The Manufacture of Consent

The mass populace that appears on Maury and Jerry (both on stage and in the audience) is more than merely unfit to rule. It is a modern-day embodiment of the wretched, unruly, and childish “mob” – the dangerous and all-too “masterless” and “many-headed monster” – that aristocrats have always claimed to see when they describe the common people. It is proof of the classic authoritarian and self-interested ruling-class idea that the ordinary citizenry is unqualified for freedom and must always be checked, coerced, and manipulated from above. It is evidence for the venerable bourgeois thesis that “human nature” is essentially nasty, violent, disagreeable, and brutish. Especially at the bottom of the supposedly merit-based socioeconomic pyramid, this thesis maintains, civilization’s majority is composed of ignorant and boorish louts. That thankless rabble must be controlled for their own good and the good of society by benevolent, far-seeing masters, who are supposedly less tainted with humanity’s inherent inner savagery.

To be sure, it’s hardly just on the daytime freak-shows that these viciously hierarchical ideas find modern media expression. These oppressive notions are ubiquitous in various forms (especially in crime dramas) across the spectrum of America’s corporate-crafted “popular culture,” with authoritarian consequences that deserve serious consideration by progressive media critics and activists. They color the content of numerous situational dramas and comedies as well as pseudo-documentarian law-enforcement shows like the dangerously repression-friendly broadcast “COPS.”

Specific shows aside, the “manufacture of [mass] consent” to the shocking concentration of American wealth and power takes place just as significantly in the entertainment media as well as in the news and public affairs media that preoccupies most left media critics and activists.

I basically agree. The average American wakes up, eats, works, eats, watches television, and sleeps. There is no "free time" for critical thinking. The programs the average American watches on television amount to thought-control. I cannot think of a single show on broadcast or regular cable that is intellectually stimulating besides some PBS shows.