It’s very possible that C-SPAN and such important, impartial media outlets just might be the best sleep aid on cable. Next to the billions of incarnations of crime show reruns, of course.
The problem is this: Public service channels like that exist to inform voters, inform the general public — but voters and “the public” often really don’t care about being informed.
You can’t tell someone something or teach them something if they don’t care about learning.
This is a problem in our society I’ve struggled over since it first hit me personally about 10 years ago when I was a graduate assistant in a university history department. In that case, I was very aware of many people I knew personally, and many parents sounding off on talk radio, all preaching the gospel that “we fail to teach kids history and teach them about America’s founding values these days.”
In fact, the university I was attending and assisting in requires all students — in accordance with state law — to take two semesters of basic U.S. history and one semester of basic world history.
It wasn’t long into my first semester assisting with a U.S. history class and two world history classes to discover that the students absolutely went to sleep bored out of their minds about history of any sort. The problem, dear parents, isn’t in the teaching. The problem is in the learners.
No, it wasn’t a matter of how the subjects were taught. I worked with three very dedicated professors who were highly knowledgeable about their subject, very good at teaching and challenging the students, and sound educators all around. But the students were totally disinterested.
How do you inform students, citizens, and voters when they don’t care to listen?