I interrupt the regularly scheduled programming for this public service announcement.
There was a section of a political science class I took somewhere around 1968 where we discussed media and politics. (Yes, Virginia, that was a topic oh so long ago.)
We did some research and discovered, hold on you won’t believe this, that people tended to read what reinforced their political views. People of liberal persuasion tended toward The New Republic (liberal in those days) and people of conservative persuasion read something else (I forget this morning the title, probably something with Bill Buckley).
This morning I was scanning a couple of my carefully selected news sources that used to just provide me with short, to-the-point news items. Unfortunately, they are slipping into the mainstream “journalism” news + analysis stuff.
Today’s lead on one site was–hold on, you won’t believe it–people tend to watch TV news that supports their political philosophy. Conservatives watch Fox, liberals something else. They even looked at favorite TV shows.
I could almost feel the breathless exclamations of surprise through the prose.
I believe that it is Heraclitus I could paraphrase as saying there’s nothing new under the sun.
Since I haven’t watched TV news outside of what I’m forced into in airport gate areas for 30 years, and I don’t watch any of the TV show genres they mentioned (occasional episodes of “Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives” along with a diet of European soccer didn’t make their list), I guess I remain firmly in the “no political party would have me” camp.
So, go read what you read and don’t let anyone make you feel bad about your choices. You will feel better, and then you can go out and develop and apply technology to make our industrial and manufacturing systems operate ever better.
