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I... think it's important to know what's up. It especially helps to give a reason to participate in the electoral process. But soooooo much political reporting
by rtpg 8y ago
I... think it's important to know what's up. It especially helps to give a reason to participate in the electoral process.
But soooooo much political reporting nowadays is basically gossip columns. They talk a lot of inside baseball and completely neglect the "the thing happening is actually bad!" aspect. Instead of debating policy, people want to debate the optics of policies.
Cable news is awful about this, but I think newspapers are even worse with their opinion pages. People getting paid 6-digit salaries to just say what their opinion on a thing is! And of course with basically no fact checking. They're just bloggers!
Meanwhile the journalists twist themselves into knots to give the benefit of the doubt to the most cynical leaders we've had in decades. Unless one of them insults journalism, in which case it's a holy war. But if the discussion is just a policy position, there's no issue.
- eric_h 8y agoIf I hadn’t gotten mildly addicted to Twitter (with my fairly well curated list of people I’m following) I’d not have spent the ~700 bucks to start my naturalization process so that I will finally have the right to vote after 34 years living here as a permanent resident (well it’ll be 35 since naturalization takes a while). I realized that my running joke of the last 18 years: “I can’t vote, but at least I don’t have to do jury duty” is recklessly irresponsible and I will do the research and be an informed voter in every election for the rest of my life. [edit: admittedly this was largely inspired by indisputable things that happened a little more than 2 years ago and the following aftermath, but my twitter feed was my window to them - I do not watch cable news]
- rtpg 8y agoYeah I think that Twitter has been a major gateway drug to remember that Politics Matter. But after you've reached that point, Twitter becomes the place where you read the same take 20 times over. Then you get the push notification from whatever news app you have installed on your phone. There's a huge amount of diminishing returns to following journalists on Twitter if you're already convinced that stuff is important. But it sure helped to establish the feeling that everything is on fire (and.... kind of always have been but right now's not great)