Some people are surprised by the amount of political heat/hatred that comes out these days. I am not surprised because I have said for a few years now that we have moved from the Age of Reason, in which rational men disagree and debate issues; to an Age of Emotion where disagreement is tantamount to personal challenge and the response is frequently rage. Rage, hatred, violence and other extreme emotions play well on our national media of Television and everyone wants a share of TV power.
The Information Revolution has given rise to so much noise i.e.. competing messages, sales pitches spam etc. that there has been an increase in extreme behavior to attempt to break through the noise and get peopleÂ’s message out. Thus extremism gains media attention and exposure
Logic and reason are legacies of the literacy. When you read something you have the time and opportunity to think about what you have read and make up your mind about it. Not everyone takes this time to be reflective and reasonable of course. There have been many provocateurs who use the written word to reach the emotions of their audience. However, the medium of literacy and written word does lend itself much more to reasonable feedback and dialogue than the audio and visual media of the of radio and television. Both audio and visual input tend to bypass the logical left brain and appeal to the highly emotional right brain.
More and more people admit that they "don't read" what they usually mean is that they don't read anything beyond what their jobs/training require. They don't take in their information about what is happening in the broader world by reading either daily newspapers or weekly newsmagazines.
These people freely confess to getting their information about the world from TV and or radio talk shows while driving to and from work. Both of these media are very poor conduits of factual information. Very few people can remember "facts" that they saw on TV for only a few seconds or recall accurately the sound bite they head on the radio. What does linger for these post-literate is the "feeling" component of the message or their emotional feeling reaction to the information.
More and more insinuation and innuendo are becoming the way to media and political attention and power.
// posted by Patrick @ 4:23 PM
Friday, October 03, 2003
Truth depends on the questions you ask.
The Great California Recall of 2003 is the first major electoral test of the 21st century, and it is showing the defining power of the public opinion poll and the news power of the entertainment media.
The media pundits have become so dependent on public opinion polls that they have no other touchstone to judge popularity of candidates or issues. The media barons have gone so far out on the limb of “fairness” that they report the opinions of the radical, the few or isolated as being equally “legitimate viewpoint.” with the voices of moderation. In fact the voices of the marginal are frequently more compelling, especially on TV where their colorful rhetoric and emotional appeals play well to the camera and an audience with a voracious appetite for diversion.
The media “experts” mainly at the operations level, have become poll junkies, anointing the polls with the wisdom of objective numbers.
In the media’s rush for electoral factoids and accurate sounding numbers, they ignore that the “truth” of any poll depends on the questions asked by the pollsters. The agreement of a variety of polls is based on asking the same questions.
For example, if a pollster asks; would you (or will you) vote for Candidate A or Candidate B, the question ignores the existence of Candidates C, D, E, F, etc. Anyone who has studied polling or statistics, knows that the more options the respondent has, the messier the results become. If a respondent does have the temerity to answer Candidate C, the pollsters toss out the answer as being a “statistical anomaly.” If you offer forced choice among 2 or 3 candidates or opinions or views, then you get clean results. As soon as you toss in more choices the numbers begin splintering and the picture (and thus the story) becomes more and more clouded.
A cloudy story with no clear lead, headline or sound bite, makes for a confused media. If the media sees itself as being confused, they fear that the public will turn away from their leadership and the media will lose power, prestige, readers/viewers and sponsors/advertisers.
Most people already admit that they get their view of the world , ie “news” from TV which is very good at presenting highly emotional stories and very poor at presenting facts and figures. The more people rely on the emotionalism of TV, the more susceptible they are to the kind of simplistic emotional appeal of an Arnold.
Reversing the Game
There are complaints among the media that the leading candidate Arnold Schwartznegger is ignoring the traditional news media and taking his message directly to the people via the entertofnment side ot the media. The traditional news mavens complain is that he is ignoring the “difficult” questions that the news reporters allegedly ask and only responding to the “softball” questions that the entertainment reporters are asking. The forth estate of the news is being upstaged by the new fifth estate of entertainment.
The news media have nobody but themselves to blame for their situation, for they have created Arnold to sell papers and TV news shows.
