PowerMedia

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The Evangelical Outpost

This is a blog from the Evangelical side. This site is fairly well read and offers an extensive selection of like-minded blogs. Current discussion at this site features some issues we've been going over in lectures.

Hugh Hewitt gets credit for being the Ev-Blogger with the biggest audience, so this alone merits investigation.

I have found that the terminology circulating in MSM (Main Stream Media) is in dispute, however.
Terms such as Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Christian Right, Pro-Life have subtle nuances which have considerable relevance within each of these groups. It is entirely possible for an Evangelical to be pro-choice as a legal matter, consider opposition to war in Iraq and poverty as moral issues and vote for the Democrats. The link to the Evangelical Outpost fleshes this out some more.

This link offers a geuine Liberal point of view: The Village Gate

" The tragic result has been that "religious" is becoming synonymous with narrow-minded, bigoted, and uncaring. "Christian" is no longer associated with Martin Luther King, Jr. and William Sloane Coffin but with Jerry Falwell, James Dobson and Albert Mohler." from the Village Gate.


My introductory examination of current "Red State philosophies", a term I'm using as a "work-around solution" to the terminology puzzle, is starting to look like an here-to-fore untapped gold mine. How can predictions be made, experiments conducted, and explanations be given when so much is uncertain?

Who is Ned Flanders? What does he believe? Where does he live? What does he think of the poor? criminals? corporate malfeasance? Is Ned a fundamentalist, an evangelical, a life-long Republican or disaffected Democrat taking a temporary detour?

A poll recently taken in the Northeast showed that very few people knew any Evangelicals, while almost all knew homosexuals. In the South the results were almost directly inverted. The facts are, however, that Evangelicals make up approximately 20% of US population and only 3% are homosexual. Are the Fab Five the equivalent pop culture icons to Ned for the South?

If, paraphrasing McLuhan, "media use explains and informs one's world view", how useful are our extensive media options when so much of our country is ignorant about such a large bloc of fellow citizens? It seems that America's current media situation is better at selling products than informing us.

IQs and Votes by State
This link features a list of IQ's and recent votes. Though I cannot attest to its accuracy, if true it raises an interesting question. If the level of understanding in the Northeast, could be so wrong about a 20 million FELLOW Americans, what else are they wrong about? (Thank you, HZ and KL)

If the intelligent and sophisticated people of pre-WWII Germany were wrong concerning rise and designs of the Third Reich through its deliberate media manipulation, what can be said of us with such an extensive, penetrative, and ultimately inaccurate media structure?

I am not suggesting that a new Nazi party is in the wings by any stretch of nuance nor wink-and-nod. I use the Germans to show that you CAN fool all of the people, all of the time! I am merely asking if the Typical Northeasterner could be so blind to the 20 million voters standing in plain view, how safe are the remaining basic assumptions of the world for that group in general? Does it follow that people in the rest of the country are immune from this oversight, or have their myopias, if any, simply not been tested yet?

Politics is the competition for law-makers; laws result in governmental action; governmental actions have real consequences in daily life of everyone; the USA is the most powerful country on the planet and our policies effect the world; and the media inform us of our politics. A very weak link has been revealed in this cycle.

How does that make you feel?

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