I'm a fan of this guy named Marshall McLuhan who was a Canadian guy but was a well known media analyst/philosopher type who coined the phrase 'The medium is the message' and talked about stuff like The Global Village.
He was influential in the 60s to the fringe left. Guys like Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary. People on acid, stuff like that who pushed the phrase 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out', and influenced guys like Hunter S Thompson and the modern counterculture.
I grew up on US TV. Since the 70s, I grew up on the same kind of media that Americans grew up on. Being Canadian though, US media isn't tuned to me so I don't really have the same perceptions. I'm just an observer while Americans are involved.
It's like that boiling frog anecdote. If you're the frog in the pot, you don't notice the temperature rising. I'm on the outside. My attitude is more like 'Yo, someone needs to turn that down'.
The US mainstream media industry is one of the craziest, scariest, most fucked up industries ever. It used to be a lot more simple but nowadays, it's this monster industry that has almost complete control of public opinion in one way or another.
It's a propaganda industry more than anything. It's not really just about trying to sell war like traditional propaganda, it's about selling everything. TV especially really doesn't portray anything as 'normal'. Everything is heightened or escalated to borderline caricatures of itself.
Rich people are portrayed a certain way, middle class is portrayed a certain way, lower class is portrayed a certain way. The media makes poor people look like worthless assholes usually whether it's white trash or black trash. There is exceptions like when the media is pandering to poor people.
These hyper representations start off as a joke but then people start emulating them. The Big Bang Theory, it portrays nerdy science types as completely inept social losers by playing on forced stereotypes.
And now 'nerd culture' is a massive industry that benefits giant media conglomerates like Disney and Time Warner.
Gay people get portrayed as flaming homosexuals. You rarely see normal gay people that aren't walking stereotypes. Christians, they get portrayed poorly too.
Usually Christians are portrayed as the proud Murican, possibly gay, gun loving, Nascar watching, dicks. If they're lower class, they're bikers or skinheads, if they're wealthier, they're like Michael Shannon in Take Shelter or the neighbor's Dad in American Beauty. It's usually just angry or yokels. Ned Flanders is a yokel. Same with the Duck Dynasty guys.
With black Americans it's no wonder that race relations are terrible. The Academic & Entertainment industries exploit the fuck out of black people by pushing PC ideology which is completely contrary to what MLK was all about.
Political Correctness is a social theory that was adopted in the 80s replacing Colourblind theory. Being colourblind meant to just treat everyone equal and accept that people are different but be cool and deal with it. It's like 'oh you're gay, whatever. If you're not a dick then we can be friends'.
It's the idea that you're all equal Americans and have the same rights across the board no matter if you're rich or poor male or female, black or white, religious or non religious, etc...
MLK was more for colourblind theory. His whole I have a dream speech is about shutting the fuck up and getting over bullshit like race. He was more about social class inequality.
Universities sell courses that teach PC ideology which is really just a systemic form of cultural segregation. It teaches the idea that everyone is a part of their collective micro-culture. If you're black, you're part of the 'African American' demographic, which is about 13% of the population.
The term African American is stupid as hell by the way.
Back in the 70s, Hollywood started pushing the blaxploitation film genre. Since black people are a small demographic, white people started thinking black people were all ghetto pimps and thugs and prostitutes with big afros and shit. The industry glorified really shitty aspects of being poor and economically segregated from suburban white Americans.
Suburban white kids are trained by media to hate the suburbs and hate their lives and they sell escapism by selling 'urban' media that projects a much cooler, more exciting lifestyle. It's possibly a factor why gentrifying low income inner city communities and filling them up with hipsters and Whole Foods.
Anyways, black people got sick of being portrayed negatively so they complained and Hollywood had to stop selling blaxploitation.
By the 80s, black Americans were improving because white Americans were seeing them as equals and media wasn't making them out to be bad guys constantly. Guys like Bill Cosby and Will Smith were projecting a positive image that made Americans not be all paranoid about.
And then political correctness replaced colourblind theory. That was sometime in the late 80s over a couple years. It wasn't really taken too seriously at first until it started imposing rules in the workplace via HR policies.
Back in the 80s, a big cause was South African apartheid and starving kids in Ethiopia and the US was all happy with 'we are the world' bullshit and white Americans started getting really 'pro diversity'.
The term African American came out of a goofy speech by Jesse Jackson when he was running for president. White pro diverse academics picked up the term and started telling people to use that term instead. The media started using the term too and it created this bullshit cultural wedge.
Not all black people are from Africa. It's a stupid term.
So now that political correctness happened, and stuff like rap music was becoming more popular, the media started going back to their old tricks.
Rap music started in the streets and was made by poor people in poor communities. On one side, there was a lot of fun party music. On the other side, it was a form of expression that could criticize the environment and the system that keeps poor people down among other stuff like the drug problem, racism, politics, etc...
And then rap music turned all gangster and the media brought back and updated a lot of the old 70s stereotypes. Since white people were told to be PC, they were told to leave black people alone or else you're disrespecting their 'culture'.
The media started making black people look like scary bad guys again while glorifying the lifestyle. It appealed to suburban white kids who were overlooking the fact that in reality, that type of lifestyle fucking sucks.
The media completely killed off black activism in the music industry and made it a marketable trend to sell to white kids. Guys like Tupac wound up being coaxed into the gangster lifestyle because of all the new money going to rappers by big labels run by corporate businessmen.
Tupac, his folks were in the Black Panthers. He got killed and turned into a fucking hologram. That's kind of fucked up personally.
The media turned black people into an industry. From clothes to cars, booze trends, social attitudes, etc...
The current black lives matter movement is a product of PC exploitation, corporate media influence, and social gerrymandering.
If it was still as colourblind theory, it'd be the All lives matter movement and probably more about socio-economic factors like why a handful of billionaires have so much more money than everyone else or why it costs so much to live nowadays and stuff like taxes or employment.
Instead it's about Feminism and toilets and Donald Trump's ridiculous walls and female ghostbusters.
I grew up respecting the US. Guys like Superman and the Lone Ranger and now you have douchebags like Cait Jenner & Kanye West and whatever other social anomaly they can pull out to keep dumbing people down.
Sorry for the stupid long post.