No news is good news

 Sunday, March 25, 2018 Let’s face it, most voters are dumb as bricks.And those people who actually know something about politics are either completely biased or corrupt.This combined with a completely unethical press makes for an extremely dangerous and explosive mix.So called intelligent voters – when they bother to seek out information at all – gather only information that supports their own preconceived notions.
Liberals cling to left-leaning media such as The Washington Post and The New York Times (others are so far left such as The Hill or The Washington Examiner as have no credibility at all). While on the right, talk radio, Fox and more recent Alt-right news outlets fill their needs for misinformation.Even then, most voters don’t even read beyond the headlines if they read at all, and media takes full advantage of this fact by framing news so that they don’t have to.Independent voters are just as bad, since most lean towards one side or the other, and routinely vote the way they lean, pretending they are more thoughtful than the masses, when they are generally less well-informed.Most voters don’t think – although they think they do.They are largely sheep, herded into the voting booth by party leaders or social leadership, voting the way all those in their social group vote, because it is expected of them.Party leaders maintain the fiction of an independent voter – such as with the recent nationwide anti-gun rallies that are supposedly a grass roots opposition to the NRA. Behind the scenes, liberal leaders pay for and manipulate people in order to curb NRA contributions to the GOP ahead of a critical national election Democrats are desperate to win.For most voters on the left or right, politics is about social identity, who a person thinks he or she is, and their need to be accepted in their social group – not about issues. They believe whatever the group believes, or risks being cast out. So, like sheep, they follow whatever policy the group supports, and the political leadership of each party, controls those groups, marshalling them to this cause or that.Individual members of these groups rarely if every expose themselves to alternative facts, or when confronted with facts that do not fit their beliefs, reject them as “fake news.”Intelligent voting is hard. It requires people to seek out alternate views which they are not comfortable with, and seek out more than propagandistic headlines media offers. An intelligent voter needs to take in both sides of any argument, digest it, and come up with his or her own opinion, even at the risk of being at odds with his or her social group.Since there is no such thing as an unbiased media – despite our claims otherwise – this task of finding legitimate views is made nearly impossible. It is easier to accept pre-digested slanted news from media than to actually think for ourselves.And frankly, most people do not want to hear anything that suggests their opinion might be wrong. They simply get angry, or worse, paint those with differing opinions as deluded or even evil.Of course, we might expect better from more informed voters. But in fact, the more informed about issues you are (studies show) the more biased you become. This is partly the problem with media which has become propaganda machines for one side or the other.The intelligent voter has even more obstacles to overcome than the unwashed masses. A college education already skews their world view as professors tend to sell their own agenda and so once in the real world, these voters are already rejecting information sources that might counter this mis-education, and they continue to fill their heads with the mis-information spewed by cultural magazines like The New Yorker (Mother Jones is a joke, and so it’s the Nation) or the National Review. These well-informed voters thus develop a system of internal fake news, even reshaping indisputable fact to fit their own beliefs.Those who manage to survive college with their thinking intact rapidly find themselves outcasts in social groups to which they might otherwise want to belong and over time, must choose between being accepted and accepting the preferred doctrine, or seeking out other points of refuge.Although The First Amendment does its best to protect free speech and media, it is almost impossible to use the first because so much has been labelled as unacceptable speech, and media has become a political power in its own rite using the First Amendment as cover just as the NRA uses The Second Amendment to protect its own political agenda.The founding fathers may have predicted slanted media when crafting The Constitution, but obviously believed some aspects of the Fourth Estate still clung to the scared scripture of objectivity, a scripture modern media has largely abandoned in its pursuit of power.In fact, these days all news is fake news, even when it is apparently backed up by fact, all of it framed in a way to manipulate people into supporting this side or that, slanted and filled with purple prose that does nothing to educate voters.Those people who don’t vote at all – because they could care less or because they have lost faith in a system where everything seems like a lie – cannot possibly rely on news media to provide them with “real news” since that’s no longer the function of media. Those of this crew who pay attention to what media says get confused by who they are supposed to vote for, so they don’t.For the rest of us (split between two political camps), media functions to sway us this way or that, mostly through frightening doom and gloom headlines designed to stir up panic or rage, so that this party or that can get us all to goosestep into the voting booth to get the media-approved candidate elected or to oppose the candidate media has come to condemn.In some ways, we have come back to that adage: “No news is good news.”But we mean it now in a whole new context.