every time i see shit about how major cities are supposedly being 'burned down' i remember how my - liberal, democrat - family talked to me the first time i saw them while i was living in baltimore during the uprising, and think of how badly we need to destroy cable news

fox news, cnn, msnbc, all of them, they're all constantly selling to the audience that still watches TV news regularly (or even hyper-regularly, constantly) that a broken window or a trash fire or some random graffiti is actually the whole city being nuked

altho honestly i shouldn't even just say cable news, local news is a massive problem here and has only become more of a problem as right wingers have bought up every station

one of the things i think of isn't just the contrast with the reporting (or lack thereof) on people rioting after sports victories/losses but how people see shit every day like some random property damage and shrug it off but news packages that same damage to melt their brains

you've seen broken windows before, you've seen minor fires before, you've seen graffiti before, you've seen busted up cars before, and you likely managed to get on with your day just fine when perceiving it in real life, but on the news it's all made to bomb your cortex

this was really the big thing when people were losing their shit over protesters showing up at tucker carlson's house and maybe leaving a bit of graffiti on his door

like as if you haven't seen graffiti

tucker got less than 80s people getting their houses egged on halloween

this is also one of the things i think of when it's not really generational differences that are problems - anyone who's getting this TV shock and awe shit fed to them 24/7 will end up like this, young or old. it's just that older gens are more likely to still watch tv regularly

thinking on it more, i would really, really, REALLY love to see a study on tv watching people's beliefs, especially on specific events - past and present - and how they fluctuated as news went from "the evening news hour" to "24/7 pump your veins full of anxiety and fear"

like people were getting fed propaganda in the 70s and 80s too, duh, but i wanna see the details of that affects people as it went from "you get this shit once a day" to "you get this every hour of the day, every day" when cable went mainstream