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.
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