Even the reporting of news has to be understood not as propaganda for any particular ideology, liberal or conservative, but as propaganda for commodities β for the replacement of things by commodities, use values by exchange values, and events by images.
Interpretation
News reporting often serves as a vehicle for promoting consumer culture rather than providing unbiased information.
Christopher Lasch's quote highlights the transformation of news into a form of propaganda that prioritizes consumerism over objective reporting. He suggests that the way news is presented often favors commodities and their associated value over genuine understanding of events, turning news into mere images rather than informative narratives. This reflects a deeper concern about the impact of media on society, emphasizing how economic interests can shape the way we perceive reality.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of media in society during a public seminar.
Much of what is euphemistically known as the middle class, merely because it dresses up to go to work, is now reduced to proletarian conditions of existence. Many white-collar jobs require no more skill and pay even less than blue-collar jobs, conferring little status or security.
The reporting of news has to be understood as propaganda for commodities, and events by images.
It is advertising and the logic of consumerism that governs the depiction of reality in the mass media.
It is the logic of consumerism that undermines the values of loyalty and permanence and promotes a different set of values that is destructive of family life.
The question of the family now divides our society so deeply that the opposing sides cannot even agree on a definition of the institution they are arguing about.
Propaganda in the ordinary sense of the term plays a less important part in a consumer society, where people greet all official pronouncements with suspicion.
As CNN saw our growth in African-American viewership, they affirmed a fundamental truth of news coverage - people will watch you if they see themselves in what you report. It doesn't hurt if the people doing the reporting look like them, too.
Americans born since World War II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy, which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion.
The media is too concentrated, too few people own too much. There's really five companies that control 90 percent of what we read, see and hear. It's not healthy.
The British media is sinking down, as the American news media has lowered the bar for all of humanity. British news media is definitely trying to stoop down to that level. Everyone is stooping to the lowest common denominator.
I really do think we're going through a period of concentration of ownership of media, and we're starting to see the effects at the editorial level, and it's all bad. This increased pressure for profits every quarter, smaller news hole, less coverage of important stuff - the extent that it's become one giant infotainment industry.
Too many of our conversations in the media hinge on conflict delivered in three-second sound bites.
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