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Politics
Public opinion is king
And that’s why the all media is necessarily engaged in partisan battle all the time
By Kevin Potvin
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Even the most tyrannical state pays close attention to public opinion on issues of the day and they always expend great effort toward influencing it. Even the Nazi regime in Germany at the height of its power worked hardest on propaganda, on strenuous efforts to influence public opinion.
The tacit admission is that no base of power, be it state, corporate, party, bureaucratic, or non-governmental, can act toward its own interests without aligning a significant portion of the public interest to its own.
How the public identifies its interests is totally a matter of perception. While all the bases of power identify their interests with far more objective measurements, like profit statements, victories at the polls, or real policy implementations like tax changes or regulation changes, the public interest is never so clear or objective—or rigid. You will never convince a company that some interest besides their own profit is more important, or convince a non-governmental organization that some interest besides, for example, the environment for Greenpeace, is more important. But the public interest shifts all the time from one priority to another. And within those shifting interests, there is also a lot of further shift on perceptions of what should be achieved. The public may think taxes are the most important issue this year, but they may also think that taxes on something, like carbon, should rise, or that taxes on real estate, for example, should fall. No other body has this ambiguity: corporate bodies, for example, always think their taxes should fall.
So just as alignment with the public interest is the most important element of any objective attempted by any base of power in any society, it is also the public interest that is most ambiguous of all interests, the most shifting, and the most influenced by the mysterious forces of perception.
Public perception of issues then is the choke point in all ebbs and flows of power, policy and interests among all bases of power, and this is exactly where the media inserts itself in the whole process. But properly understood, the media, in all its collective shapes and forms, doesn’t so much insert itself at this choke point as it condenses out of the density of interests that intersect at that choke point. Media arises because there is a naturally occurring choke point in the competition of interests, not in response to it.
In this conception, all media is necessarily an expression of the result of complex and very serious battles continually taking place between myriad competing bases of power all struggling to alter public perceptions in order to align the public interest with their own interests. There is no such thing as a neutral media. The projected image by some media as “neutral” is part of their rhetorical techniques they deploy to achieve persuasion.
What The Republic is proposing to do is to enter into that battle over public perceptions and to engage directly with all the other bases of power already involved in all those never-ending battles.
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The Republic of East Vancouver masthead
The Republic of East Vancouver supports no party, advocates
for no cause, represents no group, serves no master, and considers
problems with no preconceived notions. We hope to afflict the comfortable,
both materially and intellectually, and comfort the afflicted—of
both kinds as well, and we are trying to do both things at the same
time.
Publisher, Editor
Kevin Potvin
Managing Editor
Kara Foreman
Copy Editor
Janis Harper
Website
Chris Lavigne
Advertising
Chris Richmond Kevin
Potvin
Support
Dan Crawford, John Daigle,
Jack Etkin, Janis Harper, Carl Johnson, Hilary Jones, Chris King,
James Mecham, Albrecht Meyers, Peter Miller, James Pope
Contributors in this and recent issues
Bruce Alexander, Dan Adleman, Toby Alford, Kevin Annett, Santo Barbieri, Bob Broughton, Mike Bryan, Stephen Buckley, Matthew Burrows, Maria Calleja, Ron Carton, Chad Christie, Joshua Corber, Dan Crawford, Gail Davidson, Eric Doherty, Joe Donaldson, Lorena Jara Patty Ducharme, Shadia Drury, Taivo Evard, Reed Eurchuk, Farnaz Fassihi, Thomas Feakins, Anthony Fenton, Reza Fiyouyzat, Andrew Gordon Fleming, Ryan Fugger, Sasha Gagic, Matt Goody, Guy Hawkins, Spencer Herbert, John Irwin, Nick Istvaniffy, Junius, William Kay, Mike Keep, Kate Kennedy, Donald Kropp, Chris LaVigne, James Lindfield, Brian Lindgreen, Karen Litzke, Keith MacKenzie, Michael McLaughlin, Sonya McRae, Rafe Mair, Sonia Marino, Jennifer Matsui, Michael Millard, Isaebel Minty, Michael Nenonen, Wendy Nylund, Derrick O’Keefe, Stephen Osborne, Sean Orr, Evan Augustine Pederson III, Stephen Peplow, Kim Peterson, Kevin Potvin, Mary Rawson, Andrea Reimer, Erin Riley, Phil Rockstroh, Becky Scott, Jason Scott, Chris Shaw, Jeff Steudel, Alex Tegart, Scott Turner, Elbio Grosso Trentini, Patrick Vert, Chris Walker, Sean Wilkinson, Brad Zembic
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