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Comment by jakelazaroff | Hacker News Reader

How is this relevant? These long lines and the voter suppression that they cause are both very real. Shining a light on that isn't "sensationalism".

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Its relevant - albeit a little out of the purview, because without the rise of sensationalist based media creating the distractions, none of this is possible.

The lies, the distractions, the propaganda, the amplification of issues that simply-do-not exist, allows the power brokers the opportunity to do these types of things without the oversight and regulation that the Constitution and history used to have in place to contain such acts.

Its no different than a magical or illusionist using distraction and human behaviors against the audience so that they can paint a picture of what ever they choose. Or the infinite number of psych tricks used to fool people into giving up their money....

If the media was still beholden to facts and held actual integrity, and were not instead chasing a false metric that benefited them, the power brokers could not get away with these types of acts.

It goes deeper but the checks and balances of our Republic are no longer in place because we whored out our Congress and allowed the Foxes to buy their way to the front of the henhouse...

In other words: The lines are a result of the Right using media to create distractions and issues that allow them to get away with these types of repressive acts. Without their propaganda machines working in sync, enraging their audiences with false fears, (non-existent voter fraud for example), they cannot do get away with these things. Its classic distraction, just played out over a decade, instead of a few minutes.

The lines are one example of this because they have leveraged their media to make people HATE the other side enough to literally cut of their noses to spite their faces.

What in this article, specifically, is a lie, distraction, propaganda or amplification of an issue that doesn't exist?

Voter suppression is real. It alters election results; look at the Georgia governor's race in 2018 for a recent egregious example. The US is continuing a proud tradition of disenfranchisement — from only giving voting rights to white men at the country's inception, to poll taxes, Jim Crow laws, felon disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, voter IDs.

This is an important issue, and I can't fathom dismissing an article about it as "sensationalism".

I am not. My point is that the reason we are here, that this repression even exists, is due to the media marketplace. Without it, this kind of blatant repression isn’t possible. It is here because of decades of propaganda and distraction by the right that has allowed then to take advantage of I’ll informed people who have become enemies of their neighbors and democracy itself.

I don't buy it. Like I said, the US has systemically disenfranchised voters from inception through the present. One of our two major political parties is explicitly invested in continuing that practice, and the other is only nominally opposed.

This is not a recent invention, and it's not due to the media. It's built right into the foundation of our country.

One has to understand the root of the cause if you wish to treat the illness. It is no secret that the removal of the Fairness Doctrine paired with the deregulation of media and the removal of Congress's oversight and license requirements helped fuel the right wing media rise over the last 15years. Pair that with the rise of internet based style ad measurement and audience feedback, and you create a media tailor made for propaganda where you reward sensationalism.

Attention is the currency of media.

You dont actually believe that the Right is able to thwart decades of decency and abidance to a common good based on solely on will do you?

They do it by lying and thus enraging people into believing that the other guy is coming for them...that the other guy is evil. That is how you control a so-called democracy, you divide and distract and create a sideshow while you do the dirty work, sometimes in the open (like this) or mostly in the back, like the judiciary packing.

I just ask that you dig deeper and look for the root cause, not he symptoms. Only when we realize the cause can we make the appropriate changes and restore health.

The root cause is that our country is a hegemony founded by rich slave owners. The “decades of decency and abidance to a common good” is a myth that erases the ongoing plight of marginalized people, spun by those who want to keep that status quo. We have always been a violent and oppressive nation — the caste system is enshrined in our national DNA, and we have never in our 250 year existence truly reckoned with it.

If only the issue were as shallow as the media dividing us! I’ll make the same request of you: that you direct your gaze a little further back to discover what’s truly going on here.

If you think the retraction of voting rights is due to the actions of men some 300 years ago, I dont really have much to say... You might as well go back a few thousand years. However, if you're interested in the actual cause and effects of real, tangible actions and real legislation by living souls. People whose goals were to repress votes to change outcomes, I suggest you study the last 30 years of American media and how the Right morphed the rules to their benefit.

"Retraction" is a weird word to use. The issue isn't that we're going backwards — voter turnout has generally increased over this country's lifetime [1] — but it's that we're enfranchising people at a relatively slow and demographically disproportionate rate. If you pick 30 years ago as your starting point, you'll miss the start of the war on drugs, white flight and redlining, Jim Crow — all "real, tangible actions and real legislation by living souls, people whose goals were to repress votes to change outcomes".

Right wing media constructing an alternate reality is worrying, of course. But it's myopic to intentionally ignore the mantle of disenfranchisement and oppression that recent politicians have picked up. Their ideas didn't come from nowhere, you know.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_turnout_in_the_United_St...

Forest v Trees 2020...

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