The American conversation is so dysfunctional as to be of little use to anyone. Rather than achieving a meaningful dialogue, it encourages hatred, alienation and division. That is not the way to make a country work.
The American media, with rare and relatively insignificant exceptions, is animated by the profit motive. And the profit motive leads media entities to play to the most excited, and hence fringe, elements. It leads to distorted entities like Facebook, which knowingly encourage unreal, fringe thinking because doing so brings in revenue. Television “news” channels like Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are not much different. Each plays to its own constituency and attempts to excite it by alienating it from opposing views. PBS operates like a deer in the headlights, perpetually terrified of losing funding and hence dispensing relatively inoffensive, milquetoast coverage that reflects what most people already know but does not help the conversation to move forward.
We need to do something to change this. This website is here to publish thoughtful discussion, particularly focused on American democracy, and Trump-ism. If you have something along these lines you’d like published, just email me at barry.coburn@att.net, and we’ll talk. Best, Barry Coburn