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there are a few ways to look at the general problem of various blurrings of political position and information---infotainment is a good word for the results--i've spent alot of time working with explicitly left press outlets from the 1950s and 1960s, and reached the point such that i could recognize the positions from the rhetoric alone---inside party=speak. it's obvious. a hardline trotskyist paper is obvious. l'humanité, the french communist party daily paper--was obvious. and there's a way in which that rhetorical obvious-ness was a good thing in that it gave clear markers about what the infotainment was, where it was coming from, to whom it was addressed, etc..
over the past 20 years or so, there has been this bizarre and destructive campaign to blur the line between political position and information without providing a whole lot of markers at the level of rhetoric...this has been one of the hallmarks of conservative media on the order of fox news and the washington times...to recognize it, you need to know the various points or terminologies across which political views get slid into information, but even that is often not enough--- stories can be and often are entirely driven by ideological factors from the viewpoint of selection and framing.
you see this kind of thing coming from conservative think tanks---which i single out because of the amazing level of funding WITHOUT EARMARKS that alot of conservative think tanks have and continue to benefit from--nothing like that is operative, so far as i know, amongst "progressive" think tanks, which work with FAR LESS money and with a much greater level of earmarking (donors give money for specific projects). in this, conservates have simply been more innovative--eliminating earmarked funding to the greatest possible extent enables the organizations to be far more flexible in the issues they address and in the ways they address them. there is a ton of infotainment generated by outfits like rand and heritage and cato that really is nothing but infotainment. but it's not so easy, even there, because there is also good information. the problem is that unless you devote considerable time to working out what it what, you can't tell. and people tend not to treat information as a problem in that way.
similar there has been something of a campaign to disable debate on questions like global warming by flooding the infotainment market with mutually exclusive types of information, reducing the question to a matter of opinion that you can buttress by locating infotainment that is symmetrical with it.
if the united states is supposed to be anything at all--and i mean at all--like a democracy, this infotainment production is a real and ongoing problem--and the idea, which to my amazement actually has currency (including here) that politics is a matter of opinion and nothing more is a consequence. if yuo believe that, then you have to accept its consequences. one of those consequences is that voters vote without knowing what the fuck is going on, without having any idea of the issues, or ideas about issues that are rooted in nothing beyond wish fulfillment. THAT is what the reduction of politics to a matter of opinion means: no democracy, just opinion management.
this because a functioning democratic system presupposes and requires an informed polity. you fuck with information, you fuck with the system itself.
to my mind, this is a major problem and i personally think that the conservative movement has created it--the justification for it was a simple projection--this nonsense about "the liberal press"...
there is a routine problem of biais, and obvious procedures that you can use to control for it. then there is another problem of deliberate and sustained attempts to disable informed debate, to generate divisions by enabling people to inhabit mutually exclusive informational contexts.
given this, it seems pretty reasonable to be suspicious of information, but on the basis of the assumption that politics IS NOT a space of "that's just my opinion, man."---problematic sources should be understood as problematic. period. but if that was the only issue, this would all be easy peasy--but it's not. folk need to read critically--but they dont. folk need to assemble a range of information and work out by comparing versions what they can find of the facts--whatever that really means---behind the politics--but folk are too lazy, or they dont have time, or there's no motivation because "its all opinion."
so i dont see the problem with being critical of sources, calling out infotainment.
what seems a problem is NOT doing it.
that seems to me nothing but laziness.
and saying politics is just opinion is a way of justifying that laziness.
nothing more.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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