| richardhutnik said: It isn't a bad thing if it gets so outrageously horrible, there is a general agreement that it is all B.S and people move away from it. A problem that happens, short of that, is you get people increasingly falling into one camp or the the other, being political fanboys and being unable, to any extent to even agree to the most basic of things going on. In this, there is no point in society where people will stop and take pause and be human. Everything gets so political, people rip each other to shreads. At this point, how do you even run a society at all? Pretty much, on a practical level, you lose people being neighbors. You know, that case where you would help someone in genuine need irregardless of their political views? In short there is a lack of respect and even common courtesy. Like, where I am I see this. Someone rips down a sign for the county executive who is a Republican. Someone else decides to stick the words "tax and spender" on the Democrat's sign who is running for county executive. There is no respect or manners at all. I will go with this Brad Stine video on the outro to this post: |
There are dangers to people living in an echo chamber, sure, but I'm not really sure why Fox News is seen as the genesis of this phenomenon. Just as MSNBC's hard left turn was perhaps a business strategy inspired by Fox's success, Fox originally found that success by filling a niche that was left open by a media landscape in which you were hard pressed to see conservative ideas given a fair shake. Back when CNN was the only game in town you would have a supposedly straight news anchor talking with no less a controversial figure than Jesse Jackson and lobbing softball after softball without challenging him on anything. (In fact, I seem to remember Jesse Jackson having his own show on CNN at one point.) Any conservative, meanwhile, was to be met with the utmost skepticism.
I don't really agree that advocacy media really creates division overly much, either. For one thing, even Fox as the king of the hill gets, what, something like six million viewers a day in prime time? Not a whole lot of people even watch or read the news anymore. So while it does seep out into the culture at large and I'm sure it does help keep it going to some small extent, the real and increasingly irreconcilable differences in political philosophy are the primary drivers here, in conjunction with a culture of self-worship in which people have become more and more incivil in apolitical matters as well.
