Breaking News or Breaking Noise

What if we Canceled the Show and Wrote Our Own Story?

The Yellow Press, by L.M. Glackens 1910 PUBLIC DOMAIN WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Hello, Friend,

There are a lot of experts with a lot of advice, much of it conflicting, about what those of us who aren’t under the spell of MAGA-ism ‘should be’ doing in this moment. I would postulate that much if it is conjecture at best. Who knows what we should be doing in this moment? Who knows what is going to happen next? We’re a massive country with hundreds of millions of heavily armed citizens who have been systematically divided and distracted for decades via our 24/7 media and our addictive and ever present social media. We live in information siloes. Most Americans are willfully ignorant yet convinced that they’re fully informed, riddled with Dunning-Kruger Effect. We’re inundated with opinions disguised as facts and sensationalism disguised as news from people who harbor agendas and biases that color their interpretations of the information they impart. They need to keep us watching, and that means they have to keep turning up the dial.

"If decent people would refuse to look at such newspapers the whole thing would right itself at once. The journalism of New York City has been dragged to the lowest depths of degradation. The grossest railleries and libels, instead of honest statements and fair discussion, have gone unchecked."

From Mayor Gaynor's letter published in the New York Evening Post, 1910

Our phones, apps, social media pages, and online and cable news networks send BREAKING NEWS! alerts out multiple times a day. It’s starting to lose any meaning.

Is it breaking news or is it breaking noise?

Is this the proverbial Rubicon?

How about this?

Oh wait, this is the Rubicon!

Is it, though?

We’re burned out from the logistics of day to day survival in a country that insists productivity and monetary success matter more than connectivity and contentment. We only have so much bandwidth and it’s being overwhelmed.

Our current government is a crappy reality show combined with WWF style distraction, all melodrama and bombast and kayfabe. What is real? What is manufactured to keep us confused, angry, frustrated, paranoid, and most importantly, outraged? Our president rules through Executive Orders he’s not even bothered to read before signing and grammatically questionable vitriolic social media posts he taps in all caps followed by the random disclaimer: ‘Thank you for your attention to this matter!’ As if we have any choice but to pay attention since our media laps up this steady stream of toxic sludge and shares it as though it all has equal merit, meaning, or substance. His incoherent bloviation is only news because they love the show and the ratings it manifests.

Even Substack has turned into a 24/7 outrage machine. They’re digging in on political content dished up by an ever expanding array of former mainstream media and cable news outcasts, exiled administration insiders, Beltway pundits, and people looking for future political relevance. According to these experts, everything is a ‘distraction’ from ‘the important thing we need to focus on.’ Chaos is the game plan, so who knows what is important? Maybe it’s all important. Maybe none of it is important. Maybe most of it is a mirage.

Does a Trump ‘truth’ in the shitter if no one is listening?

According to people in charge in L.A., this week’s drama is mostly smoke and mirrors. There is nothing happening there that the L.A. authorities can’t navigate beyond the Feds coming in hot with ratcheted up ICE kidnappings in Home Depot parking lots, the resulting protests, and the requisite well coordinated anarchist agitators. The noise is being drummed up by the folks in D.C. itching for an excuse to flex their muscles. They’ve left the National Guard troops they ordered to LA without food, water, lodgings, or access to restrooms. A five time draft dodger demanding a massive authoritarian style birthday military parade has once again shown his complete disregard for the well-being of the members of our military.

They may be itching to declare martial law, but they can’t even handle basic crowd control in one small area of one major city.

It seems like that may be the main story.

So why is our mainstream media sidestepping it?

The ineptitude is the story. The performative cruelty is the story. The idiocracy is the story.

"When I look at the people who are out there doing the violence, that's not the people that we see here in the day who are out there legitimately exercising their 1st Amendment rights," McDonnell said Sunday. "These are people who are all hooded up — they've got a hoodie on, they've got face masks on."

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell

I’m just a lady who who sees patterns and wants to understand them. I’m not claiming to be an expert. I don’t know what any of us should be doing in this moment. I do know that there are more of us than them. I do know that media is a business and the makers of media need your eyeballs to pay the bills. I also know that our current administration knows how to play the media like a fiddle.

What if we canceled their show and wrote our own story?

Dig it? We’d dig if it you shared it!

Subscribe for more frippery and nonsense! It’s free with an option to support the work through a paid sub.

Can’t swing a sub? No worries! Consider buying your writer a cup of coffee!