CLARION – Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University, says the worst thing she can hear in her classroom is silence.
Dagnes, who spoke Wednesday night at Clarion University, said she encourages her students to talk in her classes, but she added that is “impossible” this year.
“This year that has come to a screeching halt,” she said. “It is sad to me that nobody wants to talk. Today if you say anything someone will yell at you and that is where we are. That is a lousy place to be.”
What people are hearing comes from very different media sources. Dagnes said she and other political observers didn’t understand what happened with the 2016 presidential election.
“What we did not see was the rage,” she said. “What I failed to see was an entirely different eco-system that has fermented and grown. It was an entirely different narrative from what I was getting. They were playing with a different set of facts from what I thought were straight up journalistic endeavors.”
She said there are two spheres in the media right now – one dealing with the right wing and the other the mainstream media and the left wing media.
She said Fox News is the most successful of the cable news networks.
“It has been the number one cable news network for the past 212 straight months and sometimes it has been the number one cable channel over HBO and ESPN,” she said.
“They (Fox) are making money hand over fist,” she said. “Money matters, technology matters and polarization matters. If we stay within our own bubble, we are rewarding their behavior.”
Dagnes said “our political identity has become mixed with our social identity” to the point that one cannot be extricated from each other. She said people are defined by their political affiliation.
“People are complicated and that is what we are forgetting,” she said. “Most people are more than just who they voted for.”
She said the polarization has been brewing for 50 years.
“Sewing distrust has been a very effective political tool,” she said. “The media can be biased. It isn’t because it is on purpose. It is really because journalistic outlets were from Ivy League schools. You do not get a whole lot of diversity when you are just getting reporters from Harvard and Yale.”
“We need to diversify the newsroom and I don’t mean with just race and gender and in the terms of geography and political ideology,” she said. “We need to vote for politicians. We have vilified Washington to the point no one wants to work there and that is bad. The whole point of government is public service. Why should we elect the guy who campaigns on hating Washington? Why should we send him to someplace he hates?”
“We have to support the guy who says I love politics, I love government,” she said. “We need good people to run for office. We won’t get anyone good to run for office if you keep hammering that nail.”
Dagnes is the author of “A Conservative Walks Into a Bar: The Politics of Political Humor” and “Politics on Demand: The Effects of 24 Hour News on American Politics.”
She is a former C-SPAN producer and is frequently interviewed in the national and international press about American politics and political media.
The Young Democrats hosted the event.