People need to look at the exit polls. A lot of citizens who voted Trump think he's an untrustworthy, unscrupulous dirtbag who is temperamentally unsuited to being a president. But they voted for him anyway, because they would rather a shady blowhard shake up the system than stick with the status quo. Trump was absolutely right that there was nothing short of committing murder that would turn the populist support away from him. But that wasn't because his voters all adored him - it was because his scandalous background and blustering demeanour
didn't matter to them.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
I disagree that the medias job is to report news. They have an important role in being arbiters of fact in the same way that scientists due in their field. The question that I think needs to be answered out of this is how do you take a misinformed voter and turn him into an informed voter?
Historically, journalists were trusted arbiters of facts. Now they are not and merged into this infotainment medium that people choose the facts to match their opinions.
The media is broken in its function as the fourth estate and that leaves the masses open to propaganda.
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As someone who studied and worked as a journalist, the decline of the fourth estate saddens me. You're right that it has largely abandoned its role as arbiters of facts. Some of the decline is a matter of resources - the business model of mainstream media has collapsed as they've lost their traditional sources of income (classifieds, print, and commercials). As a consequence, they made the foolish mistake of trying to beat online and social media at their own game by emphasizing opinion pieces, partisanship, and advocacy. The result is all heat and no light.
And it has become evident that there's a social gulf between the liberal, secular, and urban professionals who work in the media and their countrymen who live in an essentially foreign culture. To half of Americans (and British too, judging by how astonished the media there was by the Brexit vote), the people who work in the media may as well be Parisian or Viennese. Media and audience live in fundamentally different cultures from one another, in lifestyle, values, and worldview.