To be fair, they only asked about newspapers. I used to read the Washington Post daily (when my delivered subscription cost $97!). At that time, my MIL had the radio set to NPR all day, and she was well informed.
But also, disconnect from real actual facts? Yes, and very scary.
Not so much a question of building a Joe Rogan of the left as a question of what left coded messages will succeed in this broken information environment ? /3
They want someone that supports their way of thinking, whether or not it will hurt them. They feel that it helps them because they are easily swayed by someone echoing their beliefs. Prejudice, bias, fear are all part of it and a good snake-oil salesman will win them over every time.
Guaranteed that they thought the economy was in a depression, the stock market was way down, eggs were $50 a dozen, cimd was up 700% in New York City, and that people were dying because they couldn't eat bacon and cereal
Deliberately less informed. The Right's decades-long campaign to sow distrust in "the liberal media" has paid off. They were told what news outlets to distrust, and which to trust, and to only listen to and read the approved outlets. Control the input, control the result.
I think that the rightward shift of non-political media (like Rogan) also has made a big difference and I hope the Dems are paying very close attention to this. Do not cede these spaces to the right!
I mean Dems in a general sense, but also specifically the Harris campaign. Not going on Rogan was a mistake, probably, but there’s a bigger-picture problem, imo, with the move to the right in other media. Podcasts, social media, etc. especially among young men.
To be clear, don’t think one trip to Rogan by Harris would have changed the election. It’s a bigger/longer term issue. I don’t exactly know what countering the rightward drift would look like, but I think it needs to be front of mind for the American left.
However, if one uses the information sources available to their best, don’t you think one is way more accurately informed today? I certainly think I am way more informed and with far more accurate information. So not sure it is the medium per se?
This may be simplifying the problem, but it is a trend that must be addressed in the next Presidential election. And by the way, it looks like DJT's previous presidency was good for newspapers, so there's that.
Newspapers have gone to shit though. The local paper here isn't worth reading for much than the obituaries be local sports, while the two papers from the nearest large city (Calgary) are both owned by right-leaning national Postmedia conglomerate and even share the same newsroom.
Also, a lot of the worthwhile things are behind paywalls. Without https://archive.ph and https://12ft.io/ they would be inaccessible to me, a person of modest means.
Devolution of the domestic media from information to entertainment has caused this.. I cannot think of a domestically produced newspaper or even broadcast News media that is trustworthy on a consistent basis.
Dt's love of the "uneducated" leads to lack of critical thinking & difference between primary & secondary sources for facts vs outright lies that internet wildly amplifies & opinions are expressed & w/o underlying facts being established. How do you counter a lie when people pick their own facts
Declining newspaper readership is a “disconnect from facts” only if you believe that facts can only be found in newspapers. Declining use of horse-drawn buggies did not mean that people were traveling less.
does it specify "newspaper"? I do read some of them online. what if I get my news from social media, but read a linked article from time to time? does that count?
"Where there is no vision, the people perish" and were going to see exactly this play out as trump voters keep getting blindsided and surprised by policies that harm them (and everyone else) that they voted for
The traditional news industry is a dead man walking and not why Trump won. Obama was an enormous gift to the right. The Democrats responded by not getting the message that racism is still the most potent motivator, and they failed to adjust their messaging to deliver emotionally as Rs did.
Yes, this is true. But an awful lot of people were still reading newspapers when the Bush Administration told us there were WMDs in Iraq. And you had to read the UK press to see how flimsy the case actually was.
Yep. My in-laws went down the Tea Party / conspiracy rabbit hole about a year into Obama’s term, for no real reason other than … well, the obvious one, but also the Fox propaganda they ingested all day long.
Newspapers have become increasingly less factual as they have been taken over by hedge funds and billionaires. How many towns even have a local newspaper anymore? They say simple local news can decrease white-collar crime by up to 40%.
Comments
But also, disconnect from real actual facts? Yes, and very scary.
(1) How do we combat disinformation?
And
(2) How do we succeed in an environment in which disinformation is widespread?
/1
There are clearly pockets of the information system that are right-wing controlled. But leaving those aside, the question of messaging remains /2
But I do keep up on the news.
How often do you look something up in the phonebook?