In this regard, observe the global indifference of the political class, direct and left confused. Beyond the small annual unrest around the decimal percentages that are added (or removed) to the budget of culture, political thinking does not show that the dominant cultural values have been sent, sometimes imposed, by the values that dominate their own television activity. This indifference, moreover, results from a growing dependence on political discourses in relation to their forms of television representation. At the most obscene limit of such practices, there are many interventions of politicians who, in the small screen, elaborate their ideas (or lack of them) from references to interventions of other politicians … in other television moments.
This means that no one (finally, almost no one) gives due importance to the fact that television – with all its internal differences – exists as a nuclear element of configuration, not just the confrontation of political ideas, but the functioning of all social dynamics. We live every day on television and, not a few times, through television, while we behaved as if television did not exist. We don’t even pay attention to someone like Donald Trump’s symptomatic fact to develop all their anti-democratic strategy through television and, increasingly, against what resists manipulation of consciences on television.
Hysterical shouts in defense of “freedom of expression” are scarce (even when they serve as ammunition for some television clips). What has happened in the US, with the removal of emblematic figures from “talk-showsMore critics of the Trump administration is far from being a more or less provocative jokes, or a mere game of vanities. After all, Trump has arrived where he has arrived largely through many years of an insinuating presence on the small screen-understand: throughout the American social fabric.
Not that television protagonism is a method of manufacturing dictators. To suggest this would be to double the compulsive Manichaeism that has contaminated many television “debates”. In any case, it would be time to ask if we only have politicians who conceive of their television presence as a cynical theater to win voters. Or if there are still serenity politicians to think, and help overcome, the country’s cultural emptying-without forgetting that it is not possible to do so without thinking about the central role of television.
Journalist