One of the less-spoken-about positive developments that I have seen during this year’s campaign season is that more voters are waking up from the political junk food stupor that citizens have been lost in for far too long. Supporting this extremely important shift in occurring is why I created a free downloadable Transpartisan Voter Savvy course as a public service.
The New York Times, on November 3, 2008, reported that a new electorate appears to be emerging that "tends to be more questioning of what it is told by campaigns and often uses the Web to do its own fact-checking. In that article, Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe is quoted as saying, “You do focus groups and people say, ‘I saw that ad and I went to this Web site to check it.’ They are policing the campaigns.”
Policing campaigns in this way is every citizen’s responsibility in a democracy. Without this, a republic cannot remain healthy. This is part of what I refer to as being a Freesponsible Citizen in my three-award-winning book about how to upgrade our integrity intelligence, The New IQ: How Integrity Intelligence Serves You, Your Relationships and Our World. (Those awards are in the areas of Social Change, Health/Wellness and Self-Help — it is quite rare for a book to receive awards in both personal development and social change categories, which is why I believe this book is so important for all of us.)
While I believe the tipping point has yet to be reached where a majority of citizens consume less political junk food (propaganda, spin and other lies posing as facts) and more political health food (nonpartisan fact checking websites such as those that I recommend in my Transpartisan Voter Savvy course), an important step toward this ultimate goal occurred during the 2008 elections.
The more people who shift in this direction, the more pressure the media will feel to provide more fact checking and less political junk food. The more the media are restored to journalistic integrity, the more pressure politicians will feel to do less propaganda and more education. The more this restoration of political integrity occurs, the more the political process will be returned true democracy. The more this occurs, the more our republic’s health will be restored.
This restoration can’t happen soon enough.
