, different from the one being foisted on us by the MSM, but for those for whom the MSM-supplied narrative is the one they want to hear it won’t make a bit of difference. Those who want to believe the Kos-narrative will read Kos and become reconvinced that Bushitler is evil, and those who want to believe the Freeper-narrative will read that and related sites, and those of us who are both honest and open-minded will stay here with Roger.

Katherine is absolutely correct, the MSM is not going to go back on this and all that is going to happen when Bush wins is that they and their numerous followers are going to conclude that they simply weren’t mean enough and we Americans are even stupider than they imagined.

Knucklehead, your 7:55 AM post above was great.