Media literacy: the key 21st-century political skillset 

Elvis notoriously shot his TV when all four channels were trash that day. I feel you, bro. You, gentle reader, don’t have to go that gonzo to reduce the influence of mainstream media on your baseline mood and emotional stability. 

Don’t get poisoned by the toxicity of constant exposure to conventional media. Think of your viewing time as analogous to putting on a hazmat suit and descending into a nuclear disaster zone. Limit your exposure.

Containment barriers must be erected to filter the background radiation of the mainstream media’s unstated purpose of creating a manufactured sense of crisis. Avoid the doom-scroll effect of a running loop of TV news images for hours on end. That’s now an essential life skill. 

Digital and media literacy should be taught as part of school curriculums. It’s a mental health self-care strategy and a bulwark against factional tyranny.

I’m convinced the mesmerizing effect of watching conventional TV news outlets is by design an insidious form of manufacture of consent. 

The hypnotic trance engendered by running triggering highly curated video clips on a loop for days on end (often supplied with the background drone of an ambient dread score) is a blunt instrument for imprinting the memory chip file that will get pulled up whenever the topic appears. 

You are being conditioned to respond in a manner consonant with the unstated ideological objectives of the oligarchs who own mass media properties as part of a larger portfolio of inter-locked corporate entities.

The fact that specific falsehoods keep recurring despite being definitively publicly corrected by credible print journalists and academics demonstrates that the goal of the corporate media TV platforms is to frame the contours of the debate on their terms, independent of the facts.

The Republican-coded outlets take most of the heat on this score because their audience has a much higher tolerance for extravagantly bald-faced lies. They like a good troll.

The fact that the Republican outlets almost never retract a disinformation piece unless they are threatened with legal action suits the authoritarian temperament of the GOP base. They have gone all-in on post-modern, post-factual vibes based politics. It doesn’t matter what is said as much as who is saying it. 

The Rosetta stone of the Fox Inc megalithic multi-media empire is the bedrock conviction that white Christian conservatives by nature and divine decree must always be the dominant force in American society. 

Anyone else is simply lacking in legitimacy. Liberals, progressives, and most people of color are not in the club. Their views are not worth parsing or considering. Their votes are a priori illegitimate, as are any news sources who do not repeat the GOP daily propaganda memos.

What led me to this rumination was watching liberal friends who get increasingly anxious and emotionally burnt-out by watching nonstop media coverage of the war in the Ukraine and now the eruption of terrorist violence by Hamas militants from Gaza and the subsequent massive collective punishment by the IDF.

Here’s a handy guide to media literacy that I’ve employed on my KSVY 91.3 FM radio show, Deconstructing Media (Wednesday,3-4pm):

• You don’t have to have the first take
• Consult reputable and credible sources for confirmation of early reports 
• Recognize the primary media tropes of both Democratic-coded and Republican-coded news outlets 
• Withhold judgment until the facts are settled. Don’t take the bait.
• Develop a healthy immunity to all forms of MSM and Fox Inc media manipulations

With the advent of AI technology, the central challenge of being a literate citizen who votes and acts based on reliable sources has been raised exponentially. 

The necessity to adapt to the protean textual and visual creativity of large language model AI’s may spur renewed public education campaigns to promote media literacy. We will have to work smart to maintain a democracy.