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The problem might even be more fundamental than public interest. Even if we had the best possible news organizations, with the best possible journalists, only
by SmirkingRevenge 8y ago
The problem might even be more fundamental than public interest. Even if we had the best possible news organizations, with the best possible journalists, only honest, upright politicians and interest groups, and the best possible news consumers that were interested in the right things, it still might be impossible for most people to be truly knowledgeable about anything but very, very narrow slices of the world, most of the time.
We sort of assume that there's some possible combination of headlines, articles, books, tweets etc that can make us informed and wise about the current state of things in the world, that matter. But what if that isn't true? I think it probably isn't.
- _cs2017_ 8y agoI suspect that as long as humans remain the same species, we'll never get to the point where the majority of the population is informed. It's just not fun for most people; or it's too hard; or both. The trick is to find a system of government that still results in a stable, functional, and comfortable society, even though most of the people have basically no clue what's going on. I think the Federalist papers were a decent attempt to design such a system of government. In fact, I think it's worked quite well for the past 200+ years. Perhaps the world changed so much that a new approach might work better. Perhaps that same approach will continue working for a while longer, especially if it evolves a bit. It's a interesting topic but sadly I don't have any good insights to share.