Why the news will give puppies cancer and generally rain unpleasent doom on the world

I've recently come of the opinion that our democracy is hosed. The goose is cooked, the acorns thoroughly burnt, all has been said, and everything has been done; it's curtains.

Ok enough of that. Hopefully I've won your attention my fine reader. I embellished a bit above, but daily a potential trend towards our undoing does grow unchecked. We aren't providing good news information to Americans and few care. The essential problem lies with media outlets who profess to be news agencies and really are opinion mills. Jon Stewart and a few others harp on this point on a semi-regular basis, and you should watch Stewart's interview on Crossfire if you would like to see harping well done in the face of opposition.(Which if squirrely for some youtubes, you can find here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE)

As for me, while I had heard this point numerous times, I discounted it as a threat until several days ago. Fox News did a segment on the inefficiencies of the US Postal Service. They assembled a panel to create a 'debate' around the issue. Their primary speaker was some slimy sounding pundit who evoked nationalistic racist tendencies against Africans to support his point. He also suggested that we ought to privatize operations like homeland security entirely. Engaging the privatized security debate here would be bulky and distracting, but I hope we can agree that racist rhetoric has no place in news, opinion, or any other legitimate attempt to suggest policy. (If squirrelier still, you may find it here. Bonus, the title is a pun: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fi19yLcGk8c&feature=player_embedded)

The panel agreed, and spent much of the discussion speaking briefly to support an attack on the USPS, and then arguing about how racist his statements were. One panel member, senator D'Amato, openly roasted the racist rhetoric and made the video quite popular. While the most interesting thing about the segment was seeing a pundit ripped up like a piñata, it also eerily reminded me of something else.

A debate happened, an appearance of two sides was created, and both of them supported one agenda. One opinion came across as quite radical, and the others as moderate by comparison. Glenn Beck, a popular commentator on Fox, released a ghost penned novel called The Overton Window this June. The fictional book details a world in which a political ideology based on the theory “The Overton Window" runs rampant. The theory states more or less that a certain range of views are acceptable in any given political dialogue. The corollary to this, and the one that the book interests itself with, is that extreme views expressed frequently shift the window. A quick wikipedia search yields that the theory is an actual one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window. The Fox segment was doing what Glenn Beck suggested.

This alone would hardly be cause for concern. From what I have seen though, Fox constantly misstates critical facts, makes highly opinionated and partisan arguments, and generally supports a determinate agenda. Certainly some of this is not labeled as News, but people take it that way. In the USPS segment alone, large portions of information were equivocated, such as the USPS needing to deliver to areas that private firms can charge higher rates for, or that various private firms even looked into using USPS as a cost saving measure to ship non-profitable items. People take this so called news as their reality, and believe strongly that what they hear is the truth.

Think to the debates surrounding creationism vs. evolution in textbooks. Without engaging the discussion itself, we still know that it was often ugly and that resolutions were difficult to find. The core problem was that the two sides were operating under fundamentally different premises; their conceptions of the world were different. Now imagine if someone could actively mold people's core beliefs. What if their entire political and world view was informed by a deliberately constructed narrative. This is where we are headed.

Before we blame Fox as the source of all evil, we should note that they are hardly alone. Liberal outlets like the Huffington post and MSNBC are well enough known for biased coverage. Just go to Huffpost and look at the pictures and headlines they use, you will find the images of those politicians they do not favor to be quite ugly. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. Fox is just a juicier target because they put up all appearances of intentionally telling a partisan story and cut more corners with the facts.

These media outlets alone are not the root cause of the problem. As long as wealthy interests have an incentive to build narratives in the news, and a means to do so, they are going to. If we cut down Fox somehow, a new hydra would spring up eventually. I believe firmly that we can't have much of a representative democracy at all if people don't have good information. When their truth is corporate truth, their votes are corporate votes, and we begin catering to the fattest wallet instead of the people's interests.

This is a dialogue that demands immediate attention. As a starting point I would advocate a greater focus on discerning good information from bad information in schools, and some basic legal requirements for news stations. As I understand it, there are few now. We could for example place fines in cases of chronic fact-check failure for major outlets, or label news like we label our delicious, sometimes healthy, breakfast cereal. If these solutions seem contrived and doomed to failure, that is partially because the system itself is awkward and in a position where solutions are difficult. Regardless of what action we take, we must do something. If we don't solve this pollution of our society's basic political awareness, it will soon solve us.