Bob Garfield Quotes
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I can hardly believe that I even know this, but I am aware that Noah Webster's original dictionary, apart from being the first truly American lexicography, was a kind of line in the sand. It claimed a very discrete, American form of the English language, explicitly to compare it to the English of our erstwhile colonial masters who had been operating under Dr. Johnson's dictionary rules for well over a century.
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Our current predicament cannot be wholly blamed on a suffocating media sector. It cannot be wholly blamed on filter bubbles, trapping citizens in the prison of their own worldviews. It cannot be wholly blamed on Russian sabotage of our presidential election. Hard not to notice, though, that all three of those disabling conditions can be laid at the feet of Facebook.
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Subscribe to your local newspaper. Donate to your public radio and TV stations. If you read 'The New York Times' or 'The Washington Post' or 'The Guardian' or the 'Chicago Tribune' online, subscribe to them. In point of fact, journalistic information is not free. It is dear--in every way. If you complain about fake news but don't pay for real news, you are part of the problem.
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If I were God, or the sultan, or just the chief justice, this prescription for change would look very different from what I propose here. Citizens United would be overturned. Voting rights protections would be restored. Partisan gerrymandering would be legislated and litigated into oblivion. The Electoral College might be dissolved. But to paraphrase former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you don't wage de-devolution with the power you wish for; you wage it with the power you have. As a matter of both political reality and human mortality, the Supreme Court is out of reach for a generation. To protect democracy, we must otherwise intervene. This manifesto, therefore, is a platform for change built of six wholly unrelated planks--economic, regulatory, militant, educational, inspirational, harmonious--to counter the forces of ruinous fragmentation. . .
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What happens when you combine blogs, Google and millions of dissatisfied customers? An e-mob.
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So, in early 2019, when the avowedly arch-conservative TV station chain Sinclair Broadcast Group obliged its stations to run a "documentary" on vaccines, claiming to reveal previously hushed-up information on "one of the biggest medical controversies of our time," it knew it was pandering to the paranoia of the members. Among mainstream media, it is a business bias toward controversy and the principal sin of laziness, this direct assault on truth is an anomaly. In social media, it is a business model.
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Has the press piled on Donald Trump? Of course it has. But no matter what Sean Hannity tells you, this is not the smoking gun of anti-Republican bias. It is simply an eyewitness account of historic depravity.
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Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.
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Chain letters are the postal equivalent of intestinal flu: you get it and pass it along to your friends.
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What passes for patriotism is now largely measured by the flag pins in our lapels and the mouthing of pride and faith in our soldiers, sailors, and aviators. Having long since lost track of the precepts of American democracy, we've devolved into a cult of military, with its own blind faith and liturgy...