News in the Real World
by KevinNovember 27th, 2006
This last week, I was on vacation, vivsiting relatives. I was away from my normal means of news gathering — the internet — for that entire week. Without the internet, I was comletely clueless about current events. My folks don’t get a newspaper delivered, but I did glance at the local paper once or twice. It was awful — completely sensationalized and completely without context. Spending the holiday weekend around children meant that news gathering on CNN or MSNBC was hit or miss. Even when I did turn them on for a bit to catch up, they were almost as useless as the local newspaper: no context, trivial stories, dueling talking heads calling each other liar without any sense of what was truth and what was spin, obvious logical problems being glossed over, and trite sounding cliches tossed around as revealed wisdom. In a literal sense, even for people who care, if you get your news primarily from local newspapers or national television, it is extremely difficult to be a well informed citizen.
I am not entirely sure what to do about it, but that right ther eis the core of so many of the problems in this country. You cannot run a democracy if the voters do not have a clear understanding of reality. And the voters cannot have a clear understanding of reality with a news culture as sick and useless as most of ours.
Kevin,
What you say is true, but I don’t think the internet is any different. No doubt you visit numerous sites on the net in your quest for information. In order to be well informed, I believe one must seek information from a variety of sources, be they traditional, electronic, or a mix of the two.
And don’t be too harsh on the local newspaper. Most local papers focus on local news. National news is not their strength but neither is it their focus. I don’t rely on national media to get local news, and I don’t rely on local media to get national, or international, news.
Ted
Maybe I worded this badly, but my point was that outside of the internet, its next to impossible to get the kind of breadth that you need to become well informed, at least about very current events.
And I may be being too hard on local papers, but I am not sure that local papers should be absolved of their failures when they do cover national news.
On a tangentially-related subject, I heard an interesting interview today on NPR. Crenson and Ginsberg (of Downsizing Democracy fame) spoke about how the uninformed citizen indirectly enables the strengthening of the Executive branch. Their logic is the public is too dis-engaged to empower the Legislature (if you can’t even name your Congressmen, how can you support them?) and thus the Executive is relatively free to expand its power. They presented a more convincing case than I have…