We like the weekend. The weekend is good. It's when we're happiest. Of this our rulers are well aware.
The weekend and its fleeting reprieve from the rigors of the workweek has been weaponized against us. The collective desire to simply live, not work, has been contemptuously deployed to ensure we'll not pay attention to the day's most pressing issues -- decisions that impact our lives.
The Friday news dump is a cynical arrow in the political class's quiver of horrors that takes full advantage of our couple days of not doing a job we hate to earn a little money to buy stuff we don't need. And the worst part: it's become so normalized -- so accepted as a matter of how government operates -- that we scoff at the very concept of the Friday news dump. It's a tragic way of coping with the idea that our rulers strive so much to ensure we're civically and politically disconnected that they carefully schedule when the week's most important developments are made public.
Whether it's announcing major policy changes affecting millions of families or pardoning a sheriff who willfully ignored child rape or firing a powerful government official, big news happens on Friday afternoons for a reason: people are clocking out after five days of sometimes hard, sometimes tedious, almost always underpaid work. They're tired. They're ready for a respite from what could've been a nightmarishly monotonous or grueling work week. They're done engaging after engaging all week.
Then the news drops, and what would've been an all-consuming story on a Monday morning is only noticed by those who are paid to notice -- activists, political operatives, journalists. These compensated attention payers can scream from their social media rooftops all they want. Workers are on their way home, ready as all hell to disconnect from the ever-churning ocean of political discontent in our age of banal dystopia. We live in the worst possible world, we say, let us have the weekend.
The carefully orchestrated Friday news dump, of course, is not an isolated phenomenon. It fits in with having elections on Tuesdays -- when working folks are, well, working -- and scheduling political debates during the parts of the day and week when people are least likely to watch TV. Devising ways in which information can be disseminated during the time of the week when people are likely not paying attention is an effective way of privatizing public debate -- to keep the unwashed hoards on the sideline while the rich and powerful decide what's best for working families. Probably this is how austerity economic policy -- a deeply unpopular proposal among every segment of the U.S. population -- came to be. Arrange the release of news to effectively remove the voices of those who will be destroyed by inhumane austerity measures and, like magic, we have a government run by people who want the public to hate the government.
The news dump, an objectively un-democratic tool of the powerful, doesn't stand alone as a way to make sure the broad public remains uninformed and disengaged with how things are run in what cable pundits often call a democracy. The news dump is a small part of a larger campaign to ensure we are not citizens, but consumers. A citizen cares what happens. A citizen believes she has a stake in government policy. A citizen demands that government bends to her will, and the will of other ordinary, workaday folks. A consumer, meanwhile, shops and consumes and minds his business as he tries to fill the void with meaningless shit. The consumer has no time for politics or public policy. There are things to buy before we die.
Our rulers fear an informed citizenry more than anything else, because an informed electorate will call the rulers on their mountains of bullshit. Consent must not be gained, the rulers say, but manufactured. And if molding that widespread consent requires the most important news to be released in the waning hours of the work week, so be it. Information repression and manipulation are key dance steps in doing the propaganda.
The Friday afternoon news dump is a wicked development in the elimination of public discourse in deciding local, state, and federal policy. It's not funny or cute or wily; it should be seen as a naked attack on the attempts of working people to have a say -- any say -- in what goes on here at home, and what's done abroad in our name.
The Friday news dump should be seen a political assault on all of us: left, right, and all shades of middle. There would be no such thing as a news dump in a functioning democracy run by those committed to basic democratic principles. We have this hideous tradition because our rulers have nothing but contempt for us. Internalize that message and recall it next time they dump news on us at 5 p.m. on a Friday. Get angry about it. The ruling class deserves nothing but our fury.