Entries Tagged 'indifference' ↓

Andrew Sullivan links to a tragic comment, left somewhere on the Web by a teacher:

I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

I blame the writers’ strike: with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert not around to tell everyone what’s going on, people don’t get their news.

Better infotainment, please—and more of it!

Rasmussen just polled “likely primary voters” and found them—wait for it … uninformed. (If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you should of course not be at all surprised. My most recent thoughts on the subject are here.)

News from outside the blogospheric cocoon:

Separate survey data shows that political pundits and junkies are likely to overestimate the immediate impact of Clinton’s debate performance. Much of the nation was simply not paying attention. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of 800 Likely Voters nationwide found that just 56% knew that the Democrats were the party with a Presidential debate this week. Thirteen percent (13%) thought it was the GOP’s turn while 31% are not sure.

Just 38% could pick immigration from a list of four issues as the topic that caused Clinton to stumble near the end of the debate. Eleven percent (11%) picked the Iraq war, 5% health care, 4% the economy, 6% “some other topic”, and 36% admitted they didn’t know.

Overall, just 28% of Likely Voters correctly identified the Democrats as the party having a debate and immigration as the issue.

A gentle reminder: these are likely primary voters. It kinda makes you wonder why they bother, doesn’t it?

And I am writing about this because…?

Well, because it underscores my thesis: if infotainment rules, which it does (there is nothing serious about the presentation of “news” on television anymore) it rules precisely because it is effective even with an inattentive audience. It delivers messages in such a bold and loud way—sensationally—that it gets through even to the brain-dead.

Those of us who care about the issues can bemoan this state of affairs all we want, but we are powerless to change it. People don’t mind being informed, I suppose, but they are addicted to being entertained. That is why I’m always calling for better infotainment.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” asked the Jewish sage Hillel two thousand years ago.

In 2007, Saul Friedlander explains what he meant:

The Nazi state first achieved the isolation of millions from their neighbours through the ever-increasing weight of official vindictiveness. Jews gradually were restricted in their shopping hours, their schools, their use of telephones, cars, bicycles, electrical appliances; they had to build their own air-raid shelters, use their own cobblers, were denied fruit, gingerbread, chocolate, pets, white bread, furs and tobacco. Even so, when, in the East, the exterminations had begun, Jews in the West could still live out for a time a restricted life without a sense of immediate danger amid neighbours who at a personal level were sometimes sympathetic but disengaged. The bleakness of this book comes above all from its portrait of the collective timidity of so many, with whom it is uncomfortably possible to identify. They may have been distressed at what they saw but, in the face of the state’s brutality and the success of its propaganda machine on popular opinion, they feared first for themselves. Jewish persecution, argues Friedlander, could not have been taken to its genocidal extremes without the personal obsession of Adolf Hitler; yet the course it took only became possible because of endemic European anti-Semitism. ‘Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews.’