Gil Troy Quotes
As has been the case with almost every new technology, from the telegraph to television, the rise of the Internet fed false expectations that it would create a new, more democratic, interactive politics. But blogging’s harsh, unfettered nature has coarsened politics. The fact that so many bloggers are essentially anonymous allows them to spew rancor, rumor, lies, and obscenities. Increasingly, the MSM (mainstream media) appear by contrast staid, centrist, boring, even responsible. Deadlines—once daily, now without limit in the age of the Internet—demand a constant stream of stories, diluting the quality and upping the rhetorical ante in the effort to grab attention, In an ever-escalating rhetorical spiral, political discussion in the media and the blogosphere becomes harsher, sleazier. At the same time, the stories that stand out are the sensational and polarizing ones rather than the constructive, bridge-building ones. A variation of Gresham’s law applies: Just as bad money drives out the good, bad rhetoric and sleazy politics drive out—or at least eclipse and obscure—the good.
Gil Troy,"Bury the Hatchet", The Wison Quarterly, Fall 2008
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Even as late as the 1970s most media organizations did not feel any inhibition about having a spokesperson for a political movement or candidate comment about statements that were clearly untrue. The constant political criticism of the media produced this change and no matter how absurd or false a political statement is, most media will have a spokesperson for the lie appear on the program to repeat the lie. Both political parties are thereby encouraged to exaggerate or even lie as they will never by exposed by trusted journalists and can reduce all falsehoods to a “he says, she says.”
Otehr members of the Trump staff then started to echo the notion and it became common in Trumpian circles.
After Eisenhower’s successful use of TV, in 1952 and 1956, the next election—1960—had a plethora of TV ads which were mostly talking heads and in addition pundits were appearing on TV in the same format.
Gil Troy (born 1961) is an American presidential historian and a popular commentator on politics and other issues. He is Professor of History at McGill University and a 2015 visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution. Troy is the author of nine books, and the editor of two. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic and other major media outlets. He writes a column for The Daily Beast on Forgotten history, putting current events in historical perspective and is a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.
