I run all of my campaigns as if people were watching television with the sound turned down.
— Karl Rove

See this Google search.

What is important is to keep the federal government from promoting mendacities. There have been some pressure on this front with global warming, HIV & condoms, and the “abstinence only” education. The media is of course corporate or “private,” even if a corporation is about as private as a medieval fiefdom, and putting pressure on them to stop broadcasting falsehoods or nonsense is a difficult thicket.

Lawrence B. Crowell

A similar issue of course exists with global warming, or what might be better called global climate perturbation. This of course gets closer to the heart of the problem. Huge financial interests have come into play to attempt to blunt real coverage of this issue, and the usual suspects should come to mind the oil companies, auto industries, Peabody Coal and so forth. Then all you have to do is look at the corporate ownership of the main media outlets, the advertizing revenue link and it then becomes no surprise that we have this problem. It gets particularly bad with FOX, where still nearly 50% of viewers think Iraq was behind 9/11 or that there were WMD in Iraq and the rest. In this decade there has been a particularly septic convergence of money, corporate, political and religious interests — and our media has been particularly malodorous as it has obsequeously followed the money trail.

Politicians and political parties need to be changed with some regularity, just like babies need diaper changes — and for much the same reasons. Politics and power seems to attract bad people, or psychopaths, and it is up to us to keep the pot stirred so that these types don’t put permanent roots in the political soil.

Lawrence B. Crowell

I’ve worked a few campaigns, and usually hear this is usually explained as either “issues aren’t what really matter–people vote on personal attributes, and later back-form their issue justifications” or “Republicans have better funded, better run campaigns.”

(No really, I just think a better question is if people are acting more as idiots now than they were, say, 20 years ago!)

Of course, supporters of each party are more inclined to think supporters of the other party will act stupidly, so it makes sense that this particular anxiety shows up every election year.

I agree it’s the media’s fault, but I also don’t think they will ever bother to fix it. Discerning the truth is tough and often disputed, especially when it comes to something as complicated as a tax plan that is supposed to motivate spending. (Presumably, that is how tax income will increase, people spend more, spurring the economy, resulting in more income to be taxed, etc, right?)

I think another part of the problem is the fact that we buy this crap. We listen to talking heads spouting rhetoric about change and how life will be better when we blah blah. We fall for the empty words and no one is ever held accountable. Oh, and always the other party is to blame.

It seems that for most of the last 10 or so years, the mainstream media has been so terrified of being called liberal that they feel some need to give lies equal time with truth. Or maybe it’s just that viewers/subscribers/advertisers prefer to hear about some alternative universe that’s a little less challenging than the real one.

And, of course, the U.S. right wing is amazingly skilled at working the media process in their favor. Kinda ironic: the right was so vocally opposed to the “relativeization of truth” that was an academic fad in the 90’s, but they’re by far the ones who have benefited the most from it.

I personally blame the impulse of being “balanced”, there are some viewpoints (political, scientific, …) out there that are sufficiently unsupported by the facts to render them outright invalid, but this somehow is a very difficult thing to say, especially in public, especially to people who are not paying attention, without losing credibility.

Still likely to be better than the status quo as I see it.

More and more, I wonder if Western Civilization’s 500-year experiment with rationality is coming to an end.

Oh well, at least that investment I made in learning Chinese looks like it might pay off.