Sublime

Miller’s 1986 “Deride and Conquer,” far and away the best essay ever published about network advertising, details vividly an example of how TV’s contemporary kind of appeal to the lone viewer works.

those who “consume” the news can be corrected. There are powerful, almost incontrovertible, codes of decorum maintained by and for people who are thought of as White, or who have been invited to participate in Whiteness. The racial disparity in published photographs of traumatized bodies is by now a recurring, and almost tedious, question.

“That movement... from wonder that a country should be so big, to the wonder that a building could be so big, to the last, small wonder, that a marketplace could be so big—that was the

With a note of sadness, Wicker wrote in 1983 that “the reverence, the childlike dependence, the willingness to follow where the President leads, the trust, are long gone—gone, surely, with Watergate, but gone before that.… After Lyndon Johnson, after the ugly war that consumed him, trust in ‘the President’ was tarnished forever.” That tarnishing

These are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself. —Michael Hayden (CIA director, 2018) We have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have

paranoia about the government has increasingly migrated from the Left—which blamed the military-industrial complex for Vietnam—to the Right, with alt-right trolls and Republican members of Congress now blaming the so-called deep state for plotting against the president.

hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.

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