That’s one way to look at it thru the media lens . . .*G*

Here’s when I remember being suddenly aware of political discussions in mass media being totally divorced from policy:

Right after Ronald Reagan first reached the White House.

I can even remember the exact moment, when watching This Week (with David Brinkley at the time, I think) I heard everyone at the “round table” talk about stuff like “perception management” and the clever use of “stage management techniques” and the sudden emergence of the he said/she said (there is no truth to be found, nope!) to the exclusion of any concrete policy analysis.

It was a Sunday morning in spring 1981, and I remember my head snapping ’round to stare in astonishment at the screen with a “WTF?” going through my head.

It particularly hit me hard because, at the same time, I was studying in graduate school the heavy use of satire in German literature during the time of Kaiser Wilhelm & Bismarck, to lay bare, parody, and warn about the blurring of all distinctions between politics and theater for the masses.

That’s when I first started worrying about it, for real. When I was a kid, I remembered hearing, distinctly, somewhat serious debates on the consequences of various policy approaches on programs like Meet the Press and Face the Nation.

More recently, I’ve seen video clips from those “olden days of yore” and they have verified the drastic change — the massive dumbing down which occurred over the past 3 decades.

Fascinating that Wyden and Feingold are happily on board with Panetta, and that Wyden was consulted.

Nice to think that I know members of the Intellectual Left. Howdy!

Feinstein and Rockefeller sense a real individual with real clout at the agency, whom they cannot control.

They control shit.