"Junkfood Politics"...That's the term that best describes the the worst of what passes for a political process these days. From the tabloidization of cult personalities, to the empty or prevaricating rhetoric that passes for "information", the media - like the snack food industry - have researched, tested and delivered a carefully crafted product that is designed to hit as many pleasure buttons as quickly and as hard as possible with little effort on the part of the consumer for self care.
In the snack food industry it works like this: you aim for a particular flavor and "mouth feel" for your product, and as long as those test well, you then add as much sugar, salt or fat as you can. As Dr. David Kessler described in this Washington Post column, adding as much as you can of those ingredients "...alter[s] the brain's chemistry in ways that compel people to overeat." As a snack food producer, overeating simply translates to greater sales, while making your product's consumers less and less healthy.
The modern media factories have learned similar lessons. Take a product designed to appeal to a specific audience then add ingredients designed to increase viewer loyalty such as drama, fear/paranoia, schadenfreude, and luridness/lewdness. It doesn't matter that these ingredients may give us a false understanding of the people or subject matter, what's important is that it stimulate the satisfaction centers of the brain so they will watch repeatedly and thoroughly (through all the commercials). And like the oral junkfood, a steady diet of it slowly makes us sicker mentally and emotionally, perhaps without our even being aware of it.
It's one thing to do this with shows like the whole "reality" lot. It's another when it's being done with things that matter such as our political discourse and the decision-making ability of the country's electorate. The more these ingredients are used to "flavor" the shows and sources we rely upon for our information, the less informed our votes and actions will be by the facts, and the more they will be driven by emotion. This is not to say that the issues that we face are not emotional and that emotion should not be a part of our process, but as anyone who has faced the consequences of an impulse buy knows, they make a terrible basis for important decisions if that's all we have to go on.
This complaint is leveled at all and any media outlets who do this, however the right-wing media have not only mastered this process, it has largely become their standard mode of operation. This is so much so that the Great American Argument is now no longer so much between conflicting viewpoints and ideas as it is between intellectual honesty and wholesale manipulation of heart and mind. Look at all the mainstream media bandwidth consumed by factually void tabloid scandals such as Obama's birth certificate and the cost of his international trips. All are stories designed to push the buttons of the consumer, fill them up and give them instant satisfaction while depriving them of any real sustenance.
There has been actual research that shows a connection between one's susceptability to fear and political leanings. This does not mean that all conservative ideas must be based on fear, but rather that the conservative media has found this button and it exploits it constantly and shamelessly to promote its narrative. By doing so they have traded real ideas and constructive debate for cynicism, propaganda and outright lies in order to gain a stronger "brand".
Just as the size of our country's waists has grown with the size of our hamburgers and fries, the volume of voting people consuming a greater percentage of political junkfood as their main source of information has created an environment where fear rules and facts are the "salads" we reluctantly consume (if ever). Our minds, like our bodies, reflect what we put into them, and right now alot of us are getting flabby around the cortex.