THE partisanship thread

[Dill]

(12-15-2016, 11:40 PM)treee Wrote: This thread is for discussing the prevalence of partisanship in politics and how it is used to manipulate your average citizen of the United States.

Then I note the following:

1. After Washington, politics has always been partisan and candidates and parties have sought to "manipulate" average citizens.

2. What is new is the role that telecommunications media, and the deregulation thereof, play in conjunction with parties now, allowing segments of the electorate to develop their own distinct and unvetted record of historical and political facts which circulate unchallenged within what we now call "bubbles." I think there are other influential factors as well: people don't read as much as they used to, civic education is not as strong as it once was.

3. Especially troubling now is how media entities like Fox have come out as open partisans for one party and convinced large segments of the electorate that something called "the liberal press" is equally partisan or more so for the other side. Now we see millions of Americans judging the truth of news reports by their source rather than subjecting each one to traditional non-partisan, criteria of evaluation.  Because large segments of the electorate do not share the factual record anymore, it is easy for double standards appear normal, or not double at all.

This is no longer a one off problem unique to one election or candidate, but a problem which now continues from election to election.

4. The Fox Effect did not come out of nowhere. The groundwork was laid by government lying during the Vietnam war, Watergate, and Iran Contra, which undermined the authority of the US government, and by the civil rights movement and 60s counter culture (though both have now been partly integrated into US conservatism). This erosion of trust in government has greatly helped small-government conservatives (classical liberals) to delegitimize the notion of a "public good" supported by tax dollars in the interest of all. That government can do anything better than the private sector becomes subject of dispute. People elect representatives who don't think government works, and so it often doesn't, fueling the cycle of distrust while obscuring its causes. This is fertile ground for any news organization which makes distrust of public institutions profitable, an expanding market share.

5. The "liberal" press is itself part of the problem, so far as it embraces an uncritical notion of "balance"--presenting "both sides" of an issue as if each were as factually grounded and well argued as the other whether they are, in fact, or not.  One cause of this may be fear of appearing partisan, as the side with the most to lose from demands for logical consistency and fact-checking insists that journalists (on the other side) "stay out of it" and "just report!"