Cali Coug |
02-22-2008 01:59 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex
(Post 187862)
Last night it occurred to me how odd this line of thinking is: complaining about an uninformed electorate on the one hand, and then criticizing nearly every means a voter has these days to get informed. Someone wants to have it both ways.
There is no such thing as an objective source in politics (which almost by definition is opinion). Getting the candidate's ideas from the horse's mouth is a good and fair idea, but you'll get his spin just as much as anyone else's. We have more options available to us to BE informed than any group of people in any era of the world. TV, radio, blogs, etc. ought to be praised, not criticized. What options did people have in 1980 to be informed about Ronald Reagan's policies? In 1960 about JFK's?
The system isn't perfect. I watch "Jaywalking" like everyone else and know there's a bunch of willful ignoramuses out there who don't know and don't care (of which many seem to have drifted to the Obama campaign). But if you want to hear opinions, from BOTH sides, all you have to do is turn it on, or log on. It's that simple.
That's a good thing.
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Tex- the current way people learn about politics and candidates is anything but good. I don't know why this is just now occurring to you. It has been fairly commented on for years.
It is a chicken-egg issue. Did the candidates first boil their policies down to 15 second sound bytes, or did the news cycles start cutting out everything except 15 second sound bytes and the candidates then catered to the news organizations?
It doesn't really matter who did what first, in the end, because we are stuck with the simple fact that there isn't much discussion on issues in the media. The issues are oversimplified and discussed only if there is a big scary graphic pertaining to the issue. This is true of all MSM.
With the blogs, they are even more overtly partisan than the MSM in most cases. The blogs are where you can go to get the spin on an event involving your preferred candidate.
The place where you will find the most detailed information on a candidate's positions will be in that candidate's white papers (which are almost always on that person's website). Of course it will have spin. Are you going to tell me you have found some great source of information that doesn't spin anything? But more importantly, it will have details- far more than you will get from any other source.
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