Ask A Genius 564 – Reform
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2020/07/02
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In terms of reform in the United States, what governance needs restructuring?
Rick Rosner: Right now, in America, the focus is on fixing the police Although, the latest thing is on Trump. But what I think needs to be reformed is the news, the engine for 40% of the country to continue to support Trump.
It said that it was a mystery. Except, it is not a mystery. Conservative media, particularly Fox News, not because it lies more than other conservative media, like OANN or Alex Jones, but because it has the most viewership.
The stuff that presents itself as news shouldn’t be allowed to misrepresent itself, shouldn’t be allowed to bullshit at Americans for 4 prime time hours, for example, every night on Fox. I don’t know exactly what can be done about it. Take away the “news” designation?
They are an entertainment network, but are allowed to have “news” in their name. That doesn’t seem right. If they are allowed to have “news” in their name, they should have a third scrolling chyron that fact-checks what is said.
It can apply to the other news networks, too – CNN, MSNBC, and whatever else. You shouldn’t be allowed to pump propaganda into people’s heads and call it news. After WWII in Germany, there was de-Nazi-ification.
I don’t know how it worked. They had to unbrainwash the population. I’m not sure anything like that can be done with Trump supporters. They are isolated in an information bubble. It’s a cliché. They don’t know about a lot of stuff that is happening.
They believe a lot of stuff that’s not true. To a lesser extent, that applies to MSNBC and CNN because they don’t cover enough stories. They will stick to the most popular stories. The Malaysian airline went missing. It was about that all day and it squeezed out all other news.
There should be a rule and the government can do this. New stations can’t spend more than 10 hours on any one story.
Jacobsen: I mention in the context of governance and not individual people.
Rosner: Fix the news via legislation. Two, get money out of politics, which is almost impossible, get some legislation to overturn Citizens United. But the supreme court ruling there argued that money is speech.
That restricting money in politics is restricting free speech. That’s just horrible bullshit. So, that needs to be legislated against if possible. Then fixing gerrymandering, we have just had a census. Every time you have a census every ten years in American, yo redraw districts.
They have tried to legislate fair district boundaries. It is really tough to do. It is easy to set it up to give the dominant party in a state more political representation than they should get proportionately.
The way you do it is concentrate. Say you’re a Republican, you concentrate. You have four districts, as an example. You get four congresspeople. You concentrate all the Democrats into one district. In that district, a Democrat will always win because it is 90% Democratic.
Then you spread out the Republicans across every other district, so they have an unbeatable but lesser majority because they’re spread out. So, Democrats into one district with 90% and then 3 or 5 district where the Republicans are spread out to win all the other districts with a 5% or a 60% majority.
So if you put the Democrats in a ghetto, and spread out the Republicans, so they have a decent majority, you can get Republicans having 45% of the vote and 65% of the elected representatives. That needs to be fixed. Will it be fixed? I don’t know.
Those are three areas.
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