In the wake of winning World War II America began to remake itself, not just on the basis of creating and selling good things but using language to convince others that this was true even when it wasn’t.
We had used such techniques in the past but since the 1950s the emphasis on advertising, public relations, and other systems of manipulating reality through language and images gained a precedence it had never had.
I was blessed by having entered journalism in the 1950s and was already aware that much of what we had to cover involved a distortion of reality. And, as I have noted before, I was blessed to be engaged in work on a farm and on the water that only accepted working with the real.
And while, even back in the the fifties, I was troubled by the role of lies and the manipulation of ideas I was not aware that it would increasingly define America decade by decade and might one day even allow the election of someone as bad as Trump.
As just one example of how things have changed, consider this from GB Times on the length of television ad breaks:
"In the 1960s and 1970s, commercial breaks were typically 1-2 minutes long, with an average of 6-8 minutes of commercials per hour. As the 1980s and 1990s brought an influx of cable TV channels, commercial breaks began to stretch to 3-4 minutes, with an average of 10-12 minutes of commercials per hour. Fast-forward to the present day, and the average commercial break length has changed dramatically. According to a study by the American Television Advertising Archive, the average commercial break length is now around 2.5 minutes. This means that viewers can expect to sit through around 12-15 minutes of commercials per hour, with some TV shows featuring breaks as long as 5 minutes."
As we try to recover from this great crisis, our schools, colleges, and media need to face the quiet damage that ultimately produced Trump and recognize that it's not just a nutcase we have to deal with but a cultural revolution that allowed him to thrive.
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