How do we overcome the current media landscape?
I don't think Trump could have happened in the era when everyone depended on Walter Kronkite and their local newspaper for information. The large numbers of people who believed that "Killary" was more corrupt than Trump, who were unaware or didn't care that 70% of what came out of his mouth was provably false, was only possible with the whirlwind of of websites, social media, Fox News and AM radio providing "conservative" narratives.
This started around 1990 with Limbaugh, then all of AM radio, and then Fox News, but social media and the internet has taken it to another dimension. I think everyone could see that Fox said "fair and balanced" with a wink and that they had a bias, but their biggest success was to convince masses of people that they were merely the flip side and that actual fact checked journalism at sources like the New York Times or Washington Post was as biased as they were, but in the other direction.
The situation we have now, with actual news being discounted, or put on an equal footing with propoganda, and a highly manipulated public looking through sources that affirm their ideological bias is the perfect environment for a demagogue to succeed. I'd think Vladimir Putin must almost be surprised with how easily American opinion can be swayed.
What I find most disturbing (in addition to what Trump will do in the next 4 years), is I don't see how this situation will ever improve. We're not going to be able to get back to a time where people have a central source of information that they all trust, so at least the public is operating off of the same understanding of reality. The purveyors of disinformation are only becoming more sophisticated at creating doubt about the facts and playing on people's perceived resentments and often false perceptions.
Can we ever again have a time when the public is not deeply politically divided?
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How can a nation whose very creation and maintenance was based on Mass Media, continue when that model is collapsing? Our Constitution, mythology, institutions, national agenda; hell, what we buy, listen to and value, all depended on mass media to report massively, and to simultaneously confer legitimacy. Those columns came crashing own 25 years ago. It should be no wonder we have a national anxiety.
I submit that the computational/social networking we have seen has thus far merely succeeded in patching together a functional substitute for the mass media model, and may not even be directed toward replacing the old model. The innertubes and social networking have only fulfilled the democratizing function it sought early on in narrow matters of commerece and wholesale legitimacy-debunking. (The 2 are often complimentary.) My only suggestion is to build into the reform of the Democratic Party not only the clear, concise bright-line positions a revolution needs, but build the means to communicate and legitimize those positions. One cannot be done without the other, so it is more than cutting-edge that we develop a new model of communication and legitimacy, it is a frontier necessity. Besides, the crap we have now is stylistically burdened with the Bellbottom Syndrome: Its getting old.
people truly care about their children and the world they will inherit. Imagine how bad things could be in only a generation after today's young minds have been soaking in bullshit and propaganda for 20-30 years with little or no protection. Zombies!!!
Maybe it's a symptom of advanced consumerism where the "free market" says everybody gets to choose not only which doughnut among many they want to buy and consume but which version of "news" among many they want to buy and consume and believe. Freedom!!!
K/R
