How Do We Re-Balance America?

[Opsa]

A congresswoman was shot in Arizona, along with some citizens at a rally last week. The gunman was a lone, unstable young man. The congresswoman is now recovering from her injury. A little girl died.

All kinds of accusations have been flying around, most of which I find shockingly irresponsible and inflammatory. Some people are saying that the unstable gunman was influenced by far-right propaganda. Quite possibly, but the far right is now firing back that that's unfair and they are not to blame. True, they are not to blame for the attack, but maybe they should be more careful with their rhetoric.

Some people are calling it a terrorist act, but I don't think that's right. The gunman just another in a long line of poor loser outcasts looking for attention and getting themselves all worked up into a self-righteous froth that leads them to do something horrifically reckless. He's a Travis Bickle. He has no political affiliation. There are lots of them out there, confused and afraid and off their rockers to begin with. They should not be glorified by attention. They need serious help.

The main thing that bugs me about all this is that once again, here we have the U.S.A., a huge, diverse nation, in danger of once again being pidgeon-holed as being a gun-toting bunch of maniacs because one mentally ill guy with a gun made the news. He is not us and we are not him. The far left and the far right are not us, either, they are just firing off their mouths as recklessly as whatsisface fired off his gun.

I am not what you'd call a particularly patriotic person. I don't wear a flag on my lapel or automobile, but I think I'm pretty much like most of us in the States in that I'm here, it's a beautiful land, and in spite of our screwed up bipartisan government, I don't think we're trash and I hope we can get it together so that we can live in peace with each other and with the rest of the world.

I just want to know how the heck do we start ourselves in a more balanced direction?

[pieces o nine]

I don't know, Ops.

I suspect a similar question has plagued quiet, thinking people for as long as there have been people.




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Whenever and wherever people meet to interact peacefully and with good will, especially when diversity is welcomed within that group and towards other groups, a little balance is restored. Such people try to carry that balance with them by living in a way which affects others around them positively. It will never be enough, but it's a start.

[Scriblerus the Philosophe]

Something really bad has to happen, I think, and it has to hit all levels. I don't know what, and don't want to speculate, but we seem to have lost the ability to make compromises. Or the Right has, so it seems, and it looks to me like they see compromising as a weakness. There's a time and a place for refusal to compromise, but this is not it.

[Sibling DavidH]

I have been thinking along the same lines as Scrib.  It's hard to think of a way in which the situation will improve both quickly and without some major stimulus.

[Swatopluk]

A selective bug that attacks the vocal chords of obese people? That would hit far more RW pundits than leftist ones
And a filter virus that replaces the standard RW buzzwords with something hilarious.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

I don't see a short term solution for the problem, but I'm hopeful that the younger generations are able to see much better what's going on. It will take a while for a critical mass to see reason but the general trend would suggest that the tactics currently employed will stop being effective at some point in the future. Not a reason to stop denouncing intolerance at every opportunity, though.

[Aggie]

I'm skeptical about that; I think that the younger generations will be too plugged-in and distracted to bother with anything more than slacktivisim. Internet censorship is carried off so successfully in other nations that it's hard to think that dissenting information will not be eventually be "shaped" a bit on the future internet.  Out-and-out censorship is not something I expect to see on the (american) Net anytime soon, but there are other, more subtle ways of making info difficult to access, unfashionable, or conspicuously infiltrated enough that fledgling activists get spooked.

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

Slacktivism is the child of comfortable living, the question is how long until life becomes more uncomfortable.

As uncomfortable as this may sound, the motivations behind activism aren't that different from those of terrorism, in that you need some real or perceived injustice to take action (and that action may be pacific or not). You need a struggle to have a real motivation, otherwise you have too much to lose.

[Aggie]

*rumble*

I was touching on this elsewhere.  To address Lindorm's observations directly, I can conceive of myself making a radical change in my personal lifestyle, but I admit I would not have the courage to take law-shattering action that would be likely to get me locked up, shot or disappeared.

I do think it's possible to achieve change through less-radical activism, but to do so you need to unite and mobilize a significant proportion of the population. 

[Bob in a quantum-state-of-faith]

 

I see the root of all this evil, is for-profit "news".

Bear with me a sec.

Back when I was young, we had 3 major news outlets in the USA, in the realm of visual Media.   Certainly, there were any number of printed media outlets, ranging from ultra-conservative to irresponsible-liberal and everything in-between.

But it was all pretty much balanced by the "loss-leader" TV news media, which prided itself in not only being not for profit, but being as unbiased as is humanly possible.

In those heady days (when looking back), the Big Three had to provide annual reason for the government to renew their ownership of limited RF spectrum.   And the bureaucrats who oversaw that spectrum took their jobs (more or less) seriously, and insisted that the Big Three justify their continued monopoly of each of their respective slice of the TV bandwidth.

One of several avenues the Big Three utilized, was presenting news at a loss, not-for-profit basis.   They could justifiably point to the costs of bringing said news, at a loss, but also as a Legitimate Public Service.  And mean it.

Often, there were few adverts during the news-- if there were Big Events Happening?  I often saw entire stretches of news coverage, sans any advertising at all.

By removing sponsorship of the news from the table, they also removed any worry about offending said sponsors.  And reduced the tendency towards censorship.  Among other things.

Then, along comes a Rich Man, who wanted to get even richer:  and he conceives of a 24 hour entertainment channel.  He lies, and calls it "news".  And you have CNN for the first time.  For profit, of course-- did I mention the man was Rich and wanted to become Richer Still?

Coincidentally with this development, you have massive de-regulation efforts in government, including stripping all oversight from TV.  Thanks, Reagan, for destroying yet another American Icon:  unbiased nightly national news.

With the competition of for-profit CNN, and the grand larceny of corporate take-over of the other networks, not-for-profit news vanished almost overnight.  News shows must be for-profit, now.

With that shift from "bring the news as a Public Service" into "Bring the Entertainment to Sell, Sell, Sell-- selldammit-- ISAIDSELL!" you pretty much eliminated any chance of unbiased reporting right there.

Because everyone knows that Trouble-With-A-T-which-rhymes-with-P outsells any and all other "news", regardless of it's honesty, believability or integrity.

If there is not currently any Trouble-With-A-T happening?  Make some up.  

And Fox News (and their like-minded ilk) was born out of that idea:  it is possible to fabricate Trouble-With-A-T out of literally nothing.  All you need is fear and a fanatical devotion to the pope (sorry).   And if you can fabricate "fear" out of nothing?  So much the better-- artificial fear is much easier to feed anyway.

The USA has been going downhill ever since.

What we need, is draconian methods:  some form of quality control, if a media outlet wants to use the word "news" as opposed to entertainment, editorials or gossip.

I would implement it as so:  to qualify for the word "news" as in "we bring you the news" in your program?  You would be required to adhere to strict truth-standards.  I.e. anything you report must come from at least two independent sources, if you label it "news".  Otherwise, you >>must<< label it, frequently, "opinion" or "editorial content" or "conjecture"-- anything that indicates it is not news.

Any agency caught willfully or by accident, lying either by omission (not telling the whole story) or by direct falsehood, is fined $1000 per item.  

A second-tier system would be implemented as well:  if, once a fine is paid, the agency publicly admits, within 48 hours of the fine being issued, they were wrong, and why, and issues the whole story or the correct story, in the same venue as their mistake, all is well and good.   If they fail?  Or if they go past the 48 hours?  A second fine of $1000 is issued.

A public forum, wherein the weekly fine-tally is published for each news agency is made available to anyone.  Including a fine-rating, i.e. which agency has paid the highest fines this week, and how much they paid, etc. The second-tier is also published, and the ratings for that.  And finally, the combined total is rated.

Each week, the triple-rating of each agency is published, prominently.

-------------------

I wonder how long Fox News would last, under such a system?  They would have to change their name to "Fox Entertainment" or "Fox Funnies" or the most honest of all, "Fox Lies" in a neat double-entandre....

[Aggie]

Bless the CBC, and may it continue to be generously funded from my tax dollars.  In addition to pretty decent not-for-profit news, I appreciate the not-for-profit CanCon (canadian content) programmes, no matter how humble. 

I don't suppose Fox rebroadcasts Little Mosque on the Prairie, eh? 

oh, I may be wrong on that one:

In June 2008 Fox announced plans to adapt Little Mosque on the Prairie into an American setting, in partnership with the show's production company, WestWind Pictures. The planned deal would not affect the Canadian version if it were to be picked up in the United States by another distributor or network.

[Opsa]

The Ops household canceled our TV subscription a month and a half ago, and I've not seen TV news since. (Never watched FOX or CNN.) All I really miss is the weather forecasts, but I can get that online. I read the newspaper, too. The difference with the paper is that I can re-read and clarify if I need to. I can stop and decide what makes sense.

Maybe so many of us are busy trying to make a living in a carpy economy that all we seem to have time for is TV news, which comes out in sensationalistic spurts as we're brushing our teeth in the morning or making dinner in the evening. Headlines are misleading. Sound bites are half-truths. It's very dangerous. Then some miserable twit who needs attention hears it, makes his assumptions, grabs his non-controlled firearm and you can guess the rest. This formula keeps playing out over and over and and still people seem surprised.

I like B-of-Q's ideas. Didn't we once have accountability laws for news?

[pieces o nine]

...
Didn't we once have accountability laws for news?
...

Yes, we did. It was the "completely-out-of-control-government-takeover-program" called the Fairness Doctrine

[Sibling Zono (anon1mat0)]

As Colbert famously said, reality has a known liberal bias, a fairness doctrine would definitively impact the right's ability to say whatever they want without consequences.

[Sibling DavidH]

Seems to an outsider that Bob has a very good point.  Your media stir up all sorts of trouble.  What you Americans need is to get the BBC to run your broadcasting.  They're so biased towards the liberal-left that it's become a national joke.