Swickard: The new political fact of distraction

Commentary by Michael Swickard, Ph.D. - I am quite taken by the fact that facts no longer seem to be in vogue in our society. In the last ten years or so our news media seem to represent a “Truthless” society. Example: the electronic recordings of what one person says often are ignored by that person who says, “I never said that,” regardless of the contrary data.  Even more of a problem is the use of distraction to keep citizens from dealing with the real core issues. In today’s society opinions hold favor with people because they are so much more useful in political debate. For one thing, opinions do not have to be founded on fact, though I think they should be. Often opinions are framed as facts and held as facts when the listeners cannot distinguish between facts and opinions.  More so, in today’s society what you believe seems to be more important than the reality of the facts. In storytelling, of course, you should not let facts mess up a good story. But when we, as a society, are trying to deal with the important problems of our society, facts are ever so critical. How does distraction work? Perhaps call it deception, since the point is to get people looking at the wrong things, to get people thinking about lesser problems. Currently a huge deception is going on in the media where every day a myriad of lesser important things keep citizens from noticing the critical problems concerning the five core election issues: government reach, energy, employment, financial insolvency and security.  Read Column

Swickard: The new political fact of distraction