Fein is particularly disdainful of CNN’s past use of “audience reaction meters” (the network used them in the 2008 general election when audiences were instructed to remain silent) in which the real-time reactions of a small, handpicked group were recorded on dials and broadcast over the course of the debate. “Their opinions are going to shape and at some level influence potentially millions of people out there,” he says.
He speculates that monitoring social media sites during a debate can have a similar effect on people, though it is likely to be somewhat muted, as people most often follow like-minded individuals.
He worries these technologies and the instant feedback found on Twitter and microblogs leave the public and perhaps more critically, the media, “no time for being thoughtful. There’s no opportunity for subtlety and nuance. It’s just quick reactions and very reactive kind of response.”
In this regard, Google and Fox, in introducing their brave new world of “realtime feedback” have stacked the deck for tomorrow. Will Google’s instant polling drive the pundits or will the substance of the debate? Will audiences lose sight of what’s actually being said between the Twitter feeds and reaction charting? What sort of sample is really going to be participating in Google’s real-time polling? Whatever the answers, it’s hard to imagine deeper understanding about candidates and their policies will result from this new distraction.
While acknowledging that media is a business and must engage in a contest to attract an audience, Fein thinks they can do better.
“What really concerns me is how much the media plays this as a sporting thing. It really sounds like a horse race or a baseball season. There’s this titillating quality to a lot of the coverage—all the bells and whistles and charts and 3-D things. It just cheapens the whole process and makes the emphasis on very superficial things. It becomes what reader and viewer comes to expect. With a little more substance it can make a bit of a difference, I think the audience is capable of more than more of what the media thinks they are.”
What happened to the land of the free! Federal,state ,and local gov.tell us what we can and cannot do about almost everything! We pay taxes on everything you can think of,and then,they dictate everything we do
#1 Posted by Dan Lemaster, CJR on Wed 21 Sep 2011 at 12:41 PM
Dan, people have forgotten what freedom is, and will only miss it when it's gone.
#2 Posted by Nunya Biznezz, CJR on Wed 21 Sep 2011 at 02:01 PM
Dan, people have forgotten what freedom is, and will only miss it when it's gone.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." - Goethe
#3 Posted by Nunya Biznezz, CJR on Wed 21 Sep 2011 at 02:04 PM
"A Republic, if you can keep it." - Benjamin Franklin, when asked by a woman while he was leaving the Constitutional Convention what kind of government they had given us.
"To live under the American Constitution is the greatest political privilege that was ever accorded to the human race." - Calvin Coolidge
"The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind." - Thomas Jefferson
“We are a Republican Government. Real liberty is never found in despotism or in the extremes of Democracy.” - Alexander Hamilton
"[the framers of the Constitution] intended our government should be a republic, which differs more widely from a democracy than a democracy from a despotism.” - Congressman Fisher Ames
“The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.” - from the US Constitutitution
"I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America. And to the Republic, for which it stands." - from the Pledge of Allegiance
“The honest and serious student of American history will recall that our Founding Fathers managed to write both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution without using the term ‘democracy’ even once. No part of any of the existing state Constitutions contains any reference to the word. [The men] who were most influential in the institution and formulation of our government refer to ‘democracy’ only to distinguish it sharply from the republican form of our American Constitutional system.” - Clarence Manion - Dean of Notre Dame Law School 1950's
“Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos,” - John Marshall - US Supreme Court Chief Justice
"In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution." - Thomas Jefferson
"Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy." - Ron Paul
"Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms." - Aristotle
“A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” - Thomas Jefferson
#4 Posted by Nunya Biznezz, CJR on Wed 21 Sep 2011 at 02:14 PM
“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” - James Madison
“Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.” - James Russell Lowell
"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." - Abraham Lincoln
“Democracy passes into despotism.” - Plato
“Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.” - Plato
"Democracy is more cruel than wars or tyrants." - Seneca
“Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-canceling business: and gives in the long run a net result of zero." - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) Scottish Philosopher and Author
“to provide a cure for the evils under which the United States labored; that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and trials of democracy....” - Edmund Randolph - participant in Contstitutional Convention
“I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.” - Thomas Babington Macaulay
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship." - Alexander Tyler
#5 Posted by Nunya Biznezz, CJR on Wed 21 Sep 2011 at 02:16 PM