Never have so many argued for so much (of what they do) to mean so little.
This is how they think, from establishment high officials to establishment flunkies, like the dominant press. They think what they do doesn’t matter in any damaging way when they simply type up what the officials have to say and leave it at that. Hey, buyer beware! (But you won’t be warned here.) Here’s Ana Marie Cox on Stephen Colbert’s satire of the administration and of the press at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
“Comedy can have a political point but it is not political action, and what Colbert said on the stage of the Washington Hilton — funny or not — means far less than what the ardent posters at ThankYouStephenColbert.org would like it to. While it may have shocked the President to hear someone talk so openly about his misdeeds in the setting of the correspondents dinner — joking about “the most powerful photo-ops in the world” and NSA wiretaps — I somehow doubt that Bush has never heard these criticisms before. To laud Colbert for saying them seems to me, a card-carrying lefty, to be settling.”
She hit the trifecta in a short space, wrong on three accounts. First, political comedy is political action and can directly create social, cultural, and political action all. Second, Colbert’s whole performance was mainly a criticism of the press, a far more apt target under the circumstances. Third, the idea that Cox considers herself a “lefty” is entirely laughable and predictable.
Back to the first point, the dominant members of the press love to think so very much of their work has no negative effect on anything no matter how disinformative and subservient to power it continuously is. I’m sure tobacco PR spokespeople think the same way: Just doing my job (and making my big bucks) mainstreaming killer dope, into the veins of the public. And why not? PR doesn’t kill people — words do.
A Practical Policy 