“The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself.”

that I suspect (again, without clear data to support the supposition) that the particular politics of the left, and the particular politics of the right, have more than an incidental relationship to the formal and discursive modes of left (Steward, Colbert, DailyKos, etc.) and right (Fox, RedState, etc.) media, in ways that are inextricable from and yet that implicate much more than the facts at issue, making the case for continued interpellative study (in the tradition of Althusser et. al.) with regard to what technologists call UI/UX and “human factors.”

Might not there be correlations between interpellated subjectivities, their preferred “facts,” and their interactive practices? There is some work in this area, but much of it is either old and largely forgotten or falls outside the map of sociology proper, being carried out instead within cultural and media studies circles and stopping at the event horizon of direct media experience, rather that continuing beyond it.

Hence my interests that are in very real ways about formalisms in media (though I focus on different region of the media geography entirely and map in in different ways), yet pursued with a sociological eye and with reference to the sociological canon.

The one new thing is that it is now much easier to check facts across sources. Any of us could make a list of things we read in the newspapers way back before the web and asked “this cannot be so but how I am going to check?” Now we can, though not everyone does it – many prefer to believe what they could easily figure out is false.