United States of America - More than an Acronym to Chant at Sport Events

[_EAllusion]

"Fact checking" of politicians as a separate entity I think has arisen as a genre to dealing with abdicating responsibility of doing that as often in straight reporting. Because that would require taking sides and upset the balance. The whole fact check genre has problems with what facts it considers worth checking and how it checks them, but the idea that there are facts to be checked about political statements separate from reporting on those statements gets obnoxious at times.

[_Some Schmo]

So, if we were reporting on this morning's press conference, the objective facts would be a transcript of the press conference?

Pretty much, although an accurate synopsis would do.

I mean, on these 24 hours news networks, they take about 5 minutes worth of daily news and turn it into 24 hours of entertaining rage-making.

[_EAllusion]

News has to condense transcripts. It has to make decisions about what is important to report out of them and place them in context. Because doing so requires making complex decisions about what is important and why, some people think that means there's no difference between directly quoting President Racist saying "Helter Skelter! Race War! Race War! Prepare the Nooses!" and reporting that as, "Today, The President had harsh words for critics. Others claimed his comments were racially charged." After all, what is objectivity anyway?

[_honorentheos]

I personally don’t like open primaries. I think it reduces the incentive to get involved in politics. I’m agnostic on top two, although it requires voters to understand the importance of voting in the primary. I do think it would be healthy to give third parties a realistic chance to develop, which I think means ranked choice voting. It’s not perfect, but I think it’s an improvement over what we have now.

Can you explain how an open primary reduces incentives to get involved in politics? My observation of people's party affiliation is it defaults to one of the two major parties, typically the one a person's parents supported. I don't see how holding open primaries creates a disincentive for people to actively decide to engage in politics. Perhaps you can elaborate?

[_honorentheos]

As always, I think the biggest problem here is the development of propagandistic right-wing media and its audience, and the corresponding ethical issue of false balance and fairness rather than striving for real objectivity in mainstream journalism. That's the primary source of radicalism, the bad kind, and its enabling.

I think the underlying problems are a devil's triangle of conditions if we want to go that direction.

First and foremost, expanding income inequality that has been occurring since the mid-70s is the base of the triangle. As people feel less and less enfranchised in society, they become more open to viewing government as the problem. Reagan's quip about the nine most terrifying words lands because people don't see government helping...largely because the sense is the game is fixed and getting worse.

Second, the two major parties turning partisan differences into combat sport is one of the two sides. This has been most evident on the right though the left is working to catch up. Steven Schmidt has described this as a form of nuclearization of the electorate through emphasizing and villianizing the fundamental ways government operates. Used to polarize voters, the risk this posed to right-wing conservative politicians was deemed minimal because, like with nuclear weapons, they assumed no one would dare actually set it off through acting in accordance with the rhetoric because that would be self-destructive. Gingrich played a pivotal role in normalizing this. Mitch McConnell is the face of it today.

Without this complicity and exploitation of people feeling increasing disenfranchised, conservative talk radio looks more like liberal talk radio in the late 90s. It'd be there, but hardly the force and influence it is today. With the two above, conservative talk radio becomes the third side of the triangle. It took root and gained outsized importance to it's listeners and viewers because, unlike the politicians, it benefited from pushing the narrative even harder that government was the problem. The politicians who were exploiting and furthering the message saying the same things about how government was failing them but then appearing to not do anything about it were trying to have it both ways. Talk radio didn't care that the reality differed from their narrative spin. So they turned the electorate against anyone who wasn't willing to be swept up in the momentum that eventually gave us Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America.