On 08/02/09 07:58, andrel wrote:
> to have an political opinion. One of the reasons for the sharp divide in
> the US is that most people only watch a certain number of channels.
> Which shape their political points of view which in turn makes watching
> a channel with a different opinion impossible. In a way some channels
> are using politics to bind the audience.

	That's essentially the free market ideology at work. You end up with 
lots of "specialized" channels - each presenting a certain point of 
view, and most presenting things that are not true mixed in. Sure, if 
you go through almost all of them, no doubt you can figure out what's 
going on. But most people don't have the time, and when given a 
"choice", they'll go for the station that is showing _their_ truth.

	And if that's bad, the Internet as a source is even worse. When you 
have disgustingly partisan sites like the Huffington Post and 
FrontPageMag that make the schisms even more pronounced. People will 
naturally choose the sites that give them the news they want to hear, 
and those sites generally don't display news that goes against their 
point of view.

	A few years ago, a veteran journalist lamented this whole problem. He 
said that at the very least the benefit of newspapers is that a headline 
on the other page may catch your eye, and it takes less effort to read 
that article than to click on it. Unfortunately, newspapers are being 
abandoned for more partisan sources.

	As for The Daily Show, while it _is_ good that it often highlights the 
general inaneness of the main media companies, I don't see it being any 
better as a _sole_ source of news.

-- 
Kotter: "Have you ever considered becoming a vet?"
Epstein: "Uh...Uh no. My brother Sanchez was in the army. Didn't like it 
a bit."

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