The Media Mediates

There is definitely the sense that the media can mediate (!) the experience of viewers after the thing has happened. I might be sitting at home in North Carolina, watching the program and think one thing, and then the guy with a tie and “expertise” might come on right after it’s over and say with great gusto that one person or another has done something radical and race-changing that I never even considered. I often think of a great art museum in Boston when I think of these debates re:...

 Habits for Depolarization

1. Criticize from within. In other words, criticize the other—whether person, group, or society—on the basis of something you have in common. The political philosopher Michael Walzer describes this approach as “internal criticism.” He writes: “We criticize our society just as we criticize our friends, on the assumption that the terms of the critique, the moral references, are common.” As Walzer and many others have observed, besides being depolarizing, criticizing from within is ...