Just a quick jotting down of a spontaneous idea. I was just thinking about how hard it is to get people "educated" about political issues in today's world. There's always a tendency for people to "preach to the choir" because generally liberals are only going to tune into liberal talk radio (not that such a thing really exists still) and conservatives are going to listen to Rush Limbaugh.
But that doesn't lead to education. That's just cheerleading to the home team. And similarly, I don't think listeners are going to inherently trust the commentators to be reliably un-slanted. The tendency will be for them to frame every issue around the pre-existing "party line" and distort and reword until education erodes into propaganda.
So what if there were a show which had two hosts, one topic, and each week the two would trade places in who would represent the "right" and who would be on the "left" of the issue. The hosts of the show would work hard to do each side justice because they wouldn't be personally committed to one or the other. In fact, I think any listeners/watchers who tracked more than a couple shows might start to get curious as to whether Host A was really a liberal or a conservative. The curiosity would lead to speculation which would lead to more attention and interest in the subject matter.
Hmm. Now I just have to find a radio station and a partner!
Posted by Murray Todd Williams at November 17, 2004 07:13 PM