Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

reactive

2018-07-22 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
reactive
Votey panel for reactive
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

This comic satirizes modern political news media. A news anchor announces: "Today, a thing happened. We'll be discussing the reaction to the reaction to an opinion about an opinion about a poll about the thing." A news ticker scrolls across the bottom with absurd headlines like "State of Oregon engulfed in flames -- exit polls suggest it is painful" and "Stocks move in random."

The caption reads: "Political news became a postmodern dystopia so slowly that nobody noticed." The comic skewers how political journalism has devolved from reporting actual events into an infinite regress of meta-commentary -- reactions to reactions, opinions about opinions about polls. The actual news (the "thing" that happened) is never described, because the media ecosystem has become entirely self-referential, generating content by commenting on its own commentary rather than on reality.

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