Doonesbury Say What?

[thewayne]

"This is a president that you know less about than any other president in history."
-- Mississippi governor Haley Barbour on Obama

I guess they don't get the internet and Wikipedia down in Mississippi? And books and libraries? Or is it just willful ignorance and pandering to "conservative" media?

Comments

[silveradept]

Option 3. I know full well that they have both of the previous two there. There's more than enough for people to see, read, and understand, but they choose to believe the idiots, the demagogues, and the people they trust instead of the people who would be authoritative on the matter.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

There's a Robin Williams movie where he becomes president. Someone tampered with the electronic voting machines programming, did a bad job of it, and Williams' character (a car salesman, IIRC) becomes prez. One of his advisors/speech writers is Lewis Black. They're riding around in the back of a limo and Black says "I hate TV. You can put two people on it. One, a historian who has spent his life researching World War II and the Holocaust. He's been to the death camps. He knows his stuff. The other is a holocaust denier. And they're given equal weight."

(probably a major paraphrase and misquote, I've only seen part of the movie and it's been a while. But it gets my point across.)

[silveradept]

Yep. "We report, you decide" assumes that the average watcher has the intelligence and knowledge to be able to decide well, or conversely assumes the average watcher can be persuaded by hacks because I'M A LOUD DOG YOU MUST OBEY ME.