COMM 150: "Now ... this" / reality TV, media platforms and Sarah Palin

It drove media critic Neil Postman bananas when television newscasters would end a segment with "now ... this" before breaking to the commercial ... or another, unrelated story. As he said in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," the lack of continuity helps give us a fragmented view of the world.

And in that spirit, here's something about Sarah Palin. In other words: Now ... this:

Can Sarah Palin Twitter her way to the WHite House with reality TV and 150-letter sound bites (OK, let's call them text bites)? Don't be so sure she can't, writes Melissa Harris-Perry on The Nation's website. The Nation is a liberal magazine of opinion, so Harris-Perry has a political ax to grind, but she gives evidence of Palin's authentic emotional appeal. And Palin is a master at working the media. See if this rings true, and see if it echoes Neil Postman's analysis of the media that you'll write about on the final exam ... that he argued long before anybody outside of Wasila, Alaska, ever heard of Sarah Palin:

... Media, especially reality TV, encourage us to think less and buy more. They capture our emotions and silence our inner critic. They send us in search of products to fulfill our deepest desires. Palin may just be the political embodiment of our contemporary cultural moment; a presidential candidate born from TV's easy emotional draw and limited analytic capacity, a candidate who needs only 140 characters to explain policy, a candidate who attracts us even when she repulses us. As with reality TV, to underestimate Palin is to invite her to reach ever deeper into the American consciousness.

And ... now this, in a Los Angeles Times review of Palin's new book by Tim Rutten:

Along with her ally-of-convenience, the Fox News personality Glenn Beck — certainly the most gifted electronic demagogue since Father Coughlin in the 1930s — she has adroitly used the full panoply of contemporary media to position herself as a leader of the populist surge reshaping Republican politics. Like Beck, Palin is a multiplatforming powerhouse, a presence on cable news, reality television, on social media — Facebook and Twitter — and, more traditionally, in book publishing.

There's more. But suffice to say you don't have to agree with Palin's broadside attacks on the "lamestream media" to realize she understands the media very, very well.

Rutten adds:

... The media, by the way, are one of the recurring demons in this media-savvy book, along with progressives, liberals, academics and all sorts of look-down-their-noses-at-the-rest-of-us "elites." Like Beck, though, Palin is wonderfully adept at escaping any responsibility for what's essentially a Manichaean view of our society — one that divides real, hard-working, family-loving, religious Americans from those who … well, aren't those things.

Thus, she doesn't bat a professionally mascaraed eyelash while decrying the "shameful tendency on the left not simply to declare their opponents wrong, but to declare them evil. Conservatives and liberals don't have honest policy disagreements, this strategy says, conservatives are just bad people."

Right.

If I'm understanding this correctly, Palin demonizes people who (she says) demonize people. Barbara Streisand once had a song that went something like that.