Ideology of Power

Contemporary politics has been rocked by the advent of ‘fake news’ and the relentless circulation of ‘alternative facts’. One cannot help but mention Donald J. Trump, loved and worshiped by some, yet hated and scorned by others; his election made liberal use of the penchant to believe whatever was said authoritatively, regardless of the truth, with little attempt by voters to discern the veracity of any piece of information they were fed. This perception of Trump by his votaries, as the final authority on fact, was only buttressed by the vitriolic backlash of the mainstream liberal media, who became so blatantly skewed in their representation of Trump and (more importantly) of his supposedly racist and supremacist popular supporters that it only served to ossify their obduracy. I do not claim that Trump falsified and sensationalized a narrative and imposed it singlehandedly on his unthinking entourage; rather, while the statistics presented seem no doubt cherry-picked and exag...

It has been a rocky journey since election night, where (now President) Trump shocked the world in a miraculous upset victory over Hillary Clinton. The writing had been on the wall, and the complacency of the media outlets had obscured the root of the problem, making it seem as though a Clinton win was inevitable – a supposed fait accompli . As is always the case, political analysts and strategists, with the advantage of hindsight, have perspicuously adduced myriad reasons and factors accounting for Trump’s win. Whatever transpired, our business is in the present, where Trump’s first days have been just as controversial as his presidential campaign. Now the target for much invective, the most entertaining of which has been the Women’s March, Trump’s executive actions have spanned almost the entire breadth of his campaign promises, his most recent one being a temporary ban on all immigration from seven primarily Muslim countries: ‘Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen’...

The past weeks have been eventful in the way of celebrity deaths. Two in particular catch the headlines: Muhammad Ali’s death presumably from the medical complications of old age and Christina Grimmie’s murder by a ‘fan’ after a concert in Orlando. The latter is this article’s principal consideration, but both are important in scoping out the nature of fame and its relation to the media.