Politicizing Entertainment

It was a bad idea to personalize politics. It is a very bad idea to decide who to frequent based on political zealotry. The worst is to turn your business into a propaganda organ. Such is the strategy now at work in Hollywood and in certain parts of the NFL. 

Totalitarian dictatorships politicize the arts and culture. Democratic nations, or nations that want to remain democratic don't. The message has not gotten through to our media and intellectual elites.

These latter believe that they are leading the Resistance. They believe that they are leading a cultural revolution. In truth they are politicizing entertainment, and thus losing their audience. So says Joel Kotkin. By his lights, the marketplace will eventually pass judgment on this folly.

Keep in mind these are serious thinkers. And yet, how much brainpower does it take to know that it is bad business to force your political views on your audience.

Kotkin says:

America’s seemingly unceasing culture wars are not good for business, particularly for a region like Southern California. As we see Hollywood movie stars, professional athletes and the mainstream media types line up along uniform ideological lines, a substantial portion of the American ticket and TV watching population are turning them off, sometimes taking hundreds of millions of dollars from the bottom line.

This payback being dealt out to urbane culture-meisters by the “deplorables” are evidenced by historically poor ratings for such hyper-politicized events as the Oscars last year as well as this year’s Emmys. The current controversy surrounds the NFL player protests, which are lowering already weak ratings, down 10 percent since the national anthem protests, as well as plunging movie ticket sales. The oddly political sports network ESPN has seen declines close to catastrophic, although how much their often strident “resistance” turns off viewers is widely debated.

Sports and entertainment draw an audience because they eschew politics. Now, however, in the name of diversity, they have alienated large segments of the public. They have become propaganda organs, spewing out ill-informed opinions, and demanding adherence. Their version of diversity insists that people be of one mind:

… with the rampant politicization of culture, sports and information, the notion of a common cultural market has all but disappeared.

Among those in control of mainstream media culture — newspapers, magazines, movie studios and television networks — attention is focused on an affluent, progressive audience concentrated in urban centers. The ignored, or disdained, are not just the roughly 46 percent of voters who voted for Donald Trump, but a wider section of middle-class America.

Purveyors call it niche marketing:

Large cultural companies see their future not so much as appealing to the mass audience, but to a large, often wealthy, audience that shares their increasingly homogeneous world views. The rise of Trump has been a huge boon to “resistance” media like the New York Times, MSNBC, late night talk shows and Saturday Night Live, all thriving from those millions who can’t get enough anti-Trump.

Some have been making money off of their resistance to Trump. But, Kotkin continues, how well do they understand their audience? Do Clinton voters really form a wealthy intellectual elite:

The big open question is who will capture the 40 to 50 percent of America that the mainstream media finds “deplorable.” This alternative audience is not made up entirely of repulsive alt-right white nationalists and is clearly underserved in our mainstream media. They may not be generally as erudite as readers of the New Yorker or the New York Times, and perhaps less attractive to the luxury advertisers who sustain those publications, but they are not necessarily illiterate dopes. In fact, the average Trump voter appears to have been wealthier, and even better educated, than those who voted for Hillary Clinton.

Having descended into nonstop propaganda the mainstream media has also lost its credibility. Fewer and fewer people trust them to present objective facts. Of course, they have done so in order to fight what they called President Trump's loose relationship with facts.

It is not going to be that easy to recover it:

Today only a small part of big media, notably talk radio, as well as Fox News and other outlets of the Murdoch empire, have targeted this audience. In addition, the conservative mainstream has spawned such alternative voices as Pajamas Media, Breitbart, The Federalist, the Daily Caller and a host of other small web-oriented publications. The growth of these outlets reflects how many Americans no longer trust the established media as being either objective or sharing their values.

Attacking patriotism might play well on the Upper West Side. In the rest of the country it is divisive. If we do not have a strong sense of patriotism we will never unite the country.

Kotkin remarks:

The likely winners in the new media landscape will be those who can carve out a strong niche capable of supporting advertising or gaining sufficient eyeballs. Sadly, this tends to weaken any sense of national unity. Rather than a moderately liberal mass media that at least pretends to respect differing opinions, we may see a cultural landscape that more resembles competing armies or football teams, and forget the nuances.

We have reached the point where national debate are being led by stand-up comedians who are not even funny. They are backed up by ignorant celebrities who command space in the tabloids. Kotkin is not very impressed by President Trump’s tweets, but then again, most of his supporters aren’t either:

It’s not pretty. We see conflicting outrage from both the unhinged man in the White House and his claque, and an endless stream of drivel from almost embarrassingly ignorant celebrities, including that intellectual icon of our age, Kim Kardashian. The real loser is our democracy, the quality of information and largely unrepresented, less politicized Americans, often stuck between two sets of hardened partisans.

It’s not just the propaganda. The American mind is being systematically dumbed down. With any luck the market will bring them to their senses. Otherwise, we are in big trouble.