Stupidity Kills / Monopolized Media

http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=2026

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The best question asked in the aftermath of the 2004 US election came from a British newspaper, The Daily Mirror, which inquired over a picture of George W. Bush, "How can 59,054,087 be so dumb?
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is it really appropriate to compare the United States in 2004 with a warped media market like South Africa during apartheid days?

Actually, the comparison may be a bit unfair to South African media in the apartheid era
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Years of consolidation and bottom-line pressures have forced even once responsible media to allow entertainment and commercial values to supersede civic and democratic values when making news decisions.
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a lot of Americans voted for George W. Bush on November 2 on the basis of wrong assumptions.
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a lot of what Americans know is wrong.
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only 31 percent of Bush supporters recognized that the majority of people in the world opposed the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.
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Only 9 percent of Bush backers correctly assumed that Kerry was the world's choice.
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72 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq had actual WMD (47 percent) or a major program for developing them (25 percent)
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75 percent of Bush supporters continue to believe that Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda
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tendency of Bush supporters to ignore dissonant information
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good citizens who consume American media come away with dramatic misconceptions
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Fox warps facts intentionally
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CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, USA Today, the New York Times and the Washington Post
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fed the American people an inaccurate picture
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without aggressively and consistently challenging
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misstatements of fact
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taken as a whole, US media--with its obsessive focus on John Kerry's Vietnam record, its neglect of fundamental economic and environmental issues and its stenographic repetition of even the most absurd claims by the president and vice president--warped the debate in 2004.
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Some of those 59,054,087 Bush voters may have been dumb.

But a far better explanation for the election result is summed up by the Weekly Guardian's observation that, "Maybe it's the papers they're reading."

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http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=2026