[ExI] news

[William Flynn Wallace]

Most of us deplore the extreme right and left news sources, blaming them
for much of what is wrong with America.

But how much influence do they really have?  Fox leads in number of viewers
with 4 million out of about 80 million homes that receive Fox.

Is that really a lot of influence?

The riots and so forth are startling, important events.  They make a lot of
news.  But it would seem that the number of people involved in them is
truly a tiny portion of Americans.

Perhaps polls tell us more about us than national news.  I read them and
what seems to be the case is that prominent pols don't seem to care about
the issues that are most important according to the polls.  And they don't
care about their ratings, which are extremely low.

Back in the days of the Nixon campaigns everyone wanted to claim that the
'silent majority' was on their side.  It appears now that few big pols are
supported by the silent majority.  And there's this:  just how important
are the people at the top of the heap?  In our everyday lives, not on the
media.

How can this be?  They are getting away with ignoring the wishes of their
constituencies.

It is just too easy for the news media to play on the cognitive errors of
their viewers, who think that what they see and hear is what is happening
with everyone, not the just tiny part of America portrayed on Fox etc.

Truly a strange time in politics.

bill w
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20211124/1a7705fb/attachment.htm>