Thursday, April 18, 2013

Media Frenzy

Is it just me, or has the real news and celebrity news seemed to have congealed into one indistinguishable miasma? Of course theorists of the spectacle have long argued that everything is turned into a commodity in the representational world we live in, including war, political campaigns, mass murders and the like (framed within narratives that create the most drama, suspense and entertainment value, while spreading the dominant hegemonic ideals). And terrorism, of course, is spectacular without any enhancements -- so it's not surprising that it fits the mold. But with people in Boston still trying to make sense of the tragedy and find meaning in the loss, the major cable news outlets are at it again. Fox decided that it is clearly "Muslim Extremists" behind the bombs that went off during the Boston Marathon Daily Beast, even though there is no evidence to support this claim, and one hoped they would have learned something from the Oklahoma City bombing (Orientalism Clip). And CNN decided to chime in and inform us that a suspect had been captured, even though this didn't turn out to be true. But in a world where truth and fiction have dissolved into one endless, anarchistic discourse (backed by montages of images without context), who really knows what the truth is any more

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