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posted by n1 on Monday June 12 2017, @09:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the join-the-club dept.

According to Fox News:

Puerto Rico's governor announced that the U.S. territory has overwhelmingly chosen statehood in a nonbinding referendum Sunday held amid a deep economic crisis that has sparked an exodus of islanders to the U.S. mainland.

Nearly half a million votes were cast for statehood, more than 7,600 for free association/independence and nearly 6,700 for independence, according to preliminary results. The participation rate was just 23 percent with roughly 2.26 million registered voters, leading opponents to question the validity of a vote that several parties had boycotted.

Also covered by AP.


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday June 12 2017, @03:24PM (1 child)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday June 12 2017, @03:24PM (#524441) Journal

    I probably shouldn't bother replying to such a post, but I think it's worth noting that the VAST majority of people are unwilling to sit down and watch or read a long news piece on a "boring" topic.

    Thus ALL "investigative reporting" shows or segments (from "60 minutes" and Frontline to TED talks) find ways of holding your attention if they're going to do a 10+ minute piece on something. Typically, they're based on "shock and awe" kind of reporting -- showing you something so surprising periodically that you keep watching. When there's gross injustice, this is often easy -- just keep "shocking" viewers every 5 minutes with some new revelation of something horrible. Often there's "human interest" elements, too, either around the injustices or just telling personal stories that are emotional in some way.

    Basically, let's face it: news is entertainment. Long segments are structured to be entertaining and to keep audience attention. Even long journalistic pieces in stuff like The New Yorker and The Atlantic often follow a structure like this. "Just the facts" gets boring unless you keep shocking or emotionally engaging the reader/viewer.

    So then you have folks like John Oliver. Rather than just employing a bunch of journalistic tricks to keep you interested, he includes comedy. You may or may not like that comedy. You may or may not like his political views. (And I frequently disagree with him in the details.) But just because he includes comedy doesn't mean he can't address "serious" issues at the same time. Sure, he applies the "shock and awe" and "emotional human interest" elements periodically too, just not exclusively to keep you entertained. Rather than putting up yet another video of an abused puppy under Policy X, he'll change it up and make a joke on Policy X periodically instead.

    There are varying degrees of "infotainment," and I agree that Oliver's schtick can be annoying at times. And it's sad that he has to "trick" people into paying attention to important issues. But it doesn't follow that his segments can't be informative. I vaguely remember watching the Puerto Rico debt piece he did, and he pretty much covered a lot of stuff that you'd find, say, in the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] on it. But how many people are going to go read the Wikipedia article on Puerto Rican debt just randomly? (And yes, I know Wikipedia isn't the greatest source either, but I was looking for a quick site with an overview of major concerns on this issue; there are plenty of other internet resources, though people are even LESS likely to independently go seeking information out there.)

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  • (Score: 1) by oakgrove on Tuesday June 13 2017, @04:53AM

    by oakgrove (5864) on Tuesday June 13 2017, @04:53AM (#524791)

    You wrote all that shit just to prove the GP's point. *slow clap*