One thing that living in the media age ought to have taught us by now is that reality has to be manufactured and marketed, and that the media are the monopoly producers, the Standard Oil of reality for our time. To this extent, they are right when they criticize, as they so often do, the leaders of their country for being out of touch with reality—they just leave out the part about how the “reality” in question has been patented and copyrighted and branded and sold as their own peculiar property. I imagine that when you are a part of a great corporate enterprise like the reality business, particularly on the marketing end of it, it must be easy to forget that reality is not a given. It has had to be painstakingly constructed out of a chaos of confused information and is always in the process of being revised and reconstructed by new information. At its margins, too, it is always in competition with rival versions of reality, and the clash between them can often be productive for both sides. But Big Media have lately been seeking to squash the competition in order to protect their monopoly on reality production, and that is commonly what they are doing whenever they use the word.

It’s their world, and we’re just living in it. More importantly, those who wield political power and authority are also living in it, and it has been constructed at least in part to thwart