Monday, September 28, 2009

Quality of Public Deliberation Suffering

Since Obama has taken office, a very small, very vocal, and apparently very hateful minority has attempted to hijack public deliberation. And it has worked. And the media have made it happen.

It began with claims that Obama was not born in the United States. The claim was so outrageous that the mainstream media covered it precisely because it was ludicrous. This ended up, of course, actually legitimizing the claims. Had the media ignored it—and they should have because it was completely false—then few of us would even have been talking about it. Simply put: it was a distraction we didn’t need when we should have been debating other issues that actually matter.

What we call a “debate” about health care is no debate at all. When one side fabricates outright lies and the other side actually spends time responding to the ignorance, we’ve hit a new low in what passes for public “debate.”

Here’s a case in point: Can anyone articulate the actual concept of what has now become known as “death panels?” The media, on both conservative and liberal progressive outlets, keep repeating the phrase “death panel,” allegedly first used by Sarah Palin on her Facebook page for crying out loud, either to embrace it or to discredit it. No matter the reason, repeating the idiotic phrase has embedded that concept into the “debate,” and we’ve almost entirely ignored any real deliberation about how end-of-life counseling might better allow the elderly to make their wishes known to their family, loved ones, and caregivers before they are mentally and/or physically unable to do so. (By the way, as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin devoted a day to promote exactly this idea. It was called “Health Care Decisions Day.”)

Most recently, critics have attempted to claim that Obama planned to “indoctrinate” our children in schools with his socialistic views. (As a side note, most people I encounter who call Obama a socialist cannot define the term; they merely believe it’s “un-American.”) Obama’s speech simply encouraged kids to study and to stay in school. Again, this marks a new low in our public discourse because such accusations were being circulated days before Obama spoke to discredit him before anyone even knew the content of the speech. Obama’s opponents are so desperate to see him fail that they don’t even wait to respond to what he actually says.

For the most part, this outrage has been fabricated and orchestrated by special interest groups or extremists on the left and the right. Most of these “debates” were not legitimate, and most reasonable people would simply have ignored it. Unfortunately, the media apparently are starving for controversy. Republicans, too, have played some role in this for frequently perpetuating the lies and myths either explicitly or because they will not, when asked, correct them.

The United States can do better than this. I hope.

2 comments:

  1. This is the era of the 21st Century Sophistic. All style, no substance.

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  2. I know. I guess I'm hoping we can return to Aristotelian standards of discourse, but perhaps it's too late. Nonetheless, I'll continue to educate as many as I can in whatever ways I can!

    Thanks for reading.

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