"The bigger the lie, the more they believe."

A follower of Marx, Guy Debord, also discusses commodity fetishism and takes another focus on the degradation of mass media and marketing in The Society of the Spectacle. His statment that

The loss of quality is so evident at all levels of spectacular language, of the objects it praises and the behavior it regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative. It is the quantitative which the reality form develops, and it can only develop within the quantitative.

actually led me to ponder the 5th season of The Wire most critically. In it, the focus is directed towards the daily ins and outs of the newsroom at The Baltimore Sun newspaper. As the season progresses, valuable and thoughtful reporters are lost due to budget cuts, the question of what makes a story "newsworthy" is consistently pondered, and the thirst for profit seems to ultimately cast a gloomy scenario on all forms of media in the future. The season, according to David Simon, grapples with "what stories get told and what don't and why it is that things stay the same."

The newspaper itself is, of course, a commodity and is therefore subject to all of the domination and reification delivered to all commodity by the people. There are important stories going on all around the city of Baltimore that the newspaper simply does not have the manpower to cover OR the important stories are deemed not "newsworthy" by higher ups at the paper because they aren't sensational enough and therefore won't make enough money. Ultimately, a fake news story of a homeless killer purported by a wayward detective in order to gain more money for his unit becomes the star story. Through these faked murders, however, everyone (readers, detectives, writers) become interested in an actual legitimate problem in their city--the homeless and their mistreatment by the government. Sadly, it took a sensationalized and false murder mystery to garner that kind of attention.

According to Wikipedia, "When Debord says that, 'All that was once directly lived has become mere representation,' he is referring to the central importance of the image in contemporary society. Images, Debord says, have supplanted genuine human interaction." It is the figurative image of a ruthless killer of the homeless that brings up the concrete discussion of who is the actual killer of the homeless--the ignorance shown to this group of people by the government and voters alike. The newspaper and its readers are "at once present at absent" (Debord) as they ignore the real problems of the city and focus their attention instead on sensationlized and fictionalized media saturation. Just like the drug trade, the writers and workers of the newspaper all ultimately fall victim to commodity fetishization as they become commodities themselves.