01-13-2017, 10:54 AM
(01-13-2017, 08:06 AM)Odin Wrote:I hate to admit it--contrary to that last optimistic bone in my body--but you may be right that "the vast majority doesn't give a shit," that "they don't want to be informed, they want to be entertained." Neil Postman, in his prescient 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, predicted that American society was much closer to manifesting the dystopia of Huxley's Brave New World than that depicted in Orwell's 1984. (We may yet succumb to both nightmarish visions, in that order.) If citizens of this country can't pull their heads out their "technological escapism" long enough to see what's going on around them, then they--we-- may one day cede democracy in a time of existential crisis to some kind of totalitarianism.(01-12-2017, 12:10 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:(01-12-2017, 10:28 AM)SomeGuy Wrote: Yeah, cable news in general (Fox, CNN, MSNBC, etc.) is pretty terrible in general. Of course, I really don't watch it because I don't own a television. Reading became my pastime of choice at a young age, and that is how I prefer to receive information. My only quibble now with reading the news is that it necessarily comes through the filter of the author's perceptions and biases, and I have simply lost trust in journalism as a profession.
Berlusconi is at least a decent comparison. These incessant "Trump is Hitler, no, Trump is Mussolini... He's Hitlerini! memes going around are the worst sort of garbage.
The Fourth Estate failed us miserably during the presidential campaign. The movie Network has proved so prescient. When TV news departments became profit centers, ratings became the name of the game, the truth be damned. Look up the comments of the CBS executive when pressed as to why Trump was getting the lion's share of TV news coverage. I recently watched the movie Truth about the fall of CBS news anchor Dan Rather, with Robert Redford in the starring role. Of course, Rather comes off looking like a hero. But the dramatization of events tends to gloss over the sloppy journalistic work of him and his assistants in developing their expose of George W. Bush's alleged "absence without leave" while serving in the Texas Air National Guard. The film simply reinforced my jaundiced view of modern journalism--its depiction of the rush to get a "scoop" right before the re-election of Bush. It's becoming harder and harder to discern the truth from "fake news," and I'd like to think that I'm a discriminating reader, as I assume some posters on this forum are as well. But even I must admit that the blurring of truth and "truthiness" has posed an especial challenge for me in our "post-fact" world. That, coupled with what I perceive to be a growing civic ignorance, is a dagger aimed at the very heart of our democracy. .
I ran into an enlightening exchange on Reddit's /r/politics board last night when a poster mentioned that it's not that we don't have good news, we still have PBS "Newshour" and NPR News, it's just that the vast majority doesn't give a shit, they don't WANT to be informed, they want to be entertained.
I came across this televised interview of former Supreme Court Justice Souter, commenting in stark terms about the danger of America's 'pervasive civic ignorance.' About four minutes in, he issues an apocalyptic warning about where our civic ignorance--and lack of civic engagement--may take us as a country. Chilling...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0