Britney Spears
Los Angeles, California, 2008
Part of Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Photography at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, on view through May 10, 2020.
From The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming
Traditional media outlets exhibited the same value-free mentality, pumping out Trump stories and airing his rallies because they got hits and high ratings. At some point over the summer, it struck me that the greater part of the media wanted Trump to be elected, consciously or unconsciously. He would be more “interesting” than Hillary Clinton; he would “pop.” That suspicion was confirmed the other day, when a CNN executive, boasting of his network’s billion-dollar profit in 2016, spoke of “a general fascination that wouldn’t be the same as under a Clinton Administration.” Of the clouds and shadows that hung over Clinton in the press, the darkest, perhaps, was the prospect of boredom. Among voters, a kind of nihilistic glee may have been as much a factor in Trump’s election as economic dissatisfaction or racial resentment. The mechanism by which people support a political program “largely incompatible with their own rational self-interest,” as Adorno wrote, requires many kinds of deception.