America Is Too Dumb for TV News
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
I don't say this about America, but about people in general. We care far more about our egos and not challenging the beliefs we hold, than we do about being correct.
For myself, I can't help but look at this, and the rise of the micro-aggression culture and see links. There's something odd that's happened, where opinion and niceness has become sacrosanct, beyond truth. It's a tribalistic, and ultimately dangerous thing.
That could be an adaptation to the information (and globalisation) age. Since you're more likely to meet with more (and more different) opinions and have no way of instantly checking the facts behind them ,with the sea of information available, you have to first be nice. You are forced to accept the possibility that your opinion might be wrong because you can not possibly have access to all of the facts.
That's funny, because my first thought was the kneejerk reactions on Reddit to anything that could be construed as "SJW." This phenomenon doesn't pick a side.
They're so focused on entertainment that they don't want - or even know how - to dispense of an idiot like Trump.
So instead they throw some GOML shade at the people they've throughly failed.
I don't agree with the conclusion, I often read pieces like this one which expresses outrage with the news media, but can agree that the economic requirements for news programs and channels to support their host organizations has influenced them in negative ways. And that leads me to conclude that if you want hard hitting and accurate journalism you need to find a different way to support it.
Regardless of whether it was said by Trump or Clinton, if someone says they "watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering [at the 9/11 attacks]" and then claimed they saw it on TV, and then facts showed that this was never shown on TV because as far as anyone can tell it didn't happen... I'd want to see an article about them lying. And that article would naturally make the side of whoever lied look worse. Nothing partisan about it.
One thing that made the show more palatable was the addition of Ainsley Hayes, a Republican who is hired by the White House on the president's insistence (and causes much grumbling from the other characters initially). She specifically calls out the self-righteous attitude of the other characters and their simplistic view of all Republicans as gun-toting hillbillies.
I stopped watching The Newsroom because it was both more extreme in its partisanship and in its oversimplification of the opposition. And it didn't have an Ainsley Hayes character (or at least not one as good).
I grew up as a very religious evangelical christian, and as such I grew up alongside many American evangelicals who would never vote for the baby-killing atheist Democrats.
And while I strongly disagree with most of their views, I've come to realize that this is not because they're stupid and I'm smart, or because they're mean and I'm kind, or because they're lazy and I am not, but rather most of the time it's because we just disagree on some very fundamental issues. If I were to accept their axioms to be true, they can provide coherent and perhaps even convincing arguments. I know this because I believed much of what they believe myself. Sure, I was younger, but I wasn't stupid. Or at least not more stupid than I am now...
An interesting quote from the same Sorkin interview [1] I mentioned before:
Question: 'Will’s take is that liberals don’t know how to win and conservatives are wrong and often ignorant. The left will like that version of fairness more than the right will.'
Sorkin's Answer: 'All I can say is this: First of all, my biggest concern always is, was it a good story, well told? I’m not thinking about the politics at all. But I don’t want to make the same mistake that I accuse the media of making, which is that they all better be equal accusations on all sides, that fairness is somehow a virtue in art. It’s not. Fairness and balance don’t have anything to do with art. This isn’t journalism, and it doesn’t have to live by those rules. It’s meant to have a subjective point of view and an authorial voice.'
[1] http://www.vulture.com/2012/06/aaron-sorkin-newsroom-intervi...
that being said, i don't think it is that bad. trump is an old, white rich guy - what exactly did you think is going in his head? its amazing that he is restraining himself from ranting about "niggers, chinks and wetbacks". you know he talks like that in private, like any other of his profile. that is how he grew up, in a segregated US.
black president, gay marriage - all signs that society overall is moving in the right direction, the old guard simply dying off. like that crazy aunt you'll meet at thanksgiving who only rants about "the jews".
happy thanksgiving.
Same, however my commute to/from work is luckily listening to the Boston NPR station, where I get a full dose of BBC News in the mornings and a random NPR news show in the afternoon depending on when I leave. I unplugged my cable a long time ago, and I stopped visiting most news websites even longer ago. If it weren't for shares on facebook, I'd never find out about what scandalous thing a politician said to get in the media's eye again. If I could filter facebook to only have text and photo shares from friends, I'd be so much happier with the site.
It's interesting what you say about what's going on in his head. Before I graduated school or worked in software, I had a pretty interesting repeating summer job as a QA technician in the nuclear industry. I did a great job and got along great with my boss and coworkers, and often we'd get together over holidays and special occasions. He was an older guy nearing early retirement. On one such get-together, the boss revealed his real opinion about "who caused all this crap shit we're in", being "niggers and spics". Ugh. I was shocked that I was working for a racist, but what shocked me more was just hearing that, period. I couldn't imagine holding an opinion like that at all, let alone having it my entire adult life and believing it worthwhile to share.
I have a hard time believing that most politicians are as dumb as the words they say to get on the air, and Trump is a master at constantly being on the air. But, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised by it.
The media and those groups don't really matter.