|
cloudboy -> RE: "Obama Derangement Syndrome" (8/23/2013 4:33:12 PM)
|
Sometimes to understand the mechanics of a syndrome, it helps to see how such a thing operates in another country. In this case there's Brussels Sndrome as inflamed by particular British media and experienced by British Citizens.
LONDON — The basic tenet of The Daily Mail is that Britain is not what it was (true enough, it isn’t) and that it would go a long way toward recovering its gritty greatness without wind farms, safety obsessions, green lunacy, overregulation and — above all — the European Union with its meddling bureaucrats.
The formula works. The Daily Mail is the best bad newspaper in the world. It hits every jingoistic British button with eerie precision. Its mix of sex, celebrities, scandal and Brussels-bashing has something of the yucky addictiveness of the Kardashians. The paper boasts a weekday circulation of almost 1.6 million, rising to close to 2.5 million on Saturdays. It also has a wildly successful Web site, Mail Online — but that’s another story.
My concern here is not with The Mail’s journalistic brilliance — no paper is more maddeningly readable — but with what its obsessions say about where Britain is headed with its acute Brussels Syndrome. The Mail wants Britain out of the 28-nation European Union. So does the only daily that outsells it, The Sun. For both papers, Europe is a sort of Soviet Union-lite with plans to regulate everything from female quotas in boardrooms to your doctor’s hours. This is a nation where the agenda of the mass circulation tabloids weighs heavy.
----------
Without a doubt the US right wing press operates the same way -- there's a de-emphasis on news, a high calculation for audience sensibilities, and emotional targets to trigger viewer / reader hot-buttons.
Arguably the British tabloids are the forefathers of the FNC, a news channel birthed in the USA by Rupert Murcdoch.
|
|
|
|
