Happy Constitution Day! Annenberg Annual Civics Survey

[Dill]

(09-25-2018, 11:05 AM)Nately120 Wrote: We don't want to be informed. We desire self-serving bs to avoid challenging our views and hurting our fragile egos, so in this sense, I fully believe we have elected a president who represents the people.  In all fairness, bs news and misinformation was spread back in the good ol' days, too.  I recall reading an article that pointed out a number of old fake news stories from way back when, including one from 1928 where a Catholic was running for president and it was widely assured that he would ban the Bible, and that the recently build Holland Tunnel in NY was actually the beginnings of a tunnel that would be built all the way to the Vatican so that the Pope could...um, drive to the USA and assume office?

Yes, this bs was distributed through good ol' fashioned newspapers written by real writers and read by real people who were smart enough to read.

Also, before Facebook even existed we managed to turn John McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh into his illegitimate colored child.  Score one for Bush, there.

Yes, "fake news" has been around for a long time.  Newspapers printed outright lies about Jefferson and Madison.  There were no journalism schools preaching "objectivity."   YELLOW JOURNALISM was the bread and butter of Pulitzer and Hearst in the late 19th century, when Fox style commentary was presented as news in the great New York papers.

Still, a bit of historical contextualization is in order.  People still revered certain standards and authorities to a greater degree than they do now. The rate of literacy was lower, but the level was higher. (I am still amazed sometimes to think the Federalist Papers were newspaper articles.)

It was the reaction to yellow/tabloid journalism that drove standards into the then newly created journalism departments of universities, and onto newspaper editorial boards.

In my youth, there were conspiracy theories spread by pamphlets and books--Commies put flouride in our water; the FCC was going to ban religious broadcasting, etc.--but these were FRINGE. They had no voice in the "liberal" media: the three networks and the major newspapers, and magazines like Post, Life, Time, and Newsweek. So if people were not good at sorting out fact from fiction, they could at least rely on the professionals to do it for them. 73% of Democrats did not think Eisenhower was a Communist.

The greatly disturbing characteristic of the present, is that with the takedown of the "liberal" media, and the rise of Fox and the internet, the FRINGE has moved to center stage. So 73% of Republicans believe or suspect the FBI  plotted to take down a sitting president in 2016, and the Russia investigation is a continuation of that. Doesn't matter if the FBI director destroyed Hillary. And 3-5 million voted illegally for Hillary, whose personal assistant belongs to the Muslim Brotherhood and helped her sell 20% of US uranium to Russia; and how did she get away with the murder of Vince Foster? Different standards for the Clintons.

Doesn't matter if the "evidence" is always tabloid style.  The FRINGE now has the authority of Walter Cronkite.