The deluge of political ads that have been assaulting our sense of hearing and good taste has brought in over $2.4 billion dollars this campaign season.  The number of ads has grown so quickly that some local stations are struggling to find enough salable time to sell to super-pacs and candidates.

The station’s new 4 p.m. news program offers interviews with candidates and was created in response to greater interest in the races by viewers, he said, noting that “political campaigns always prefer news because there is a higher propensity to get out to voters.”

Woods said that by replacing “Ellen” with the political newscast, the station gets to keep all of the revenue from ads, rather than share it with Warner Bros., its syndication partner for the daytime talk show.

This is a startling admission for a number of reasons.  One is that the idea of the public interest is quite subservient to commercial interests.  Whatever obligations we might wish to believe networks possess regarding the democratic process, it pales in comparison to their fealty to the bottom line.  The presidential election in two years will probably cost around $8 billion dollars.

Election Cost: Opensecrets.org

This influx of cash also highlights why political processes and institutions are so difficult to change.  If we envision the media as a watchdog of the powerful, then the fact that it also happens to be on the payroll of the powerful creates a substantial conflict of interest (or at the very least the impression of one).  Where will the impetus come from for campaign finance reform, or any meaningful change, when the status quo is just so darn profitable?

In an excellent piece by Kyle Wagner at Deadspin, the phrase “American Grievance Movement” is used to describe a cultural backlash – specifically against the media – in the reportage of systemic issues regarding race, class, and gender.  The phrase fits so well into the contemporary climate of media critique and cultural politics that it would be a shame to not traverse its contours.  What can we see, and say, regarding a grievance movement and its functioning? In thinking about the ways such a discourse functions, I thought it would be helpful to include some examples.  The first is part of an email forward that was passed around a few years back exclaiming the virtues of white pride:

Proud To Be White Someone finally said it. How many are actually paying attention to this? There are African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, etc. And then there are just Americans. 
You pass me on the street and sneer in my direction. You Call me “White boy,” “Cracker,” “Honkey,” “Whitey,” “Caveman” … and that’s OK. 
But when I call you, Nigger, Kike, Towel head, Sand-nigger, Camel Jockey, Beaner, Gook, or Chink … You call me a racist. 

You say that whites commit a lot of violence against you, so why are the ghettos the most dangerous places to live? 

You have the United Negro College Fund. You have Martin Luther King Day. You have Black History Month. You have Cesar Chavez Day. You have Yom Hashoah. You have Ma’uled A l-Nabi. You have the NAACP. You have BET. If we had WET (White Entertainment Television) we’d be racists. If we had a White Pride Day, you would call us racists. If we had White History Month , we’d be racists. If we had any organization for only whites to “advance” OUR lives we’d be racists. 

We have a Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a Black Chamber of Commerce, and then we just have the plain Chamber of Commerce. Wonder who pays for that? 

A white woman could not be in the Miss Black American pageant, but any color can be in the Miss America pageant. 

If we had a college fund that only gave white students scholarships you know we’d be racists. There are over 60 openly proclaimed Black Colleges in the US . Yet if there were “White colleges” THAT would be a racist college. 

In the Million Man March, you believed that you were marching for your race and rights. If we marched for our race and rights, you would call us racists. 

You are proud to be black, brown, yellow and orange, and you’re not afraid to announce it. But when we announce our white pride, you call us racists. 

You rob us, carjack us, and shoot at us. But, when a white police officer shoots a black gang member or beats up a black drug-dealer running from the law and posing a threat to society, you call him a racist. 

I am proud. But you call me a racist. 

Why is it that only whites can be racists?

But what about class?  This image has made the social media rounds recently.

Lastly, and most closely related to the article written by Wagner, is this piece excoriating feminists for . . . I am not sure, actually.  Being terrorists?

At the core of each of these examples is, as the discourse goes, an issue of political correctness gone too far or “reverse discrimination.”  It is minorities, the poor, and feminists who are just ruining everything, or so it would seem.  Thus when video game producers/critics like Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu are forced to leave their home due to numerous death threats (and worse), they are not victims of online campaigns of harassment but rather the aggressors in a cultural war against established power (gender power, in this case).  Likewise, both the race and class examples above implicitly reposition dominant socio-political groups as the aggrieved – it is in fact the white and the middle class who are victims on a zero-sum cultural battlefield.

Here is where the “grievance movement” comes in.  Media – either mass or social – allows communities of persecution to congeal around the perceived injustices against the established order.  As Hofstadter noted in 1964, there is nothing new about this phenomenon – there has long been a paranoid style in the american political mind.  Media coverage and mediated communities, however, offer a veneer of respectability to such ideas.  The primordial members of a Grievance Movement can now immerse themselves in an echo chamber where the true enemies within – welfare moms, thugs/illegals, and feminazis – are seen as existential threats.  It is within such a context that civil rights leaders are called racist, feminists are called terrorists, and the poor are demonized as the “takers.”  A thoroughly “negative” politics  metastasizes within the grievance movement, as identities coalesce around “that which one isn’t.”  In an ironic twist, the identity politics that for so long have been the target of cultural reactionaries are now the driving force of a social and political movement that is built on perceptions of perpetual persecution.

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