It’s our own dumbass fault for making our news particularly exhausting
Our political news is divisive, polarizing and isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know. There’s basically no objective news outlets in the country. They’re either heavily left-leaning or heavily right-leaning, and everyone watches the ones that align with their pre-existing views, which is only reinforcing what we already believe, or is designed to make us angry without offering any actual solutions, which is just tiring.
heavily left-leaning
Where’s the heavily left-leaning news? I’d like to consume some. Late-stage capitalism, rights of labor, single payer healthcare, CEO/corporate greed, abolish cars, eat the rich-type news would be nice to see somewhere.
“We” didn’t do this. News outlets are not elected. Cable news was packaged and proselytized in the 80’s and advertising revenue has never let it go away. Lazy political campaigns glommed onto a captive audience and continually underfunded grass roots organization for media buys. That became it’s own industry and here we are.
However, at no point were any of these decisions made by the population at large. We didn’t all get together and collectively decide, hey let’s really fuck up our media diet and incentivize our most reactive take on an issue to further politicize the holidays and vaccines. This was done to us. It’ll take a lot of work to undo, if it ever gets undone.
I think it’s just part of the US return to its roots as it’s post WW2 advantages are beginning to wane.
The American population bought American exceptionalism hook line and sinker so it’s going to be a bit of an adjustment.
The “return” of yellow journalism is just part of the trend as the modern US returns to its late 1800s roots.
Yellow journalism, specifically the USS Maine and Pulizer and Hearst don’t really factor into the 24hr news cycle. They absolutely factor into how the news has always been a tool for the wealthy to shape and alter public opinion. However that’s been a problem since the stratification of wealth. You can go all the way back to cuneiform tablets to show this. It’s human nature.
This is by design. As cited here: https://jordanrussiacenter.org/blog/propaganda-political-apathy-and-authoritarianism-in-russia
Russian propaganda derives its effectiveness from political apathy rather than its ability to persuade. Because citizens understand that their actions cannot affect the autocrat’s policies, they invest only minimal resources in acquiring political information or thinking about politics at all. This state of affairs, in turn, leads to a very superficial processing of information. Citizens use narratives imposed by the Kremlin as frameworks for interpreting political events, but do not incorporate them fully and do not formulate consistent political opinions. In other words, propaganda works because citizens are not interested enough in politics to form consistent opinions to challenge—or support—authoritarian rule.
And it isn’t new either. From 1922: https://www.jstor.org/stable/6376?seq=2
Consequently to-day the average citizen confesses he really does not know what the facts are in this and many other important issues. He has been deluged with facts, near-facts and falsifications put forth by interested parties, so that he has a mass of undigested and conflicting ideas on these subjects, or else has become frankly partisan to one view.
This is why America is the way it is, Americans will never admit that their country is garbage. It’s ALWAYS Russias fault. lmfao
Yep, it’s not enough to be realistic instead of pessimistic.
Like, people need to be aware the current system is just a ruse, but it also needs to come with a plausible way out so people don’t just give up and disengage.
But if they do, you can’t shout them into re-engaging. That just drives them away further.
You convince them that it might be different this time. Not even the guarantee, just a semi plausible chance that things could improve if they re-engage.
As you pointed out all this is widely studied in sociology, it’s not some secret knowledge no one has. There’s just no money in it, so sociologists can’t influence the parties when both parties use donation amounts as the only metric when picking leadership.
There’s a couple good picks for the DNC election on 2/2/25, but there’s a very good chance the double down and vote based on who brought in the most donations. If they do that, we need to mobilize a third party asap for 2028.
In 2008, Obama pulled off a surprising victory against establishment favorite Hilary Clinton, mainly off the back of a swell of online, small dollar donations. In his first term, among other things like stabilizing the economy in the midst of what we called The Great Recession (dumb name, I know, though a lot of people did lose their houses and jobs), he gave everyone health insurance subsidized by the government via taxes on health insurance and pharma companies, as well as Medicaid expansion. While not ideal, this was both realistically doable with the degree of Congressional support at the time, and a massive improvement over the previous system.
For some reason people have forgotten this in their zeal to pressure the dem party. I do get that, though I think it’s important to retain a degree of memory of what actually happened and why. Anyway, are we really sure a third party is necessary, when it is possible to simply win this one?
Or even that great of an idea? Because unless you pulled all the dems with you, you’re just leaving a dominant repub party by helping them divide and conquer. This is very frustrating, no question, but so is life sometimes.
I think some have forgotten it. But I think more people either weren’t paying attention back then, or were so young that they didn’t even know what was happening. I’d hazard a guess the younger the voters, the more they think the democrats are always terrible and never get anything done and primaries don’t do anything.
Not to say there aren’t older people who think the same, just my guess about why we get so many people insisting the democrats are just as awful and not fixable so they stupidly think a third party would be better despite that just removing their power as people.
Oh I’m not exhausted by political news, I simply refuse to injest political news from gigantic corporate monoliths. Within their “reporting”, their interests will always come before the people’s. Journalistic objectivity does not apply. If you believe these corporate news agencies have journalists, then you have been propagandized. “Seeing both sides” is not objectivity, it seeks to further the status quo.
May they fall into obscurity.
We’re in the find out phase of ending the Fairness Doctrine
You can thank Ronald Reagan…
I probably should have said “wouldn’t” rather than “didn’t”. It’s grossly out-of-date and would be a gross violation of the first amendment if it were to be tried as people want it to be.
It applied only to “holders of broadcasting licenses”. That is - “old timey television and radio” that was broadcast over the airwaves. The reasoning being that the airwaves are a limited resource (there can only be so many TV and radio stations in a given area) so the government didn’t want a single entity to monopolize all of it with a single voice.
But it wouldn’t apply to the internet, cable TV, or any other modern form of communication. It wouldn’t do anything to Twitter. It wouldn’t even effect Fox News (the cable station) or NewsMax.
Yep, this country wasn’t over when Trump got elected either time. He’s a symptom of this country’s death in its current form under the current constitution.
Reagan was the deathblow, this has just been leftover momentum, that appears to have finally waned. From Trickle down, to legalized bribery, to conversion of their former opposition party into neoliberal corporate bribe takers, to ending real news in favor of corpo serving propaganda like “climate change is a hoax to sell books, CONSUME” on and on.
Trump’s authoritarian rise is just akin to vultures helping themselves to the corpse. This country has been little more than an oligarch exploitation piggy bank for half a century.
Yes it would be painful, but we’d need to tear it down and start over, as the core constitutional mechanisms for change have been circumvented through intential propaganda to sow division and protect the sociopathy of our economy from the citizens it hurts and murders for private profit. But we won’t out of cowardice, so climate change will do what we’re too social opiate addicted and fearful to do in a couple decades when it will hardly matter anymore.
The next four years are in part going to be about Trump and his assortment of grifters, nut jobs, and ass kissers doing all they can to troll anyone not in their club. Damn straight I’m not tuning in for that.
