8/2/22

Audio News Media vs Text

 There is a stark contrast these days between news media with human audio and news reports in written text; the former is marinated in political spin and text, far less so. Television, radio and Internet video are saturated with human and speech synthesizer read news stories that usually have rave demotic spin slathered onto skeletal structures of news facts.  Hearing via the ears, Julius Caesar commented, is the most vulnerable sense. He would be aware if alive today that enemies with mass communication technology can do a lot of social harm. People can injure via the ears from across the globe. Brainwashing and political control may be engendered through audio with deceit and guile. Text is shorn of emotional and disinformative spin packed into audio inflections and warps of paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. Audio readily serves as a communicable social disease of lies.

Text of course may be used to put out propaganda. The ability to consider text reports without emotional manipulation is much easier than for audio reports. One may for instance, compare audio to walking through a store checkout line with human checkers vs. one with a self-scanner-check out, do it yourself system. The human may use audio to spin even the weather while the do-it-yourself scanner should generally be silent and compliant.

Text has a syntagmatic and paradigmatic axis. Audio has those too, and one more; a phonological axis. The phonological axis can be used to corrupt syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes infusing each with duplicity and/or emotives.

It isn’t that automated systems with speech synthesizers cannot be used for audio spin; they can. The National Weather Service’s marine weather forecast radio usually applies some kind of controlling spin pronunciation onto regular words. One could pack emotion laden language into any speech synthesizer or insults from grocery auto check outs to automatic car driving systems. Electric powered self-driving car owners may want their vehicles to have a road rage program function built in to compensate for a wussy environmentalist reputation; who can say.

It is possible to compare text for objective content more easily than audio reports. If one watches the spin of Fox News vs. NBC or CNN via the Multi-news windows of cable TV the contrast can be notable sometimes. With text one can line up three reports on the same news item and sometimes see spin from the left, right and with luck, and objective, just the facts sort of item.

The Democrat Party seems to be permanently on vacation from objectivity and intellectually optimizing mass infrastructure designs for progress in a preference of anti-Trump and anti-Russia narratives forever. The hate Trump narrative is comparable to the Mary Jo Kopekne remarks that flowed through the conservative media about Sen. Ted Kennedy decades after the drowning; it is simply much more hateful, loud and of a scale Sen. Joe McCarthy would have appreciated.

I believe it is possible that the phenomenology of modern capitalism inducts socially destructive political dynamics to facilitate the concentration of wealth as a best-possible-wordline in-itself. The rich own the media and the political environment too. With the end of Cold War 1.0 political reorganizations were made to enable concentration of wealth. The rise of an American left was a concern. It is possible that the left were diverted to socially divisive issues as a way to take their focus off economics and the politics of economic equalization within a reasonable range income distribution. The same principle may apply to environmental reformation too; the rich may prefer gradual for-profit market responses to environmental challenges over comprehensive government led approaches in order to conserve increasing concentration of wealth. I believe the media, owned by the rich, reinforces the narrative of social issue divisions.

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