Partly, Don, I beleive this can be blamed on media desperation. Technology has given the media channels huge empty spaces to fill with news, when there is not that much news worth presenting; to make these long hours electrifying the media corporations have migrated away from informing and toward electrifying and dramatizing. Although this is shortsighted you can see how the competition and huge amount of program time needing filling have fueld the deterioration from "forum" to "circus". He who dramatizes best gets the eyeballs.

Informed by melodrama instead of communication, American voters of less discrimination learn that dramatization is the nature of the citizen voice, and they go forth and act out like ten year olds in the public arena, mindless of any more disciplined kind of self-government.

A