- Joined
- Sep 24, 2024
- Messages
- 75
- Reaction score
- 45
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Independent
Do you think banning commercials during news broadcasts would help our country? I’ve thought about this a lot. Our politics are tied to money so closely that it’s practically impossible to be elected if you’re not rich. That seems like we’re stacking the deck against ourselves. A democracy cannot function without an informed electorate, we get our information from the press, & a free press is essential. But if every news outlet is highly motivated to make partisan inflammatory statements in order to increase ratings, thereby increasing profits, then we have a fatal flaw in a critical link in the process. I’ve been thinking for weeks on how we could lesson the importance of money in our elections, without lowering the quality of the process, because we all know we can’t afford for it to get any worse. Money doesn’t always determine elections but it’s usually safe to bet on whoever has more of it. That would seem to indicate that we’re gullible and we believe whatever is said the most or the loudest. We can’t sensor what people say-that would be unconstitutional. So what can we do? If we take away the incentive to have inflammatory headlines, do you think that would be enough to get the “news” back to being the “News”? I used to really respect reporters whose only concern was getting to the truth. Reporting the truth to the American people. Unbiased journalism- just the facts mam. You remember that? When news stations reported the facts and let us decide what to make of it? I’m thinking if we take the commercial appeal of broadcasting partisan ideas to boost ratings away from the news outlets, that might precipitate a return to a “just the facts” approach towards informing the people. I’ve got concerns that it may be to late, and that people would just turn the channel if it did work. People have gotten used to tuning in to whichever channel is saying what they want to hear. But at least, if it worked at all, there would be somewhere people could tune in to hear it if they wanted to. Do you think it could work? Have any better ideas? Or should we all just start building bunkers?
