Scrat wrote:patiodog wrote:Very well put, blatham. I do wonder sometimes why it is so difficult in the U.S. to find out what fringe parties even think.
Maybe because it isn't
news. It is not the job of the media to be the marketing arm for every group that has a political message. It is the job of the members of those fringe parties to get their own message out. If their message is one of interest to enough people, the media are likely to pick up on it. If not, that's just reality.
I would love to see the Libertarian and the Constitution parties get more media coverage than they do, but that's a question of scale. They are smaller parties, involved in less, with less chance to have an impact on people's lives. That makes what they do and say less newsworthy than what the Democrat and the Republican parties do and say.
It's not just coverage of events I'm talking about -- in fact, my main concern is with analysis. You flip on one of these panelist shows on one of the cable news networks, which, really, is where most people get their analysis of the news, and the range of ideas presented is very narrow. Even the commentators who are always at one another's throats rarely express any ideas that are very far apart on the world's political spectrum. There is value in hearing an "extreme" position on an issue, if for no other reason than to be forced to defend your own position against it. Just because the political machine is dominated by one or two schools of thought doesn't mean that these should only be viewed through the same intellectual lenses as those by whom they are enacted.
Nor do I think this is solely a media issue. I've noticed in travelling that random people -- people I meet on the train or in a bar -- tend to be more open to various
ideas than people here. (Which is not to say that most people would rather not think than think, justs that there is more of a culture of spirited intellectual debate among individuals in other places I've been.) If I say we are insular, it doesn't mean that I think we ignore world events, but that we generally are not inclined to look at them very critically. I think there is a disturbing attitude of anti-intellectualism in the U.S. (and I don't think you yourself are guilty of it, Scrat, however much we may disagree, which is sort of the point I'm trying to make in my verbosity and my parenthetically convoluted post); the media we support is reflective of this, but by being so it also engenders us. To revert to a previous metaphor, it seems to me that our major news outlets (and their inherent editorial bents) serve us more as a mirror than as a lens.
