Stewart Hoover on the media imaginary

Stewart Hoover reflects on Wade Clark Roof’s essay at Religion Dispatches, and in the process notes that:

He thus helps us break the age-old syllogism that has unfortunately been attached to much commentary about the tea-baggers and others: the media (talk radio) create a moral groundswell that is expressed by more-or-less mindless behaviors among the easily manipulated.

No, what we have here is something more complex, but no less troubling, and where no less of a role is played by media. There is discontent, rooted both in structural and economic issues and in social anxieties about the direction of an increasingly diverse culture. Instead of functioning according to a code of propaganda, the media provide a powerful, synthetic, recursive imaginary that articulates social and cultural anxiety in particularly profound and–this is important–satisfying ways.</blockquote>