Polarization Nation 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, David Evans considers why dis coarse discourse has become so coarse and offers some suggestions for reducing today’s political polarization. In our current political climate, his article is well worth a read.
Here’s a tiny bit; follow the link for the rest.
But around the year 2000, the country began to be more polarized.
(snip)
A big factor has to do with the way we receive our news. Early in the twentieth century, the radio came into prominence, and the government required that all broadcast stations be licensed. Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce at the time, recognized that the stations were a public trust and shouldn’t favor one political party over the other. So he instituted the Fairness Doctrine.
The Fairness Doctrine required that a broadcast entity, when it reported a story about one political party, had to also give the other side a chance to respond. Both political parties needed to be treated fairly and equally.
But Ronald Reagan, as president, vetoed the Fairness Doctrine, and the equal treatment of both political parties in the news vanished. Before long, partisan broadcasters such as Rush Limbaugh appeared and, soon after that, Fox News.
