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this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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The 1990’s called and want to know if you’ll be a guest on Rush Limbaugh. You won’t actually get to say anything, so no pressure.
Sure. Any chance to get his audience to hear an alternative version. The number of conservatives with whom I chat in real life who have just never heard of various things kind of blows me away. My good buddy was on the "yeah but the Left is more violent" train, we talked about it, I showed him things he hadn't seen and vice versa. We both learned, grew and revised our opinions.
Same thing could happen for Rush's audience.
You’re expecting good faith then. Like talking with a good buddy.
No, I'm just confident in the power of reality and facts. It's why I admire Pete Buttigieg for going on and making the Liberal case on Fox news. We're not converting anyone who disagrees with us here.
You know we just elected a 34-time fraud convict and adjudicated rapist to the Presidency here, right? Reality and facts weren’t even in the news for the last two years.
But hey - good luck!
Exactly the point. When things are so bad half the country is willing to say "yeah, but we trust him more than the fucking Left" something is seriously wrong.
If we don't work to figure out how to win folks over, things are going to get much much worse.
My life will be fine kind of regardless but I worry for others.
The short answer is media. Or as the kids like to say, "propaganda".
Neither of which are arguable. But I appreciate you wanting to talk with people one-to-one. Good luck there.
Ehhhh, I think blaming a problem happening simultaneously in almost every democracy on "the media" feels a bit like putting our heads in the sand and avoiding the issues. But to each their own.
There's a ton of scholarship to back it up and it will affect your efforts one way or another but you can also ignore it and hope it doesn't have as much sway as "they" say.
You are free to share some of that scholarship.
Unless you mean something like social media, then I'd probably agree. But any research blaming traditional media would have to answer three large issues that seem to stand in direct contradiction:
Germany has a wildly different media ecosystem than America, which has a wildly different media landscape than the UK, which has a wildly different media ecosystem than Italy, which has a wildly different media landscape than Austria, which has a very different one than France, which is very different from Poland etc. But the same phenomenon is happening across the board.
Traditional media is no longer where most people get their news. So either it's really radicalizing a smaller group or?
Traditional media consumption among age groups seems to indicate quite the opposite happening, ie, in America at least (I can't recall the age related shifts across Europe) younger voters are, relative to historical norms, lurching Right, whereas older voters are moving a bit to the Left. Yet, the younger groups are much less likely to get their news from traditional media than older voters, so if media were the culprit, you'd expect the shift to have happened the other way.
So media, properly defined, has certain properties that inherently exist regardless of the business or social environment it itself is a part of.
This explains why the phenomenon is similar across different media landscapes. And while traditional media may be fading away, people who have lived their whole lives with it are still in power at various levels and it’s still very much applicable. Also, social media affects those from a traditional media background differently.
This was posted a few days ago and is just interesting though not particularly relevant to your efforts.
To each their own. I agree with Chomsky that yeah, media blinkers people and frames the terms of the debate. But, this has been true for decades. Something has fundamentally changed in the last 10 - 15 years and we're watching those changes ripple across almost every society.
Again, you're free to share any relevant research. But, I think blaming the Rightward swing that we're seeing across the world on just "the media" is, at best, over simplistic.
Well it is simplistic. Because there’s a lot of complexity to unpack.
So true! Several things have fundamentally changed:
Just a few things. There’s many more. But we're not talking about clothes, or food, or anything else in our daily lives that have had such an impact, because clothes or food don’t have the same qualities that make media such a pivotal piece of any given person’s worldview.
Like I said earlier, if you mean something like social media, then I agree. When I say social media, I also mean our new ways of ingesting media, eg short form text, memes, podcasts etc (though should probably use a different term.) I think there are a bunch of pernicious effects and incentives which have made seeing the humanity in those with whom we disagree difficult and compromise impossible. We don't need propaganda, people in general are just not able to handle the information landscape that's been created.
But, if you're really talking about even the spread of more independent written media etc, then I just don't see their limited readership being the fundamental game changer that we've seen.