The last week of the US election campaign was all about garbage, but who will pick up the pieces after the voting is done?
Donald Trump has cast a huge shadow over this election battle with Kamala Harris. : Michael Joiner, 360info CC by 4.0
The last week of the US election campaign was all about garbage, but who will pick up the pieces after the voting is done?
Just days away from the 2024 US presidential election, it is still too close to call.
Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has cast an enormous shadow over this campaign with the rhetoric of his supporters matching his own bellicose claims.
In the final week of campaigning, all parties have been reduced to calling each other garbage.
It kicked off at Madison Square Garden last weekend at a rally for Trump where a comedian compared Puerto Rico with a garbage island. It continued when current president Joe Biden apparently referred to Trump voters as garbage.
The unedifying scene reduced the campaign to its most common theme: the ideological culture war, which appears to have split America into increasingly fragmented, angry pieces.
The media’s role in amplifying these voices over any potential conversation of nuanced policy differences offers little solution. Politics has hit the lowest of lows.
Speaking to 360info’s Leave it To The Experts, journalism lecturer at the University of Sydney, Bill Wyman, says that the fragmentation of our media industry is helping accelerate these issues.
“There’s this huge section of America who don’t read The New York Times, don’t read The Washington Post, or look at CNN, and they get all their vague information from social media,” he said.
“As a journalism professor, (it) drives me crazy.
“When a student said, ‘Oh, I read it on Facebook, it was on Twitter, it was on Instagram’, and that’s the sort of thing that … to me, it’s nails on a blackboard to hear someone who is completely not even understanding that whatever they were reading was sourced somewhere, and to not have any understanding, of course, it’s completely foreign to us.
“So it’s not a pretty situation.”
You can hear the full interview with Bill Wyman from the University of Sydney and Dr James M. Dorsey from Nanyang University on the latest episode of 360info’s Leave it To The Experts.
Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.
Editors Note: In the story “US election” sent at: 04/11/2024 09:09.
This is a corrected repeat.
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