Introducing BPRoundtable, a new web series in which Brown students discuss and debate some of the top issues of the day. In our inaugural segment, Ben Resnik and Chip Lebovitz joined Jarrett Key to discuss the media’s role in covering, contributing, and ultimately influencing politics.
Someone needs to do a study of how mainstream media such as Time Magazine, Book of the Month Club, and network news once used to determine what upper middle class families and many middle class families talked about. These media tended to promote moderate, "uniting" opinions that gave credit to liberal and conservative views. When they got behind an issue, such as Civil Rights, their impact was enormous. Now we have media that promote disunion, hostility, fact-challenged ideology.
The media have completely missed the story of the institutionalized "right wing counter-revolution" that has dazed and confused the Democratic Party, which once thought that all of America supported Social Security and even Medicare.