When taken to an extreme, hateful rhetoric by political leaders can precipitate civil wars and genocides, as was the case in the s in Rwanda , where Hutu extremists used anti-Tutsi radio broadcasts to foment widespread violence. I tried to determine the relationship between politicians using hate speech and the number of domestic terror attacks the country experienced the following year. To further distinguish political violence that was specifically produced by hate speech, I also factored in how much domestic terrorism the country had experienced in previous years and whether or not the country was experiencing a civil war.
What I found is that countries where politicians frequently weave hate speech into their political rhetoric subsequently experience more domestic terrorism. A lot more. True believers may not believe in a god, he said, but they must believe in a devil. And it is hatred for this devil, not love or respect for what is good, that unifies them.
Honoring mankind! Finding and speaking to what is good in all of us. What a novel idea, one that we need desperately to rediscover today, before the political meteor strikes. Morton Schapiro is university president and a professor of economics. Editorial: Recall a city councilman one month and put him back in office the next? Column: Yes, Democrats have a messaging problem.
The bigger problem is who has the megaphone. Op-Ed: Abortion restrictions widely punish military women. All Sections. A politician who runs for office, then scoffs at lawmaking to score points with a weapons-packed Zoom background or a cold-hearted culture war tweet, looks foolish and, worst of all, ineffective.
I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Mary C. Follow her on Twitter mcurtisnc3.
Please subscribe on Apple , Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Viewing opposing partisans as different, or even as dislikable or immoral, may not be problematic in isolation.
But when all three converge, political losses can feel like existential threats that must be averted — whatever the cost," the authors wrote. Fanning the flames of dislike. In addition to a growing polarization of political identify, in which Republican politicians are moving further right and Democratic politicians further left, the study pointed to various forms of media as a catalyst for the growing chill. Between and , US media were subject to the Federal Communications Commission's "fairness doctrine ," which required broadcasters discuss controversial topics in an unbiased manner, typically done by presenting contrasting viewpoints for each political issue.
You're not nuts. This really is a crazy time. Here are a dozen ways to cope. To meet the FCC standards, broadcasters had a duty to understand a spectrum of views on any given issue and include experts best suited to representing those views in their programming. Questions of constitutionality plagued the doctrine, and it was revoked in
0コメント