"Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result"
“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985
When leaders of the April 2025 White House / Republican political party that believes and trusts Donald Trump / Fox News audience, "Make America Great Again" fanatics encounter information they do not grasp or understand....
Such as more complex policies of the European Union or nuance of Ukraine wanting diverse liberty and freedom (more complicated) and not to live under Vladimir Putin dictatorship of Russia...
People "'change the channel", "block the ideas" they disagree with. They "tune out" and "filter bubble" to avoid complex and diverse understandings of the world. That's what Neil Postman was raising the alarms about in his 1985 book "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business"
Neil Postman, 40 years ago: "It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information–information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world"
That is what is happening... leaders of the April 2025 White House / Republican political party that believes and trusts Donald Trump / Fox News audience, "Make America Great Again" fanatics... they avoid ideas and even dehumanize those they do not comprehend or understand, using systems of DOGE computer process, social machine systems of Twitter and Truth Social, and this behavior is being adopted by practically everyone in the United States of America, copying the leadership signals of the White House + Elon Musk + Donald Trump!
The entire nation, all inclusive, We The People, are drowning in what Neil Postman described as a warning about the future in 1985: "misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing".
This problem runs so deep and wide, to every person in the nation, that the speed of social machines and clickbait news systems, the speed of which someone can "tune out" and change the channel to another simpler idea that they can easily accept defines the behavior of the whole nation! People can just unsubscribe, block, filter-bubble away any difficult comprehension or learning in favor of tuning into Rupert Murdoch Fox News HDTV provided answers... or their favorite Bluesky and Reddit meme channels and communities.
“The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias—in a way, it’s designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them.” ― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble