I agree that there are those who are engaged, and those who are disengaged. One of my contentions is that the pool of disengaged grows as the media become increasingly biased and unreliable - on both sides, conservative and liberal.  In particular, people grow disenchanted and detached from the doom and gloom that the leftist media portray, but having a strong conservative bias would not be good either.  In the face of an increasingly complex world and multiple levels of problems, people withdraw into media that are the intellectual equivalent of comfort food - shock jock radio; sports radio and TV; TV that doesn't challenge them to think; feel good TV; escapist TV.

I think that the dual aims of the leftist media agenda are to a) repeat a certain set of lies often enough to make people believe them; and b) to neutralise people by causing them to disengage. The analogy that I would draw here is to the withholding tax. By taking tax from people before they even see their money, government obfuscates the amount they pay in taxes, deceiving them and making it seem more inocuous than it is, while at the same time they prevent the citizenry from possibly using those tax dollars as a weapon against them, therefore pacifying the urge to engaging in grass roots activism.

Personally, I think this all started (as did so many of our social ills) in the 1960's with the reporting of the Vietnam war and the rise of populist-based reporter/activists ala Geraldo and Dan Rather. Do you remember Dan Rather making his career standing outside the White House night after night during the unending saga of Watergate, sinking his canines into Dick Nixon's neck like a bulldog? Sadly, I do.

Part of the problem is that TV is such a passive medium that has such disproportionate impact. I was born in '46 and took a shine to shortwave radio when I was 9
or 10. By the time that I could absorb and digest the news, I'd gotten
into the habit of listening to news from BBC, Radio Moscow, Voice of
America, Radio Nederland and a couple of other sources. I never
succumbed to the fallacy of just listening to one news source and
grew up implicitly understanding that all media carry a bias
and that my understanding of the world around me was my responsibility, not theirs.

I still listen to the radio more than I watch TV because radio relies on the "theatre of the mind" concept rather than what I call the "theatre of the obscene" on which TV is based. The 'theatre of the mind" concept relies on the listener to mentally connect the dots and construct a picture regarding what they're listening to that is unique to them and therefore very powerful. The "theatre of the obscene" model is based on confronting the audience with shocking material in order to control the images they construct. For the "theatre of the obscene" model to continue working, it must become increasingly shocking in order to obtain the same results. Kind of like heroin or alcohol addiction - one needs ever-increasing doses to achieve the same effect.

I guess my overarching concern is that increasing numbers of people seem to want to avoid the responsibility for learning about the world around them specifically at a point in the history of our nation and our species that we need more people to engage and learn than not. And the media seem hell-bent to keep this from happening.

"All that is necessary for the trimuph of evil is that good men do nothing."

- Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

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