host

I'm doing this to examine how we have come to be so divided, so polarized in our political points of view in the US.

As background, Dan Rather culminated a distinguished career as a TV network news reporter, first to report from Dallas that JFK had died, followed by assignments as CBS news white house correspondent, Vietnam and Soviet Afghan war correspondent, and CBS news sunday night anchor, as well as CBS news show, "60 Minutes" reporter, with a 24 year "stint" as CBS evening news anchor:

Despite the disaster to the people of Vietnam and to the US generation that was largely conscripted in a military draft to fight and die in the US war in Vietnam, and the cost of the war to the presidencies of both LBJ and Nixon, and to their credibility and that of key members of their administrations, the division the war caused in the US, and the damage that it did to the reputation of the US military, due to the well documented atrocities committed against the civilian Vietnamese population by US troops, and to the reputations of the FBI and CIA because of their illegal harassment of war protestors, Ronald Reagan described Vietnam as a "noble war".

I'm wondering how the following opinions, close to a mirror opposites of my own, evolve to be assembled in a post like this.... what process is used to embrace or to discard information reported about current events, over a long period. How is it that the 24 year CBS news anchor is regarded as less credible than an openly partisan columnist and talk show host, and how the well documented history of numerous atrocities committed by US troops is minimized to the point of irrelevancy, because of alleged errors in one of the CBS news anchor's investigative reports. Is Reagan's claim of a "noble war", accurate or valid, and was it part of a campaign that made the invasion of Iraq so initially righteous and popular?:
We think what we think because of how we regard the information we take in, and the source of it. It's costing us, because we disregard the lessons of history when we ignore the body of facts surrounding policy mistakes. The lessons of Vietnam could have kept us from invading Iraq. Dan Rather was nightly news anchor at CBS news for 24 years, for the same reasons that Walter Cronkite had the job before him. Cronkite toured Vietnam in 1968 and came back and told the American people that the war was unwinable and it shoild be ended via peace talks, ASAP. It took 5 more years for that to happen, and some of us are still persuaded that it was a "noble war",and that the military was forced by liberals to fight with one hand tied behind it's back.

Does anyone see a way out of conditions where a man like Limbaugh could command a large audience and be listened to as if he was at all credible or reliable?

roachboy

which was obviously a favorite line of german extreme right groups after world war 1.

this might be a good thread for references to systematic work on media politics in the states---information that'd let us push beyond the anecdotal, beyond the repetition of various stock phrases that substitute for argument.
but even there, you have reed irvine type "analyses" that enable conservatives to indulge the "he said she said" game at this level.

traditional conservatives defended the status quo.
this defense of the status quo did not preclude accurate description.
american populist conservatism has a nihilist relation to information, and so are not in a sense defending the status quo in anything like the mode of folk like, say, edmund burke. they are doing something else...and if you think about it, what they are doing relative to information is quite radical and quite new.
so i dont think that people like roger ailes are conservative in the old sense---they are rightwing radicals. perhaps this is why there are so many symmetries that link contemporary populist "conservatism" to right radicals of the 1920s.

__________________
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it make you sick.

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ottopilot

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Charlatan

What makes you think that the US being politically divided (progressives vs. conservatives) is a new thing?

I would suggest that the last time there was no political divide was back when the US population was a boatload of pilgrims.

What we are experiencing today is a direct result of the growth in our modern media of a diversity of voices.

__________________
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djtestudo

And if you believe that, you don't know much about the Pilgrims

I don't think there has ever, in human history, been a time without a political divide.

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