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To address the OPs question....I think a lot of it has to do with people moving to areas of the country with viewpoints like their own. This makes people more extreme in their views. As the authors of The Big Sort point out, starting around 1965 more and more counties are becoming homogenous politically, so more and more people don't interact with others who have viewpoints different than their own on a day to day basis.
The main stream media reminds me of my grandmother. She used to go to one person and say things to make them mad at another person, then go to that person and say things to make THEM mad at somebody. She was happiest when everybody was mad at somebody else.
Ohiogirl81, time has nothing to do with telling the truth. Some of these TV Stations and Newspapers report things that is not true. What ever happened to non-bias reporting, asking the hard questions not some of the marshmallow stuff they have ask Obama and others in politics.
i'm interested in reading all of this later, but just real quickly:
i think the media makes our country seem more divided than it is. the media sells ads based on viewership, people like whatching heated arguments.
i think this also applies to the reporting on the economy right now. we keep getting reports on growth, housing prices, manufacturing. all the data is positive but it's reported as "not good enough" making us all think the economy stinks.
i think it's irresponsible. doom and gloom sells well though, so when will it end?
Baswcailly it that the parties have gotten more spread in their view points;especailly since Obama and the left wing of the democratic party took control.
I think the bigger divide is being caused right here on the internet. More than anything the news reports (or doesn't) is the REACTION by the people who then get online and spread their interpretations and whatnot all over the web, where it gets passed along as gospel truth to whoever holds the same preconceived notions, further entrenching everyone into an "us vs them" way of thinking.
The internet gives everyone a voice and an audience, even people who probably shouldn't have one.
After all, the job of journalists is to collect and gather information on current events and report on them so the general public can make intellectual decisions based on what they read or watch on television.
More accurrately, the job of the journalist is to do what the uber wealthy owners of the media ( EG: Rupert Murprick ) tell them to do thru the chain of command, else they would lose their good paying job and the status conferred upon them.
I've often felt that City-Data Forum was generally a less formalized introspective into typical American thoughts. You have those on the left and those on the right. You have the religious, non-religious, and people who simply don't care. You basically have those who come from all walks of life, all mindsets, and all opinions. In general, it is indeed a slice of America. And, for that reason, I'd like to focus on a general similarity I see on this forum which is highly represented as a microcosm of America in general.
The title of this thread may seem like a bit of a non-sequitur. How is it possible that politics could actually be usurped in its divisiveness by the very media that reports on it? After all, the job of journalists is to collect and gather information on current events and report on them so the general public can make intellectual decisions based on what they read or watch on television. The average citizen, of course, should be able to keep in mind that each reporter and each news organization has their own agenda (some more obvious than others) which they too would like to promote.
However, it seems that we have come to a crossroads in our highly technical society whereby we are inundated with news twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The waiting rooms in hospitals, doctors offices, automobile repair shops, restaurants, and gyms across the country blare the news as loudly as possible. Some of our journalists and political correspondents have turned into virtual rockstars. They promote their own books, TV shows, and ideological thought processes to satiate an egotistical grandeur unparalleled in this country's history.
We have also come to a point in American history where it seems as though we have two parties that are diametrically opposed to one another while the followers of those parties have become even more radically opposed to one another. Who is to blame for this? Are the ideologies of either party so consistently opposite of one another that one party (or group of party followers) cannot see the good of a single thing the other party promotes? I don't think that's the case. Given the fact that for decades and centuries party lines were easily crossed depending on the bills, laws, or legislations being proposed. That is not to say that both parties handsomely agreed with one another but the fierce opposition we see in regards to anything and everything promoted by one party or the other seems almost unprecedented in our country's history.
If we look back at human history, there are plenty of examples of party lines being crossed. The Treaty of Tripoli, approved by the Senate in 1797, consisted of twenty-three out of thirty-two Senators (the other 9 were not present for various reasons) who voted unanimously for it. Franklin D. Roosevelt worked side by side with a Republican Senator (George Norris) to create the Social Security Act. The New Deal was also promoted by Roosevelt and though it had its detractors in the Republican Party, there were those who supported it and helped write it from within. During the Reagan era and even afterwards, there were factions of people throughout America who were called "Reagan Democrats" for various reasons. During the Johnson Administration, there were many from both sides who both supported the Vietnam Conflict and there were those who rallied against it. The few that I've just mentioned are some of the more notable examples of our government's history of being able to work side by side. There are surely countless other examples that are better left for another time and another place to be mentioned.
A lot of Americans seem to forget that politics in our unhappy Republic is still driven by popular opinion and that our Senators, Congressman, and other elected officials still do march to the beat of popular opinion. They are forced to do so because of one thing: re-election.
Re-election is dictated by the terms of popular opinion, i.e., the sum total output of a collective consciousness within society that promulgates or detracts from a given candidate's number of votes. The collective consciousness of today's society is influenced now like no other time in history by national news networks, divisive political correspondents, and sub-conscious interference with logical decision making by powerful media broadcasting. What has ultimately happened as a result of this is not the powerful voice of an American public who has thought for themselves what they like and dislike. It is the powerful voice of an American public reiterating their streams of bloviated rhetoric received from 24/7 news organizations like Fox, CNN, MSNBC, et al.
It should come as no surprise that recent Gallup Polls and research from the Pew Research Center found that an overwhelming majority of Americans prefer news media that is more "centralized" to their views. More studies have shown that while network and local TV News programming has stayed relatively stable, the increase in cable network programming is rising at an alarming rate. Even more research has shown that online news from cable networks is doubling (and in some cases, tripling) every year in terms of dedicated readers.
While the divide between left and right has always been a somewhat noticeable one, the divide has now turned into something more resemblant of Africa's Rift Valley. It has become commonplace for America's cable news networks to not only criticize politics to feed a centralized viewership but it also consistently attacks the competition it has from other cable news organizations as being dishonest, less watched, while simultaneously making partisan claims. This collective harvesting of human minds has been similarly done in countries suffering from bouts of totalitarian rule. The USSR, China, North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam all had or have their own state-run media organizations that consistently condemned, denied, or lied about reports being run from countries that offered citizens the freedom of journalistic reporting. Make no mistake about it. Journalism in this day and age is a Capitalist enterprise. The type of Capitalism that believes strongly and firmly in a strict Darwinian "survival of the fittest" and a Randian view that the common people of America are nothing more than leeches sucking the blood of the real people in power. In order to promote that same sense of discontent in the public, even the daunted and favored Capitalism of those in the West still shows signs of reflective dominance over the people and citizenry it tends to represent.
And yet, in a day and age where nothing can get accomplished, we must ask ourselves one thing: Isn't the shambles of our political separations nothing more than a candid reflection of the people's divisiveness? And, isn't that divisiveness most clearly recognized in the stalwart way the cable news media outlets attack one another unmercifully?
Fox News runs consistent segways into their commercial broadcasts declaring it "The most-watched cable news channel." Political pundits for Fox such as Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck make a fortune drawing subtle gestures of disagreement while utilizing scare tactics and making bold claims of unfair reporting by other news outlets. Again, this all serves to centralize the viewers, solidify an opinion, and create a plethora of zombies who thereby push their elected officials to run away from the "socialists" in charge of the country.
CNN and MSNBC aren't much better. They don't seem to be as shamelessly egotistical as Fox about their status as a news organization. But, they each have their own correspondents and pundits who consistently talk about "the enemy" as being Fox News and other conservative media outlets.
It seems that the more America becomes brainwashed by the consistent separation of ideologies driven by a Darwinian need within journalism's existence to dominate the planet, the more separated our politics is going to become. When this country finally learns how to think for itself instead of reciting what they heard by the latest rockstar political pundit on a cable news network the night before, we may actually get back to creating bills and legislation that work for all of America. Until then, it's going to be a terrible road ahead with America becoming more and more crazed and incensed over every piece of legislation produced throughout this great land.
Roosevelt once said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Right now, we have a country riled in fear and that is being promoted from within by a bunch of greedy, mind-controlling cable news networks. That fear is being allayed onto the way our politics works because the collective consciousness of society has also subconsciously dictated that our two main political parties must be diametrically opposed to one another. That has come about because of nothing other than the mindless tomfoolery presented by our mainstream media.
Obviously what america needs is to get back to what the Founders of this Country felt was best : A civil society built on tight morals, ethics, and principles. To accomplish this would mean a total revamp of many things especially a decadent apathetic Mass Media in order to fumigate the filth that has plagued America as well as totally disban the entitlement mantra which so many embrace. And because America is nothing but a cesspool of moral filth from the twisting of 'freedoms and rights'...we will have to implement some good ol Singaporian justice to whip (no pun intended) the wrongdoers back into shape. This includes people in all walks of life.. from the common hedonist who doesnt care to the church goer who gives lip service to God on sunday then lives like a heathen for the other 6 days. I predict within a couple years , things will be under much better control. Say goodbye to what we have now that is only getting worse, and say hello to a Totalitarian Government --- extreme measures are needed for extreme moral degradation. In other words, live rightly like you KNOW youre supposed to live, or get some darn good punishment to help jog ones willful suppression of moral conscience. Then one day, Americans will be respected by the rest of the world for not leading the way of being inconsiderate/apathetic/hedonist/ naricisstic parasites. Boy..what a wakeup call that would be .
Obviously what america needs is to get back to what the Founders of this Country felt was best : A civil society built on tight morals, ethics, and principles. To accomplish this would mean a total revamp of many things especially a decadent apathetic Mass Media in order to fumigate the filth that has plagued America as well as totally disban the entitlement mantra which so many embrace. And because America is nothing but a cesspool of moral filth from the twisting of 'freedoms and rights'...we will have to implement some good ol Singaporian justice to whip (no pun intended) the wrongdoers back into shape. This includes people in all walks of life.. from the common hedonist who doesnt care to the church goer who gives lip service to God on sunday then lives like a heathen for the other 6 days. I predict within a couple years , things will be under much better control. Say goodbye to what we have now that is only getting worse, and say hello to a Totalitarian Government --- extreme measures are needed for extreme moral degradation. In other words, live rightly like you KNOW youre supposed to live, or get some darn good punishment to help jog ones willful suppression of moral conscience. Then one day, Americans will be respected by the rest of the world for not leading the way of being inconsiderate/apathetic/hedonist/ naricisstic parasites. Boy..what a wakeup call that would be .
I actually think that America is, on a utilitarian scale, a far more moral society than we ever have been before. Unfortunately, the good things we have going are so easily overshadowed by the bad which is strangely and obliviously often related to how it's reported on...
Everyone forgets how many people donated to travesties like the Haitian earthquake when it comes to having talks about morality. People neglect to mention the hundreds (if not thousands) of good, decent and notable charities started in the U.S. strictly for the purpose of helping other people progress along in the chain of life. We have abolished slavery, we have given women the right to vote, and we have a plethora of social policies in place strictly so that people are not unfairly prejudiced against in the workplace. Do these policies and procedures work 100% the way they were meant to 100% of the time? Of course not. But, there is no other time in our history when (for an imaginative example) a crippled homosexual African-American atheist could conceivably grace the pages of our history books as even having applied and successfully been grated a job! In fact, the chances are pretty good that he'd have been falsely accused but truly convicted of a crime he didn't do in "The Old Days." And, chances are, he'd be hung just for who he was.
However, to say that we are a cesspool of moral filth while relating "to the good old days" of our Founding Fathers is to truly put an ignorant stain on both our history as a country and what I consider to be a very moral society. It would require a complete neglect of our raping, pillaging and underhandedness towards the Native Americans so that we could expand into territories they'd "owned" for eons. It would put slavery on the track as a lesser evil than, say, the common indicator of "Right Wing Moralistic Relativism" such as homosexual population or violent video game purchases. It would distract from our history of violence, reverential and teetotaling churchgoers with a fierce hypocritical streak, and an obsession with violence and corruption that goes back much farther than we would truly care to think about.
The best governments of this world always have had to and still do deal with human nature at its best and its worst. Perhaps you're unhappy with certain elements of our society you deem to be immoral but, as I spoke from a rather utilitarian scale, we do more for our fellow human beings in this day and age than at any other time in history.
So, in keeping with the governance of the OP... Perhaps a good, hard look at our American history might give you an idea of the depths of immorality we've always struggled with as a country and why it is not the disastrous tsunami effect on our country you are proclaiming it to be. And, perhaps, staying away from the rockstar profiles of Glen Beck could do some good as well. Considering that your argument is essentially a parallel version of his moronic blathering of stupidity.
The main stream media reminds me of my grandmother. She used to go to one person and say things to make them mad at another person, then go to that person and say things to make THEM mad at somebody. She was happiest when everybody was mad at somebody else.
Sounds exactly like what the media does.
This is how I feel, it's reality gossip at it's finest!~
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Agree
