No. of Recommendations: 4
It costs resources to attend stock car races, real fighting and fake WWE fights, and Trump rallies, watch Fox, listen to Limbaugh.
Sure - but most people don't watch Fox or listen to Limbaugh. Only people who are into this stuff for entertainment purposes. It's how we choose to spend our leisure time; it's our hobby. The overwhelming majority of voters do not and never will invest their time into getting informed about public affairs, but instead will choose other leisure/hobby activities (whether going to stock car races or the WWE or the movies or listening to music or what have you).
The rate and pervasiveness of those lies, thanks to electronic media, is unprecedented.
Is it? I mean, certainly the volume of information that some people are consuming - but it's not like an environment where much of the electorate is being fed lies (or half-truths or innuendo or propaganda) is unprecedented. Just the medium is different. A century ago, it was yellow journalism - the yellow rags and tabloids that were pumping misinformation twice daily into the voting populace. Sure, Fox is on 24/7 rather than a morning and evening edition - but in terms of composition of one's media diet, it's not any different. Of course, the parties have switched - in the early 20th century, it was mostly Democrats that were consuming yellow journalism morning, noon, and night, while the Republicans mostly ignored it.
Again, the POINT is 'HEALTHY DEMOCRACY'. SUBJECTING THE POPULATION TO INCESSANT LYING AIN'T HEALTHY.
Then there's no such thing as a healthy democracy, and never has been. Every democracy is filled with slander, innuendo, yellow journalism, and incessant lying. You think that getting "politicized preaching" is a new thing? That prior to broadcast television, people didn't get their information from partisan sources that lied and shaded and misled? They didn't have the same types of news and facts sources back then - rather than TV or the internet, they got their information from newspapers or broadsheets or tabloids or pamphlets - but what they got was just as bad as today. The "news" was no less scurrilous in the 18th century than here in the 21st. It's just more visible today.
The Fairness Doctrine only existed for about 40 out of our 250 years as a country. That period was the aberration - the rule has generally been that the electorate is only passingly informed about major issues, and what information they got was going to be heavily colored by whatever partisan sources they were interacting with.
