The Media Today

Description: The pundits and politicians are just like us.

Transcript:

And so as Americans I would just love our pundits and our politicians and people in the media to just say, “Look. No one . . . None of us really know what we’re doing. None of us are nearly as bright and together as we pretend to be. We all go home and cry into our pillows. We all occasionally drink too much. We all occasional do sexual things that we probably shouldn’t,” you know? That’s what bonds us as a species. And it’s . . . But we’re in like . . . almost in this sort of like new Victorian era. Like we’re okay with pornography, but we’re not at all comfortable with sort of vulnerable honesty about ourselves.

The majority of Americans, when they decided the war in Iraq was a travesty was when they saw images of Iraqis being tortured and prisoned. It didn’t matter that you had 100,000 dead Iraqis before that. It took those specific, powerful images. So different people respond to different, you know, semiotic triggers. And it’s just a shame that we’re all so easily duped.Recorded On: 5/29/07