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Media in America Society
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The Media How in the world did California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger andPresident Ronald Reagan get elected The answer is the media These twoartists may have played powerful commanding roles as actors but how thevoting masses leaped to believing that they actually had a mandate to servethe people is a gross lapse in reasoning and it deserves a reckoning Could it be that the effects of the modern media are so intoxicating thatpeople can no longer discern an elected official from an actor

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Though literate, the businessmen and President'sinability to detect Chauncey's illiteracy is an indication that they toohave been robbed of their language. The Media How in the world did California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger andPresident Ronald Reagan get elected? Plato witnessedpeople walk out of the theater and return to the real world and begin toact like the characters they had just seen. Molding Our Lives in the Images of the Movies.Kozinski, Jerzy. This is just a necessary condition that,considering how many people there are and the diversities of theirschedules, requires the message to be repeated a lot so everyone gets it.The marketing MBAs might justify this by saying, "it creates economies ofscale," but repetition brutally streamlines and homogenizes individualsinto masses. Modern psychologists tend to agree with Plato that mimesis, "whenpracticed from youth becomes part of nature and settles into habits ofgesture, voice, and thought." (Republic, 395d). The answer is the media. Many people believe they arrive at theirpreferences and passions on their own, but when it is the media doling outthe vocabulary, the truth is decided by the owners of the media. Theresult is pathetic repetition of the same message, sometimes with minoradjustments from brand to brand. New York: Grove Press, 1999.Plato. The mainstream media does not put on artists who show qualities inaccordance with Athenian soldiers, but in accordance with "strong and rapidemotions, startling passages, truths or errors brilliant enough to rousethem up and to plunge them at once, as if by violence, into the midst ofthe subject," as Gabler (59) writes. Republic. The media frames world events by dictating the vocabulary and playingname games around political, religious, and ethnic uprisings. The idea is to controlpeople's language, carefully manipulating the terms people use to describethemselves and others. At the same time it marginalizes people who do not look likethe actors, and sadly even real people chastise each other for notmeasuring up to the actors in the media. If so, I wearily concede that Alexis De Tocqueville'sobservations were accurate, and further take them as evidence that Platowas right about the artists. To illustrate this point,author Jerzy Kozinski created the protagonist Chance The Gardener who, inan extreme case of mimesis, is a vidiot, a video-idiot, someone who ishopelessly illiterate and learned everything he knows from TV. The mediaframes how we talk about the world by selectively reporting on storieswhich advance its agenda, and then journalists avoid questions which mightundermine their publishers' owners' compacts with government officials.This is how Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected andcontinued to receive high approval ratings while in office-selectivejournalistic practices. Are people surprised to learn that mainstreammedia is owned by a mere 5 conglomerates, NBC Universal, AOL Time Warner,Newscorp, Comcast, and Disney? Being There. These twoartists may have played powerful, commanding roles as actors, but how thevoting masses leaped to believing that they actually had a mandate to servethe people is a gross lapse in reasoning and it deserves a reckoning!Could it be that the effects of the modern media are so intoxicating thatpeople can no longer discern an elected official from an actor playing oneon television? Plato said the danger was that"imitation" makes us attached to the wrong things, so we have to be carefulabout what artists (and images) we expose to the culture. Executives in charge ofmarketing, advertising, and of cultivating new trends know their messageshave to be unified and ubiquitous to be impactful. In BeingThere (1999), millionaire businessmen and even the President of the UnitedStates interpret Chauncey's simplistic and serious comments about gardeningas metaphorical statements of deep wisdom regarding business matters andthe state of the economy. He criticized the dramatic poetryof his day, and how it portrayed vile and immoral behavior on the part ofthe gods and humans as if it were normal or admirable. This still happens today, asmen and women actually start to behave like the vile fictional charactersportrayed on film and television. Plato warned us about the artists. In light of Gabler's assessment, itis time to reconsider a city ruled by Philosopher-Kings.Works CitedGabler, Neil. Plato's idealcity would be ruled by Philosopher-Kings who would cultivate strongartists; artists "who would imitate the speech of a more decent person andwho would tell his stories in accordance with the patterns we laid downwhen we first undertook the education of our soldiers." (Republic, 398a).Soldiers learn logic, strategy, loyalty, respect, cooperation, andsacrifice, qualities that are largely absent or highly diluted in today'smedia. The people who control the media today are well aware of thesusceptibility of the masses to mimesis. Accessed 1 July 2 9.http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.html

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