The media. In Babylon 5, "medium," singular. As I said at the beginning of this series of posts, Babylon 5 was not exactly a testament to great writing. Among the aspects that bugged me most were the episodes done as news broadcasts from "ISN" (Interstellar Network News). How many news media did Earth itself have? That was never clear since the show's POV was a space station light years away, and the internet? The show was broadcast in the earliest days of the internet, so it didn't handle that in a way that reflected what we see now, or might see in a few centuries, but hey. Who knows? Also, there were newspapers. Yeah.
Anyway, ISN was a thing. It was the news network that broadcast across the galaxy for Earth-controlled territories. The bits of broadcast were badly written, like much of the show, and the media commentary within the show was especially ham-handed. As President Morgan Clark consolidates his power, he does what authoritarian rulers must do. He brings ISN directly under his control. It goes from sketchy to just being state-run media, after government troops storm the broadcasting center, and just take the whole thing over, but even before it became truly state-run media, it wasn't exactly a muckraking enterprise.
Why? Authoritarians can't have muckraking journalism. They need propaganda. Here. Watch (and keep and ear out for any echos of revoking security clearances and firing officials who criticize Trump, even though that's not my main point. The John Brennan thing is a perfect coincidence of timing today.)
Basically, whatever is going on, lie. Poverty, crime, any real problem, just lie. Dear Leader is perfect, so everything must be fine. Don't say otherwise. The media must be brought to heel, then. Otherwise, someone may tell the public that everything isn't fine. Re-writing the dictionary, as Julie Musante puts it in "Voices of Authority" (the episode above) requires controlling the media, as you see in the subsequent clip.
Authoritarians lie. They must. So, they hate any media outlets that aren't under their direct control and that don't just spout the party line. In Babylon 5, ISN just gets taken over, straight-up. The ISN broadcasts were/are hard to watch, partly because they are so ham-handed.
Then again, have you seen any Sean Hannity clips lately? For the life of me, I can't see a difference between Sean Hannity and the worst of ISN on Babylon 5 when it was fully under Clark's control, as sloppy and ham-handed as that writing was. That speaks to the basic point that over-the-top propaganda isn't subtle, by its very nature. It doesn't speak to intelligent people. It speaks to the masses. The racists who are manipulable by a demagog like Clark. Subtlety? Quality writing? That's for eggheads like me who aren't the audience anyway. Yeah, I hated those episodes, but who cares? I have a different perspective on them now. They weren't anymore for me than Sean Hannity. Yes, he is crazy, stupid, lies like the cheap rug on Trump's head, and only an illiterate, racist, inbred hick, or someone so old, senile and steeped in a brand of racism that has been kept in the closet for decades, clawing at the walls to come out, could possibly tolerate that reprehensible pile of feces.
So who cares what I think of Hannity's hour-long cavalcade of racist lies and conspiratorial* bullshit? If it looks to me as sloppy as an ISN broadcast under Clark's control, that doesn't matter. I was never part of his audience in the first place.
The Babylon 5-Trump era media comparison isn't as clean as some of the other analogies in this series. Straczynski was writing in the early days of the internet, and he didn't foresee the development of media outlets that would allow what we should call "fake news" and the kinds of conspiracy theories that help Trump to fester** and circulate. The different media environments create a different problem for Trump than for Clark, in addition to the fact that Trump can't have troops storm CNN's headquarters, even though everyone with a brain knows he wants to.
Yes, Trump would love to order troops to storm CNN headquarters the way Clark orders a full takeover of ISN, but it wouldn't help him. There are too many other news outlets, on and off the internet, and so on. It wouldn't work, even if he could do it. The backlash would be worse for him than having CNN continue to be there. Trump won't and can't pull off a full fascist takeover the way Clark did. That doesn't stop him from, as Julie Musante puts it, re-writing the dictionary. OK, let's not give credit to Musante/Straczynski for that. It goes back a little further, if you know what I mean.
The constant demonization of the press, though? Constant lying and attempting to redefine everything? (Purging the government of anyone who isn't a loyalist?) Yeah, there are some real parallels here. As I said, when Babylon 5 was on the air, I found the writing in the media episodes especially grating. Straczynski is not exactly a Joss Whedon-level dialog writer, but those episodes just bugged me. Looking back? Sean Hannity today doesn't seem all that different from a propagandistic ISN clip, when it was fully under Clark's control.
The issue that must be raised, though, is the bizarre relationship between Trump and Hannity. In Babylon 5, ISN is simply a tool of Clark's government, but Fox News is weirder. It doesn't merely broadcast pro-Trump propaganda, although it certainly does that. Rather, Trump also watches a ludicrous amount of Fox, creating a feedback loop. Trump and Hannity feed off of each others' craziness. Hannity doesn't just follow orders from Trump, he influences Trump because Trump watches him and listens to him rather than actual, knowledgable sources. This is all ass-backwards. Like everything in our world today.
And so, I think I may wrap this up with a reference to a book that I can recommend wholeheartedly. John Scalzi's Redshirts. I am a total Scalzi fanboy, and I admit that, but not everything Scalzi writes is absolute genius. Redshirts, though, may be his best work. You can probably guess by the title that it is a play on Star Trek. The premise is that a bunch of grunts on a space ship realize that any time one of them goes on an "away mission" with the command crew, the grunt, who wears a red shirt, dies. So, they try desperately to avoid getting picked for an away mission because they don't want to die. Eventually, they realize that they are actually on a tv show. A badly written one. It gets crazier, and I won't spoil it all for you, but just read it. I love that book.
Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?
Do you wonder if, maybe, this is a bad tv show? Maybe the writers are ripping off Babylon 5 instead of Star Trek. That would suck.
*There is irony to the attribution of conspiracy-peddling to Hannity while I analogize modern politics to Babylon 5. The difference, of course, is that the Trump campaign's collusion with Russia, for example, is a known fact.
**Fun with grammatical ambiguity. Conspiracy theories fester. So does Trump. Ain't grammar fun?
Related Posts :
Picture Of The Day- Relations Between Turkey And Saudi Arabia Continue To Deteriorate
- U.S. Coast Guard Operate Floating Prisons In The Pacific Ocean
- US, China Hold Military Talks On How They Might Communicate In A Crisis
- Here Are The Photos Of North Korea's Ballistic Missile That Was Launched Two Days Ago (Photo Gallery)