Blog Post 5

         To begin with, I found the beginning of this chapter to be incredibley relevant to not only myself as an individual but to my generation as a whole. I am ashamed to say that the majority of people that I know have little interest or care in the political landscape of our country, despite it affecting them on a daily basis. When my peers do become involved with politics though, they do so in an extremely fair weather fashion. Rarely do we look deeply into current issues or the backgrounds of those that lead us. Thus what media outlets we look too greatly influence our opinions and choices. All too often, we depend solely on a single source of information without bothering to explore. This puts a huge responsibility on the providers of this information. As the book mentioned, it’s somewhat unavoidable to completely dismiss all sorts of bias but the hope is that the reader may be able to discern the bits of truth from the “chaos”. My worry is that with my generation, many have lost this ability.

       When it comes to evaluating whether or not a certain stream of political communication is legitimate, I was a bit perplexed by the books pillars of “virtue”, so to say. I agree that transparency is incredibly important, as later discussed; attempting to manipulate or bend the truth almost always ends badly. I also agree that pluralism is essential to the concept of truthful media, especially when applied to a political realm. Without different voices and sides of the same story, bias can be overpowering and extremely misleading. Yet the last too concepts that the book discusses had me a bit confused. Perhaps I didn’t quite grasp them abstractly, but I couldn’t begin to really understand how they would apply in practice. Verisimilitude is a word I’ve seen a couple of times in my academic career but I don’t really understand how this is applicable to all forms of political communication. Is it the idea that whoever is reporting or speaking on a certain issue must be responsible for the truth behind it? Or is it based off of the concept that when speaking in a political realm all claims must sprout from some sort of verifiable source? I felt the same about ‘practice’. I’m the last person to argue against civic engagement or voting but does every form of political communication need to fall under this category? The book mentions that this framework should only be applied on an individual story or ad level but I still fail to understand how the last two are applicable.

       I was very interested to see what the book had to say about political figures getting elected and the ethics behind this. The book agrees that first and foremost political ads should be based off of factual information. Yet I think anyone in this day an age that has been around for any election can agree that political ads are almost laughable when it comes to completely factual information. I think the “attack ads” as the book mentioned are what most people remember about political ads, which is why they are so dangerous. The comparative ads may be more information rich, but they aren’t what we remember when we think about opposing candidates. Hopefully in the future, political outlets will begin to realize that attack ads negatively affect everyone.