Vision Versus Television

In a perfect world, the media wizards who spawned Willie Horton would be out of business. But these propagandists are just one feature of a larger crisis of democratic capitalism: the interpenetration of politics, television, entertainment, and wealth. The mixture of cash ‘n’ camera has eroded civic discourse and brought about what Todd Gitlin calls “an eerie politics of half-truth, deceit, and evasion in which ignorant symbols clash by night.”

This crisis has t...