The Hill News

The lesson for the press in the last election should be drawn from Marshall McLuhan’s famous vision that the media are themselves the vehicle and the message. TV’s popular celebrity commentators are gatekeepers to a geist of their own time and generation (their own “kind”); sentries at the portal to tell Sarah Palin that she cannot go in. She gave her children funny names. She uses a Garfield desk calendar. She shot a moose and ate it. She dresses like a “slutty flight attendant.” She does not belong here. She is not “one of us.” Rick Perry, naturally leery in this otherworld of imagery and style, will not be likewise taken down. By solstice it will be clear to all that he is an instinctively agreeable and genuine person with a common grace that McLuhan’s winged monkeys cannot exile.

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