@joe-shmo said
1) How "well informed" do you believe the public truly is; and yet the cogs of the machine keep on turning...how strange?
2) You're not the least bit unsettled about the "Borg like" response seen in the video across virtually all the mainstream media networks? Where do you suppose the statement was formed? It's very disturbing to me.
1) I do not know how well-informed the American public are in general. One thing I am sure of is that quite a few people are living in filter bubbles, and that Donald Trump is one of them. Filter bubbles are a recent phenomenon, an unintended consequence of search engine algorithms: they tend to feed a person more and more of whatever he looked at before, creating a feedback loop. Unwary people are then liable think that that is how things really are, since anything else gets filtered out. It's like wearing rose-colored glasses all the time and not even knowing it.
The cure is to consult different news sources on different (non-electronic) media, such as print media, to get a) other stories, and b) other perspectives on the same story.
I suspect that many people nowadays neglect print media, and that is a real impediment to maintaining a well-informed populace. Print media are held to a standard which has been ignored or, in some cases, outright flouted, by Internet sites. Print media editors are personally responsible for what their papers and magazines publish; slander and liable are crimes, punishable by large fines. Not so web sites; hence, all manner of falsehoods are propagated on the Internet and many are fooled into believing complete bosh. Until recently, no one dared to challenge the Internet's big movers, such as FB; I hope this changes.
2) "You're not the least bit unsettled about the "Borg like" response seen in the video across virtually all the mainstream media networks? Where do you suppose the statement was formed? It's very disturbing to me."
How many thousands of hours of nightly news reports did someone cull to paste that video together, I wonder. I suspect that if you videoed 50 nightly weather reports, they would sound monotonously similar; certainly the radio shipping news for the British coastline is famously so. The official response to the all-too-frequent mass shootings in America has become stereotypical: "Our hearts and prayers are with the families…" When a bus goes off the road in So. America, it never does anything other than "plunge." No, the robotic phrasing doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact behind it, that too many people are shot in America, that too many people are getting their news from within filter bubbles and are too lazy to do reality checks.