Online media driving disengagement from news
One of the consequences I’ve observed with the rise of Netflix and other carriers for television shows is that people are not engaging with the news and current events as much.
Sure, everyone has seen the latest tweets from Donald Trump, but other forms of news seem to be going by the wayside. This has been a perpetual lament of the newspaper industry for a number of years but it is not just newspapers. It is news in general.
This was made very apparent by a conversation I had last week where I mentioned the provincial election and the response was “Isn’t that coming up some time soon?” Yes, it is – May 9 to be precise. But the person I was speaking to went on to say “I haven’t heard anything about it.”
That got me to thinking about our democracy and the new age of self-selecting media. Talking with a member of the younger generation – a millennial – they responded that they followed all the latest tech news. The rest isn’t very interesting.
Talking with a member of the older generation, they said it was all the same stuff over and over so why bother listening?
Much more enjoyable to binge on episodes of Game of Thrones or Gilmore Girls. The news is losing its relevancy. And then there is the president of the United States declaring the news media “the enemy of the people of the United States.”
He is persistent, if nothing else, in his view that media produces “fake news.”
Anything disagreeing with his worldview is obviously wrong.
Which all leads to the question: “Where is democracy going in an age where news media is discounted and confirmation bias dominates the news sources people do look at?”
It isn’t declining newspaper subscriptions that is troubling or news programs on television seeing their ratings drop, it is that we are developing a generation of voters who will not be fully informed on the relevant issues.
Or they will be voting strictly on perceptual party lines. Or they may not vote at all.
Of course, saying all of this in a newspaper column might be a bit of futilite. Clearly anyone reading this gets at least a portion of their daily news from the Prince George Citizen and newspapers.
Those who don’t read newspapers will never see this.
But if the citizenry is not informed about the issues facing them in an election – if all they have are sound bites and tweets to go by – how will we get informed judgments and sound reasoning behind a person’s vote? As the line says in the movie The American President, democracy demands “advanced citizenship.”
People have to want to vote and realize that it does matter.
Is there something that we can do to change this?
The argument has been forwarded that mandatory “civics” classes should be included in our high school education. The idea is that if students are introduced to their necessary role in democracy early enough, then they will be more inclined to vote as adults.
However, there is nothing in a civics class which will ensure participation in the democratic process.
If anything, being told about politics in high school will turn a number of citizens off. It is not cool as a teenager to be into the stuff you learn in school.
Another alternative would be to put a skill testing quiz between voters and voting. If you can’t answer the questions, you aren’t allowed to vote.
This would be interesting as there would likely be an uproar from people who had never exercised their franchise but are upset they are being denied their right to vote.
Another alternative would be to make not voting illegal, subject to a $100 fine.
This is the practice in Australia and leads to high participation rates at the polls. I am not sure that forcing someone to vote when they are not informed on the issues is the best choice, but it would certainly raise a significant amount of money for the provincial coffers if 36 per cent of the population still didn’t vote.
Another alternative would be to make voting into a lottery. Everyone who votes is put into a draw and something like 10 lucky voters would win $1 million dollars.
It would probably be cheaper to do this than invest in a civics program in schools and would likely see a much higher voter turnout.
But would we see more informed voters? No. Just everyone making sure they got their chance to win.
The really important question for democracy is how to ensure that voters are aware of the issues before them as they go to vote.
It is critical for a sustainable democracy to have an engaged electorate.
Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media are not the answer.