Let's do a little close-reading of media propaganda-building, shall we?

Pay attention to the little things, they reveal a lot

I spent a good bit of time this week looking into the most recent non-story about elite American journalists attacking each other on Twitter. But of course it is significant in that it shows us — in bright, bold colour — just how trapped these people are in a bubble of privilege. American mainstream journalists are truly misinformed as to the value of their insights and the level of concern ordinary people have regarding said journalists’ trauma. Poor dears. It’s not their fault. They can’t help the fact that they are mostly mediocrities. Obviously no one has told them.

But while many of the low-to-mid level young ones slug it out on Twitter, vying for relevance by trying to get one another cancelled, there is a more sinister agenda at play a few rungs above them. Though, after careful consideration, I think these more senior people are also trapped — in their socio-political and class-based bias. They simply cannot step outside their worldview. The problem, though, is that the resulting coverage is a live-action replay of the very thing these journalists claim to be working hard to prevent: the demise of democracy in the United States.

Pulitzer Prize winning writer Jennifer Senior did the rounds on MSNBC this week following the publication in the Atlantic of her lengthy profile of impassioned Trump fanboy and MAGA mastermind Steve Bannon.

Bannon is, in my humble opinion, the creator of the most interesting media product in the English-speaking world today. And it doesn’t matter if you trust him or not. The man is a force to be reckoned with, a human firehose of content. Dear reader, should you be one of the many people who have been conditioned to view him as the Goebbels of the digital age, take a deep breath. For I come to neither praise nor bury him. So don’t freak out.

Rather, I want to draw attention to how the mainstream media describes him. For therein lies an important truth, and that truth is this: if you are just a regular person, the mainstream media thinks you’re an idiot and you should fuck away off. Leave the serious work of governing to them, because only people like them can possibly understand it. Just go back to watching the Kardashians, k? (This is why Bannon makes the mainstream media crazy, because he has amassed a massive following of highly engaged Average Joes and Janes. And guess who they can’t stand? The mainstream media.)

On MSNBC’s morning show with Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough earlier this week, Jennifer Senior gingerly walks the hosts through the confounding phenomenon of people not thinking like them.

You can ABSOLUTELY trust this woman.

Senior first explains what Bannon’s War Room daily show is all about.

“His podcast, which he insists is not a podcast but a TV show, even though it’s on like Channel 240 of Pluto TV, which is its own weird metaphor for how distant it is from how we see things…” she says, casually signalling that the plebes have ideas above their station, out there in District 12 or where ever the hell Channel 240 of Pluto is.

Senior goes on: “It’s got a very activist base, he’s constantly having citizen activists on his show, saying ‘how can we get to you, tell me how you get involved in local politics.’ He’s really working hard to get people involved in the superstructure and the infrastructure of the Republican Party.”

At this point in the interview, Mika sighs — loudly. She’s clearly at her wits end. Getting citizens involved in local politics??? How very dare he.

Then Mika — who definitely got her high-paying, high-profile gig because of her own merits and not at all because her dad was one of the most influential humans of the 20th century — asks Senior, in a serious and worried tone: “you describe how he gets his followers going…’use your agency’ — what does that mean?’

Senior nods. She gets the confusion Mika is experiencing here. So she explains: “From the ground up, meaning if people get involved at the precinct level of politics, election deniers will eventually rise up and be in control of all the election apparatuses…”

I hit pause at this moment. Pay attention to the language being used here. First, Bannon “gets his followers going” by exhorting them to “use your agency.” Despite the weird phrasing Mika uses, which makes it sound kind of like a kink, the phrase “use your agency,” is not just benign — it’s empowering. It’s encouraging. In literally any other context, Mika would be embracing it as wholly positive. Yet this two richly rewarded, high-status women sit on national television clucking disapprovingly that regular people might be doing it for themselves.

Second, Senior characterises these activists as “election deniers.” How interesting. Being an intelligent woman who has done her research, she must know that this is an inelegant, if not inaccurate phrase. No one denies the election happened. Some people deny that Biden won. They would be better called result deniers. Others question, in a multiplicity of ways that I do not pretend to be an expert in, the integrity of the voting process. Call me a nutty conspiracy theorist if you must, but if you are a real news person, examining the integrity of something so important as election process would seem to me like part of the job.

But the phrase election deniers is a signal meant to communicate that the people in question are deranged deniers of reality. But what if, instead, they are worried voters who may or may not have seen evidence of wrongdoing with their own eyes, and as a result want to get involved?

And thirdly: these election deniers might “rise up” and “be in control.” Like beasts from the deep bowels of hell. I’m scared now, just thinking about it.

Do you see the language games at work here? Take a legitimate question — are elections being run properly? — then cast it as irredeemably disreputable and unhinged, even to ask it. And boom. You’ve got yourself a propagandistic line of attack.

Then you float the possibility that these people you cast as unhinged reprobates will rise up like the undead to take control of your neighbourhood. And boom. You’ve got yourself a population to demonise. If you were a radical intersectional college chick, you might call this othering.

Jennifer Senior searches for the correct words to explain the perplexing phenomenon of regular people

Ms Senior then went on another MSNBC show where she said even more revealing things.

Talking to Nicole Wallace, Senior said: “You can’t tell what he believes, he’s truly disorienting in this way.” Actually, no. I’ve listened to Bannon and it’s very clear what he believes. What Senior is doing is casting a veil of mystery around it, making out like it’s some kind of inscrutable, sinister puzzle, when actually it’s a simple, conservative, populist platform. Decent blue-collar jobs, nuclear families, safe neighbourhoods. Church on Sunday and Little League. You are absolutely free to disagree with it, even hate it. But it isn’t some kind of bizarre, outlandish cult — no matter how much the media tries to convince you otherwise.

Then she says: “He can very easily code switch and start sounding like you and me, sounding totally reasonable.”

Imagine if she said this about a person of colour. Let me translate, in case my readers aren’t fluent in Elite Speak: this schlub, this outsider who does not play the ass-kissing game to get into the Cathedral, is nonetheless actually capable of sounding smart, like us! Wow!

“He can actually have a reasonable rational argument, then suddenly he’s a different guy, and slowly but surely will start inhabiting this other point of view.” While she says this, she gesticulates by raising her arms slightly up, circling them towards her face, then pushing her hands down toward the floor — emphasising her insinuation of that mysterious, dangerous down there from which rises his…“point of view.” That scary place to which no upstanding member of the professional managerial class would ever dare to wander.

Then she says: “It’s almost sportsman-like. It’s PT Barnum stuff.”

This is sheer, unvarnished, blatant class-snobbery. She’s acknowledging his talent at building an audience, his discipline and energy, his mass appeal, but she’s holding her nose while doing it. Because when it comes down to it she’s just another myopic, upper middle class snob.

All this reminded me of an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show where he travels to London after Brexit, and he interviews some washed-up rock star in a pub. I don’t remember who. This scarf-wearing rich boy, horrified at the prospect of no longer being a sophisticated European, blames the vote on people in the north of England. And then says something along the lines of “can you imagine, people from Newcastle deciding foreign policy?”

Quelle horreur.

For an enjoyable tonic to all this class snobbery, have a listen to this hilarious and on-point song. (Warning: it contains a lot of swearing.) It could be a populist’s anthem. I guess that’s where my sympathies lie?