"They See Him In Movies...They Have A Strong Sense Of His Character"

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/PoliticsNewsMedia.html
The Politics of News Media
from the book
False Hope
by Norman Solomon, 1994


Of course big business is always looking for new products to put on the market, and major presidential contenders are no exception. A quarter-century ago, when The Selling of the President, 1968 came out, the book's cover featured a photo of Nixon on a cigarette pack-and the imagery caused an uproar; now we take it for granted that candidates will be sold like automobiles or deodorant. But the creation of politician-products runs parallel with broader inventions: a power elite that can heavily edit the past and distort the present also reserves the right to concoct scenarios for the future.
Television lights up homes everywhere with its narcotic glow; stupefication par excellence, now enhanced with numerous cable channels and, we are told, the advent of interactive TV technology.
The pretense is that You Are There, or you have choices; the reality, much more likely, is that you aren't anywhere, and/you can choose from the choices that have already been made for you. The delusion of "choice" from an array of televised (and corporately backed) programs is parallel to the delusion of choice from an array of pre-screened (and corporately backed) presidential candidates.
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Preoccupied with revved-up mass media offerings, we're on treadmills of variegated conformity. Only authentic imagination can lead us elsewhere. But it is not imagination to picture ourselves as characters in a popular TV adventure show, or to identify with one side in a "debate" on the "MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour," or to prefer one of the budget versions in a House-Senate conference committee; when we select from the options already handed down from on high, we can only imagine what has already been imagined for us. When thought processes are corralled by received notions of realism, then possibilities for independent actions are fenced off.