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Ask Dr. Ross
"Ask Dr. Ross" answers the important and nagging questions parents and potential college students raise about higher education. Topics include preparing for college, avoiding student debt, and secrets to good grades. Hosted by award-winning professor Catherine Ross, Ph.D., and student producer Ashley Worley, listeners can ask their own questions by emailing ADRquestions@gmail.com.
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Ask Dr. Ross
How to Have Hope by Studying Political Science
How does sensationalist media shape our political outlook and contribute to a widespread sense of hopelessness? Join us for a thought-provoking discussion with Dr. Kenneth Bryant, an associate professor of political science, as we dissect the impact of mass media on American politics. Inspired by the 1976 film "Network," Dr. Bryant shares his insights on the media's obsession with conflict and scandal, and we explore the cyclical nature of societal pessimism. Equip yourself with tools for critical media literacy to better navigate the barrage of negative news and regain control over your perspective.
Ever feel overwhelmed by the constant stream of negative news? You're not alone. We discuss practical strategies for combating this sense of hopelessness, focusing on what we can control in our own lives. From engaging in small, impactful actions to prioritizing self-care and education, we highlight how these steps can foster a sense of empowerment and well-being. By letting go of grandiose hopes and concentrating on manageable, positive changes, we can all make a meaningful difference within our immediate spheres.
Local politics often flies under the radar, but its impact on our daily lives is profound. We explore the importance of youth engagement in local governance, sharing a compelling anecdote from Segalville, Texas, where a mayoral election was decided by a single vote. Discover why young people are crucial to breaking the cycle of low voter turnout and how consuming information from multiple sources can help you develop a well-rounded perspective. We also touch on media bias and political discernment, empowering you to actively participate in your community and drive meaningful change.
Stay tuned to the Ask Dr Ross podcast. It's created to give you info to succeed at college. Our hosts are highly qualified. Dr Catherine Ross is a member of the University of Texas System's Academy of Distinguished Teachers. She's also a popular professor of 19th century English literature. Co-host and multimedia editor Nathan Wood provides a student perspective. Ask Dr Ross is a community service of the University of Texas at Tyler.
Speaker 2:Hi, I'm Katherine Ross and this is a podcast for parents, students in school who are thinking about going to college, college students who parents students in school who are thinking about going to college, college students who are already here, adults who are thinking of maybe going back to college and really anyone who wants to know more about what life in colleges and universities is like today in the US of A. I'm here with my friend, nathan Witt, who's a student here.
Speaker 3:If you'd like to ask Dr Ross a question, you can email us at adrquestions at gmailcom. Today we're going to talk a little bit more about hope. So we've got a little kind of mini segment about hope, maybe the feeling of hopelessness in the incoming generations, and how we can address that, how we can respond to that feeling.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a lot of the times that Nathan and I've been working on these interviews, you know we've tried to talk about all the different aspects of college but there's also the aspect of the. You know, where does it all fit in the students' lives and where are they going? And we're all trying to get them prepared for the future and yet so many of your students, you and your classmates, have expressed a real doubt about the future. So Nathan and I have talked about it a lot and we've had someone come in and talk to us a little bit about finances. But I wanted to bring in my friend, dr Kenneth Bryant, who is an associate professor of political science here at UT Tyler, an award-winning teacher, but he's also taught mass media in American politics and I feel as though so much of what is giving students today a lot of anxiety is the mass media coverage of politics.
Speaker 3:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 2:So handing that over then to you, want to tell us a little bit about how you came about to this topic yourself, and then maybe just start plowing in.
Speaker 4:Okay. So how did I come to the topic of mass media and American politics? The origin my favorite film of all time. It's a film called Network, released in 1976. And this film was prescient. It predicted where we are now with cable news. The sensationalism, the over-the-topness, the fixation on conflict was what Paddy Chayefsky, who was the writer of the film, was trying to put out there in the 1970s to predict. Where is this mass media going? Where is this coverage going? What are we fixated on? Why is there so much doom? Mind you, this is in the mid-70s, so this is right after Watergate. So the public, the American public, were in a pretty cynical mood. As a matter of fact, you could say it was the first time in American history when the broader general public began to distrust our institutions. Okay, except for the institution that blew all of this open, which was the media.
Speaker 2:The Washington Post the.
Speaker 4:Washington Post. Yes, so Network is my all-time favorite film and as I'm watching this film throughout the years, and as I get to my current post, I'm thinking years. And as I get to my current post, I'm thinking, oh, I would love to figure out a way to bring the content of what this film is talking about, but also so many other films related to mass media and American politics, and also so many television shows and also so much, right in broader media. How do I bring that into a class?
Speaker 2:So we can think about it intelligently critically?
Speaker 4:Yes, and it has been my favorite course to teach, because it is an opportunity to not only consume but also to critique what it is that we're seeing and what it is that we're hearing, and also to put things in a broader context, that what we see today is a little bit different than what we saw 50 years ago, but so much of it is the same.
Speaker 3:The trends in it maybe yeah.
Speaker 2:Same in what way? Same kind of sensationalism. If it bleeds, it leads, if it's scandalous, it's what we hear about first.
Speaker 4:Absolutely that part, but also the public's perception of our society. Right now, things feel pretty dark. They feel pretty hopeless is the word that you all have shared about hope. That is something that has happened in cycles. That is something that was there with us 50 years ago, that is something that is with us now and that is something that will be with us 50 years from now. But that doesn't mean that improvements cannot be made, that advancements are not made, and that educating our public about this cycle and who's responsible for this cycle that's why I think what we do is so important.
Speaker 3:Well, now one of the things that Nathan and I talked about yesterday is just who do you trust? This is very yeah.
Speaker 2:Could you address that? Who do you trust out there? This is very yeah and could you address that?
Speaker 3:Who do you trust Yourself? Someone is getting a call, a real quick call.
Speaker 4:Sorry. And what do I mean by yourself? I don't mean you know the I did my own research crowd, right, do your own research, certainly. But what I mean by trust yourself is equip yourself with the skills that you need to develop a discernment that's necessary as a consumer of news, as a consumer of media, in 2023. Develop the skills that you need to have to discern when something is maybe not so credible, because the signs will be there, right, the telltale signs will be there, okay. And when something, hey, okay, that kind of makes sense. But I also know I can't take just one source. I've got to take another, and another, and another and see if there's a pattern, and another and another and see if there's a pattern. The pattern, the multiple sources, the discernment comes from equipping yourself with the education necessary.
Speaker 3:Okay. So I have now to play devil's advocate a little bit and try to defend this position of why it feels hopeless. And I feel like a lot of young people right now are kind of throwing their hands up and giving up. And there's a couple things in there. The first one I want to address is you know, because I agree, to really know if you're getting a credible source, you need to, you know, look at multiple different sources from multiple different political leanings and kind of see where it meets in the middle.
Speaker 3:The difficult thing is that information is so accessible, the 24 hour news cycle is so dense, that it is impossible Like I believe, genuinely impossible to fact check, by multiple sources, every piece of news that you get.
Speaker 3:And it is very difficult to do to fact check the important pieces of news that you get, because there's just so many, there's just a overwhelming amount of information constantly being thrown in front of us by everyone. And what's also difficult and I think it's interesting, because I hear this perspective a lot and I'll I'll don't know the truth because I didn't grow up in other generations and I am not educated enough on other generations, but I always hear people say you know well, this, is this a thing, and people always feel like it's bad. They always feel like the economy is bad. They always feel like the politics are bad. But it is so hard for me to look at where things are at today and believe that things were this bad in the past. So you feel like can I clarify that? Do you feel like the state of American politics are not worse now than they have been in the past?
Speaker 4:The state of American politics are as bad as they've been.
Speaker 3:Okay, so it hasn't been like a crazy increase.
Speaker 4:It's just different. So what I mean by that is, for example, in the 1960s to give some context, 1960s our political leaders we didn't just disagree with our political leaders, they were being assassinated, they were being killed. Movements, the leadership of movements, assassinated, killed. Students literally taking over administrative buildings by a protest protesting the war in Vietnam, where they were being drafted to go to war, to fight a war where a lot of folks couldn't really figure out what the rationale was. A lot of folks couldn't really figure out what the rationale was. Today, I don't want to poo-poo the challenges today, because they are very real. They're just different. They're structural challenges. We have a problem with gerrymandering in this country, For sure.
Speaker 4:We have a broader problem with the lack of trust in our institutions which started in the 1970s, right, but when I say it's always been pretty bad, it's like when I speak with my students about the state of our democracy, the United States as a democracy has it lived up to its name? Has it lived up to its promises? We sort of look at the 250 years we've been around almost 250 years and I can pinpoint, maybe you know, 30 years-ish where we can say, oh okay, we were actually actively going towards increasing voting rights, increasing the ability, you know, suffrage.
Speaker 2:To be truly democratic.
Speaker 4:To be truly democratic and respect all perspectives, and it feels a little bit like a backslide now, and so that is sort of another reminder that we haven't always lived up to that. We haven't always lived up to that, and so to say that it's worse now would be almost to ignore where we've been and what we've been dealing with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know. I do feel like there's room to say, hey, it was really bad, or it was significantly bad, it is worse. And even if it is worse or isn't worse, I feel like maybe there's a sense of hopelessness in the statement hey, it's always been this bad. Well then, how do you have hope in it getting better if it's almost been 250 years and no one has been able to make significant improvements in the state of American politics? How do I, as a young person, have confidence that my generation will be the one? You know where your hope comes?
Speaker 4:from? Please tell me. The fight, the fight. Where does your hope come from? How do you feel less hopeless? Get a little fight in you and say's going on right now not acceptable and we are not going to? Yes, this is the way things have been and perhaps things will be challenging moving forward. We're not going to live in a utopia, but we're going to fight to change things, to make them the way that we see. We want this country to exist. And how do do we fight? There's your question. Like I said once upon a time ago, it was literally college students taking over administration buildings.
Speaker 3:I mean, I think they did that in Seattle not too long ago, right?
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was massive, it was across the country. Maybe that doesn't look like that now, in 2023. But one thing that I want to share with students right, if the definition of hope is having something to look forward to, what is it that you can look forward to in this fight to make change? The one tool that you have that you wouldn't have had 50 years ago is the vote. If you were under the age of 21, you didn't have the vote, so there's one tool that you can use just as a base to fight to make changes the vote. We've spoken about the media, the overwhelming amount of sources. Social media has been, I think, a blessing and a curse. The curse, I think, is pretty obvious, but the blessing is also it has democratized the ability to mobilize people behind a cause.
Speaker 4:No matter what the cause is no matter what the cause is.
Speaker 2:Conservative or liberal or in between.
Speaker 4:And that's a useful tool that didn't exist 50 years ago, and so the tools are here. You just got to have the fight and having something to look forward to. We've got an election coming up 2024. We've got local elections. We've got local elections. We've got statewide elections, vote and also, whatever your political persuasions are, whatever it is, whoever it is that you support, have some fight. That's going to help you feel a little less hopeful hopeless, I should say because that is something, you can do something.
Speaker 2:So I think one of the reasons why you feel hopeless is you feel helpless.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:And, I think, being able to do some action. And, of course, then, well, how do you get going on that? Well, there's the League of Women Voters, there's students, there's sometimes, you know you I don't know if you know this, kenneth, but this young man created his own nonprofit organization.
Speaker 3:Bravo.
Speaker 2:And you have that kind of energy, that kind of organizing energy and leadership to think in terms of let's have the anti-hopelessness brigade or whatever. I mean truly. And here again I come back to the two things that we sort of came up with yesterday. And here again I come back to the two things that we sort of came up with yesterday. One is getting better educated about what is possible, what has happened, you know what are the legalities of things, but also recognizing that you always give up something. You can't have it all. And you know, I hear, I know that one place you go sometimes is away from the starry-eyed idealist where everything's going to be perfect.
Speaker 2:And that's one of the hardest things about coming of age is you begin to realize oh man, I thought it was going to be so great to be in college. Oh man, I thought it was going to be so great to be out of college. I thought it was going to be so great to be married. I thought it was going to be so great to be a professor or whatever. And you get in that job. You go. Oh, my goodness, this is hard and you're just beginning to see the hard things in front of you, but they're also excitingly hard because you get to do more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 2:Still, I know that sounds like pablum, doesn't it?
Speaker 3:Well, it's, I don't know, I think. I think that there's, there's and it is, I feel like, very heavily influenced by the introduction of media, specifically social media, specifically these, you know, little pocket computers we have that we carry around everywhere, where I think just being overwhelmed, just as a general experience is so much more prevalent in our incoming generations, and I think it makes it's hard, it's harder to mobilize, it's hard to feel the excitement, it's hard to feel the hope. And this is an argument my dad always says and boy, I don't like it is. You know, I talk to him about man, it just feels like the world is horrible. And everywhere you know, I talked to him about man it just feels like the world is horrible.
Speaker 3:And everywhere you look, there's just horrible things. Because, like we said, you know, outrage sells, shock sells, and so the algorithm doesn't care about you, it just wants your attention. And you know the whole saying about train wrecks and how you can't look away. I mean, that's what it shows you all day is just terrible things because you can't look away.
Speaker 2:So what's your dad say so?
Speaker 3:my dad always says he's like well, the world has always been this horrible, you just haven't been able to see it.
Speaker 2:That's kind of what we're saying too, isn't?
Speaker 3:it, and maybe that's the case, but it doesn't change the fact that now all we see is the bad stuff, and so I feel like it makes it that much harder to have hope. You know, kind of like what you I think you said this yesterday about something about you know, if I would have known it was going to be this hard, I might not have done it Right. And I think that may apply here to this feeling of hope, because for the older generations who have had hope through life, I wonder that same question would it have been as easy for them to have hope if they knew just how horrible the world was?
Speaker 4:let me first say this, because I don't want to sit here and make it seem like I don't understand exactly what you're saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, doom-scroll myself yeah, I absolutely sit in front of and make it seem like I don't understand exactly what you're saying, nor do I.
Speaker 4:I get it too Absolutely doom scroll myself. I absolutely sit in front of the news and contemplate oh my gosh, this is awful, this is awful, and nothing's going to right this feeling. Nothing's going to change, if not get worse. I can't remember who gave me this piece of advice, but it's one that I try to hang on to. I think part of the sense of being overwhelmed and feeling that hopelessness is you're trying to take on more than necessary. You're trying to think about how do I change the world, or how does the world change instead of how does my world change? How can I impact my world? What can I do as an individual? Even a small thing is a big thing. Small things can be big things all the time, and so I think one of the things, at least for me, is thinking about what it is.
Speaker 4:What I understand, that I can't snap my finger and change the outcome of an election. I can't snap my finger and say the economy is going to do this. I can't snap my finger and say war is going to end all across the globe or that people are going to be wonderful to each other on social media Can't change that. I can't do that. What I can change is what I do for myself. Causes do I involve myself in? Where do I give my money to? How do I vote when I am in a classroom? What are the issues that I'm talking about, that students should know, that they should have an education on?
Speaker 4:And again, one thing that I think there's a misnomer and I know you understand this because you're on this campus but one of the misnomers is that professors are indoctrination machines. Sure, are indoctrination machines. Sure, and I always find that a bit objectionable because A it's tough enough getting folks to read syllabi, let alone change their entire worldview based on what it is that I'm saying in my class. Sure, yeah, but also, education is giving you all the information and then giving you the opportunity to make choices, particularly in my field, right, I always say it's my job to give you the information, to inform you. It is not my job to tell you what to do with it, right?
Speaker 4:So all of this discussion about wokeness or woke is the idea of really just being aware. Once you leave my class, you can no longer say you're not aware. What you do with that awareness is completely up to you. Yeah, and that's where I get to, how do you feel a little less hopeless? Figure out what you can do in your own individual life at your own scale. That is, making some form of positive change. That might help just a little bit.
Speaker 2:I want to insert two other pieces to that too, because I teach English, so I don't get to teach something quite as currently fascinating as politics are right now, but I do teach skills that have to do with living an examined life, and one of the things a lot of people don't do is they don't pay attention to their need for recreation, their need for friendships, need for sleep and healthy food. And as much as that sounds like mom's talking to you, it's really true that it's so easy to get off into these dark places if you're not also having some fun, having a chance to be with friends and also taking care of your body, absolutely. So that's another little piece of this. What can you do to prevent the hopelessness too? And that may seem real selfish, but it's actually what makes you able to give more be a better friend, a better lover, a better student, whatever better son.
Speaker 3:Yeah, as you know, I mean that is my perspective on it. My perspective on it is give up on the hope. So follow me on this, Give up on the hope, Give up on. And so follow me on this Give up on the hope, Give up on. And it's been my experience of this working of.
Speaker 3:I came right out of high school and I was on fire and I wanted change and I saw the entire globe. I felt, you know, metaphorically, looked back and saw the whole thing and was like we've got so much we need to fix and so quickly was my flame stomped out. Because it's just such a big undertaking to change the world or change America, even to change the state of Texas, you know, and it crushed me and I gave up and I gave up and I just happened to be in love with skateboarding and the when the pandemic happened and I had to move back in with my parents, my hometown, I was living on campus, so my college shut down. I was so lost and frustrated. I had no hope in the world. All I had was like skateboarding was fun and we had a really old rundown skate park. This is where the nonprofit started for me. We had this old rundown skate park and it was never in my mind to do something good for the community, for the world. It was completely selfish. It was just I love skateboarding, I need skateboarding. I don't have skateboarding. How do I have skateboarding? Small little, just skateboarding. Rest of my life is horrible. I have skateboarding small little, just skateboarding. Rest of my life is horrible. I'm so unhappy.
Speaker 3:And so I worked on this park and by doing this people working on this park I mean by myself, just me and a drill and some screws and some plywood. And as I was doing this, people would drive by or, like you know, I would post it on my Snapchat and people would see and they're like, hey, I'll come help you, I'll come help you, I'll come help you do this Like. For the longest time there was this group of high schoolers that would just go hang out there, Like they would go grab Sonic after school, and they would just go sit there and listen to music. They wouldn't really skate too much, they wouldn't help build ramps, they would just be there because they needed somewhere to be. And that's when I started to realize like, oh wait, like this could kind of be something. And we built a skate park community.
Speaker 3:And then, yeah, and then I started to feel hope in this little community, Like maybe, maybe I, we can do something right here in this little group of skaters. And then some community members, some some older peers, came alongside us and said, hey, how do we do something more for you guys? And so we made this little game club and that started the formation of the nonprofit. And as the nonprofit formed, our city came alongside us. And then all of a sudden I had hope in my tiny little city and I'm like, well, maybe the whole world is ruined, but maybe here in this small little town we can do something.
Speaker 3:And as that grew, the county embraced us and came along board with the non-profit. And now I'm at this point where I'm like I have faith in my county. Maybe this county can be something. And as I've gotten here to Tyler and started to see the same kind of communities and movements build in Tyler, I'm like well, maybe if we can build up enough of these little communities and towns, maybe there's hope for Texas. And so my personal perspective is like give yourself the air to breathe of, like giving up.
Speaker 4:Yeah, build hope from the bottom up. That's what it sounds like. Yes, yes, I was thinking of this metaphor. Maybe this is because I'm home.
Speaker 2:We're going out to lunch later, okay.
Speaker 4:When you go to the buffet, there's no way possible that you can consume every single thing at that buffet. But you want to. You may want to and you may feel compelled to, but you can't. It's not possible, it's not healthy to do that. Right, take your plate and put on your plate what you can and tackle that. That is building hope from the bottom up. I love that tale of building community from you started with one yourself, trust yourself, and you build a community and then you notice, oh, there are other communities building up around here. We we have a commonality, or maybe we don't. Maybe the only commonality we have is that we want to build community. Right, that is beautiful. That is, think, a change maker. If all of us participated in that way, we might look up and see the world itself change.
Speaker 3:So I wanted to ask about local politics, how, how, I know I don't know what classes you teach and what your research and study is in classes you teach and what your research and study is in, but do you feel like you know? As we're talking about looking small, do you feel like a good advice for young people looking for hope is to get yourself involved in voting for local politics, or is that kind of a waste? Because I feel like that's a perception among young people, that local politics I mean what can they really influence Like, what is it really doing?
Speaker 2:What books are in the library.
Speaker 4:For one thing I'll give you a perfect example why local politics not only are local politics the most important to your life, on an everyday right, local politics is the police department, the fire department, the roads right, the schools, the libraries and so forth. In a little town called Segalville, texas, there was a mayoral election back in May. The race, the final tally of that race in this town of 10,000 or so, was 222 votes to 221 votes. The difference between the winner and the loser was one vote and the reason this is, I think, funny to me, is my husband and I had just moved from Segalville Okay, where two votes, our two votes, could have determined that election.
Speaker 4:That's a powerful reminder that your vote, particularly in those local elections, count for more because fewer people are showing up. So imagine if you did the Gen Z, millennial, younger folks showed up en masse to vote in these local elections. They're going to make a difference because one of the things that you don't see are younger folks showing up to local elections, which may be why you look around and you are discontented with what's going on in the city because your voice isn't a part of the decision making. So local elections huge. I cannot impress upon the folks enough how important local elections are and, as a matter of fact, I understand that presidential elections get the money, get the attention. Presidential elections get the money, get the attention. But Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, the odds of them having an impact on your life here in Tyler, texas, is very small compared with the impact of your local city council person or your mayor.
Speaker 2:And most of us don't even know who they are, and most of us don't even know who they are, and most of us don't even know who they are Much less what they represent.
Speaker 3:Do you have a theory or an opinion on why young people don't vote in the same percentages that older generations are? That's not a new thing, though right, it's not a new thing?
Speaker 4:Yeah, but why is that? I ask this question every semester because we look at the numbers and it's there Usually the 18 to 29-year-old crowd. They vote roughly half of the 65 plus. Part of it, I think, has to do with the politicians and what the politicians are talking about. If the politicians look at the last election and they see 18 to 29 year olds probably not going to show up to vote, they're not going to talk about the issues that resonate with 18 to 29 year olds, because why they're not going to show up? I need votes. So I'm going to fixate on the issues that matter to the senior citizens, the boomers, as they say. Now, right, it's like a self-fulfilling cycle where the politicians don't talk about the issues that resonate with young people, so young people don't vote. And because young people don't vote, the politicians don't talk about the issues that resonate with young people.
Speaker 4:Just keeps doing it so one of the solutions that we've seen in the last um six years is we've seen more and more young people running for office aoc yeah, maxwell frost down in florida, right?
Speaker 4:young people saying, okay, well, if y'all are not going to talk about what we care about, we're going to run because you're eligible, right? Most of you running for local office. I don't know what the rules are and, tyler, in terms of an age limit, I doubt there is probably just have to be 18. If you want to run for Congress, right, you got to be a certain age. You want to run for the Senate? You got to be a certain age. You want to run for president? But that's later on down the line, what we say about local elections. You could, you could run for mayor, right?
Speaker 2:right right now. Or you could organize your friends to say, hey, local candidates, talk about the stuff we care about. Here's the stuff we care about, yep, and and you know being as proactive, and I know that seems kind of overwhelming too, but it's something you know about. I mean, listen, all the things we've talked about this summer and fall and spring when we've been working on this project. You all have so many things to say. Say them, and this is one of the reasons why we did the podcast too is to try to say things out there to people that might be listening. Yeah, but sometimes it's just it's hard finding an audience too.
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, well, fine, influencing a city election feels a lot more tangible than influencing a national election, absolutely so I think. So, like off podcast I would be. Do we have like, when's our Tyler's election cycle coming Like? We don't even know.
Speaker 4:I wish I knew I don't live in Tyler, so yeah, I don't either.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I live in Mineola, but Well, I live in Tyler and I should know, but I don't Okay yeah. But you know like, my husband quit taking the local paper for a while because he just couldn't stomach it. But I finally said, no, we've got to take the paper. Just see what folks.
Speaker 4:Well, the one thing I would say to the audience, if you want to find out, is go to the Secretary of State. Whatever your Secretary of State if you're in Texas or you're in Georgia or you're in Ohio go to your Secretary of State's website or go to your County Board of Elections website and they will have very important dates for upcoming elections, registration deadlines and things of that sort, or League of Women Voters. They also have really great information there.
Speaker 2:Although you know, I'll just share this with you. I've started going to the League of Women Voters, and they are not doing a real good job either of getting the news out to folks. They seem to feel sort of overwhelmed by it as well, and I remember when I first got here, I think it was the AAUW that sends out a kind of a recap of who all the candidates are and what they stand for, and that's the AAUW American Association of University Women and I haven't seen some of their work recently either. My guess is, Nathan, that an awful lot of us are feeling it.
Speaker 3:I don't think that it's exclusive to young people the more I feel it is harder on young people, and we talked about this after yesterday's episode. I feel like it's harder on young people because we are new to this world, we don't have the wisdom and perspective to understand the broader picture and and even there's a difference, even for myself and and I'm very fortunate to have a family that, like you know, like you could talk with Well since yeah, since I was a kid like they never babied me, like they talked to me like an adult even before I was an adult.
Speaker 3:And so I am very fortunate to at least understand that it may be the case like things have always been bad Right, or it may be the case that, in the grand scheme of things, we're headed in a positive trend, even though things seem really bad right now.
Speaker 3:But there is a difference between knowing that because you have been told, and understanding that because you have lived a full, you know 40, 50, 60 years and you understand that because you've seen it. And there's a difference there. And there's also the difference between, like our formative years were spent in this chaos where every generation before us at least, even if now y'all are experiencing the chaos of a cell phone your formative years were in a much more peaceful I feel like, kind of simpler at least not as dense, informationally dense world. And that's, I feel, difficult. You know, you were saying how you recognized yesterday you. You were doom scrolling a little bit and you realize, oh, this is probably not going to be good for me, and then you oh, it's making me crazy, you recognize the next day how it influenced your mood, because your frontal lobe is developed, you have wisdom, you have perspective.
Speaker 3:We have 18-year-olds who are not fully developed. They're not fully aware that these things will influence your brain chemistry or understand what that means. You know.
Speaker 2:Well, and it's been made worse by COVID, because everybody wants to shut in.
Speaker 2:I think it ramped it up even more. The one thing I was going to say to you that's interesting besides education is that some of the students I know that have the most hope are actually students who've done things like been on missionary trips to India or to South America, to countries where children, or Africa, where kids really I mean what we have is really good. And I can remember my mother looking at me saying, well, think about the starving children in Armenia. And I was going yeah, mom, yeah right, it still sucks to be in Tyler, texas, but actually the relative comfort we live in is something. We don't often feel gratitude and I know that I'm the worst person about doing gratitude lists and stuff like that, but every now and then it probably is a good idea just to take a look. You know, one of the things I do, girl. I see these precious little African children doing these fun dances and then behind them are dirt streets and hovels and they're dancing and I'm going, let's do that. So I danced down the street when I walked the dog listening to music. You know, I don't know where I'm going with this exactly. We'll probably take all this out.
Speaker 2:But you know, another thought I had was you know, you know my story that I went back to grad school at 40 and started a whole new career and I got to higher education thinking it was going to be what I remembered as an undergraduate. And I got in and went whoa, it was really different. And you heard Professor Doty saying yesterday you know you were always so idealistic, catherine. I used to always have to tell you, calm down, calm down.
Speaker 2:And what I realized is, over the 20 years I've been doing this now, is that I have had to make choices about the kind of scholarly work I would do, the where I put my time. Was I going to put it in high-powered scholarship? Was I going to put it in leadership? I'm doing a podcast now which I think is probably more valuable than some of the articles I've written. If it gets out to an audience in that it can make a difference. And I will still probably go to my grave complaining about the things that are wrong with higher education, at the same time saying how many wonderful things there are about it and how glad I am that I'm in it and how glad I know Kenneth and I know you and we get to teach students and that students get to come to places like this and try to sort out their hopes and their despair and to get the kind of knowledge and the kind of experience and also the kind of fellowship with people like professor brian.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think fellowship is a real tangible, approachable way to find hope too. Absolutely, you know it's there is, there's definitely some sense of solace and at least, even if you're just all in the room together banging the war drum, saying the world is burning, at least you're all doing it together and I think there is genuinely there may be putting out a few of the fires maybe.
Speaker 3:So yeah, and, and that's where you can you can focus local, as we said. Dr brian, I have a question about so. So we can all agree that media is skewed to the negative, to the outrageous right. What makes money right? Yeah it, you know me being with you know the, the student media. You know I, I saw research that says that outrageous stories, outrageous headlines increase click rate by 2.4%, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for media that's a huge number, 2.4% and so it's so tantalizing for media organizations to really tempting it's hard for them to not. But, dr Bryant, what advice do you have to young people, incoming college students, who are trying to get good political news media, because they have to stay informed. You know the alternative cannot be like, well, I just don't consume news.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah it's a it's a wonderful question and I struggle with it myself and just in terms of my own media consumption yeah what I found, at least for myself, is that, as I said earlier in the discussion, not taking one source, there are websites that exist that aggregate sources, like allsidescom, that have literally, they put it out there. This article was written from the right-wing perspective. This article was written from the left-wing perspective. This article is neutral and you can see in the headlines a lot of times. You can see blatantly how the headlines are written to sensationalize one bias or the other. But having that and being able to see it transparently, I think for most people okay and maybe, if you decide you want to read them all, you can do that. But it's a place that aggregates all of that information in one place and allows you to choose and also, again, it develops that sense of discernment.
Speaker 4:The one other thing I want to say is that so often and I fall victim to this myself read beyond the headlines. People, please read the article, because the headline is designed, exactly as you said, to draw a person in or make them upset, but to make them upset based on whatever their presupposition is, whatever their predisposition is, whatever their thinking is on the issue at hand, and they don't need to think beyond that, they don't need to read beyond that. It says this this is the headline and I'm off.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Read the article Because a lot of times all the context in there you read, you go that headline was misleading that headline. Maybe it isn't as bad as they made it sound.
Speaker 2:Well, and I was just going to add, there's a magazine called the Week which is like the allsidescom, and it does that you can either get it online or you can get a hard copy, a paper copy, and it does the same thing.
Speaker 2:It has the articles and it also covers international news as well, which I think is a real important thing for folks to pay attention to right now, and so if there's others like that, one of the things we do on the podcast is we put up lists of things, and so allsidescom the Week. Are there other sources that you can think of that we could add to his posting on the website, the podcast?
Speaker 4:I am a reader of the Washington Post.
Speaker 2:I am a reader of Tell him why it's okay to still read the Washington Post.
Speaker 4:The legacy of that publication itself is a legacy, I think, that has built up my respect, at least has earned my respect and my trust. Does everything that comes through the Washington Post? Is it up to par? No, but again, I don't just read the Washington Post, I read the Dallas Morning News as well. I read the Austin Statesman. Right, you take different sources at different levels local, state, national, online, not online cable news. Local news Take as much as you can in and then develop that discernment.
Speaker 2:Didn't you argue yesterday? But doesn't Jeff Bezos own the Washington Post? Yes, and so does that matter, like Murdoch owns Fox.
Speaker 4:I haven't seen any. It could matter I don't want to say that it doesn't or it does but I haven't seen anything or read anything that Bezos is involving himself day to day in editorial or gatekeeping what gets put in that newspaper or what isn't. I haven't seen that and quite frankly again, I know you don't want to hear this, but you could go back to William Randolph Hearst and on through to rich people have owned news publications for the existence of this country communications for the existence of this country.
Speaker 2:And so Well, there was a, there was a documentary about two or three years ago called. The Fourth Estate, yeah, which was really well done. And it followed it was the New York Times and the Washington.
Speaker 4:Post the Times.
Speaker 2:And the way they pursued a couple of stories and that whole team and I remember watching it was four episodes it's really worth watching real time and watching the checks and balances they had on who you know, what they publish and when they could publish it and if it was accurate and the number of times they had to really be sure that everything was substantiated. And you know so much. Today we hear people saying, well, everybody knows and that's not a good enough source that everybody knows.
Speaker 2:And so my feeling has always been. Of course, I also come from the Watergate generation and Woodward Bernstein, I think, were two of my early-on heroes. Actually, bernstein actually dated with my friends in college.
Speaker 4:Oh wow, all right, one degree of separation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but he was a jerk as a boyfriend, but anyway. So I do think one of the things I do sometimes, Nathan is, I will watch. My media of choice is MSNBC, because I like Rachel Maddow and the old guy there what's his name? It does the last word.
Speaker 1:Lawrence O'Donnell.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but then I'll turn on Fox and watch Fox for a while to hear how the two different people are going at the story. You know it's a crazy world right now and this is probably not going to go in the podcast, but listening to what was said on the day of January the 6th by people like McCarthy and Lindsey Graham.
Speaker 2:Well, but also you know Mitch McConnell and then what was said recently. You know what they did afterwards. It's crazy making you know. It's crazy making Everybody saw what happened that day, knew what was going on and yet somehow there's been this. I don't know if you'd call it gaslighting.
Speaker 2:That's exactly what it is, and also, you know it's sort of like. I love that. You know that word, oh, I know that word. And you know the kids are saying, hey, but the emperor doesn't have any clothes on, and the grown-ups are all saying, oh, yeah, he does. And you know there's that craziness going on. But that makes me crazy. I don't like to be gaslighted.
Speaker 3:I do. I want to ask this Dr Bryant about. You see, I want to ask this, so, real, pop In about three minutes.
Speaker 2:I'm going to take him to lunch because he's going to pass out.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, we're almost. We're at 47 minutes, so we're on the phone. Oh, because he's going to pass out.
Speaker 4:Okay, yeah, we're almost, we're at 47 minutes, so we're on the phone. Oh, we've been having a good discussion here, yeah.
Speaker 3:So I just wanted to ask. I feel like a real top geez.
Speaker 2:I'm tired too, so I feel like you want to come to lunch with us. I didn't have.
Speaker 3:I got to go get coffee with my girlfriend, but that's why I'm feeling this way. I haven't my coffee yet, so I'll say it this way. I feel like a real popular terminology in the political space right now is far right, far right, far left, all this kind of stuff. I am a young person so I can be transparent in that. I mostly align with a lot more democratic, left-signing, liberal perspectives, and what I hear from a lot of my peers is just how they try to present the scene, the political scene as well. There's all these crazy far-right people and the far-left isn't. They're not even that far-left, but I'm not so convinced. I think that there might be equal amounts of crazy on either side. How do you perceive that political spectrum of people?
Speaker 4:it just so happens that in the United States there is always, for the better part of our history, save maybe the new deal period there was center right nation. So the the idea of having a robust left wing, far left wing, is harder in our context because we've got some boogie words socialism, communism, right and so that tempers a bit of the sort of political movement on the far left, which is why you hear often people say in the American context, our leftists are not really that leftist and indeed if they were in Europe they'd probably be center right. It's kind of true right In the United States the way that our politics are oriented. We have been for the most part a center right country and so it's I don't want to say it's safer, but it's certainly been more fertile ground for your far right to have a platform and be amplified, yeah, and have a movement, especially if it's tied in with race. That is where it really sort of becomes a thing, and so I think the far left, far right thing I don't want to both sides it. I think there is an asymmetric thing going on.
Speaker 4:But that's because of the nature of the country and the politics in this country and if you look at the political spectrum again. Just look at the presidents. We've had even Democratic presidents. These are not hard leftists, right? If you look at a Democratic primary, say in 2020, who were the hard left candidates? Bernie Sanders, perhaps. Did Bernie win? No, no.
Speaker 4:But if you look on the right and you look at the candidates who are being put up and who are doing very well, at least up to now, these are not your moderate Republicans. We're away from Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney was even a pretty conservative Republican, but even he in the primary was seen as not conservative enough. We're a long way from 2012, when Mitt Romney was a nominee of the Republican Party. And so on the right, I think there is more of a fire and also there's more leeway given in media and in the broader public to that perspective, because the country is I don't want to say naturally tilted that way, but historically has been tilted in that direction. So, without sitting here and really putting together a whole treatise that's sort of my preliminary answer to that question. I think it's asymmetric. I don't think it's equally far left, far right, at least in terms of what gets recognized and what gets legitimacy in the United States.
Speaker 3:That's very interesting because and yet the right feels like they're the ones who are not being given a platform in today's. I don't know, I'm sure you've heard that drum beat.
Speaker 4:Which is a result of having an information bubble and an information ecosystem that constantly tells them that they are being victimized, that they are being silenced, and if that's the only thing you're hearing, you're probably going to believe it.
Speaker 3:Can I ask one more question? And I just because ideally you want to make change, so you start a movement right, and so I want to ask what your opinion on a successful movement in today's generation looks like. When I look at the police brutality movement, that kind of also morphed into just a generalized Black Lives Matter movement. I participated in a lot of that and had a lot of hope at first, and I feel like it was unsuccessful. You are a person of color. How do you perceive the effectiveness of that movement?
Speaker 4:And then from there, what does a successful movement look like in today's world when the movement was successful was first of all broadening the coalition of support and also broadening awareness of the issue and the problems that exist in our criminal justice system, with our law enforcement, but also across our institutions and across our systems. Right when it has failed, or at least where it has come up short, is in the hard part, which is changing policy, which is writing laws, and that is because we have a political structure and a political system where there are, you know, by design, it's tough to do that. So at the national level you can't get your voting rights bill passed through the United States Senate because of something called a filibuster Right.
Speaker 4:You can't get the, the, the recognition Bill passed through the United States Senate because of something called a filibuster Right. You can't get the, the, the recognition of that. The movement in the states to, I would argue, suppress votes is unconstitutional. You can't get that recognized by the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court is one that was built by you mentioned Mitch McConnell built by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans and Donald Trump, and so a lot of the pushback has been structural pushback, institutional pushback, and so I would say where there have been successes on that front has been at the local level, where you're getting prosecutors who are more progressive minded elected to office judges, prosecutors, local politicians, folks again starting from the bottom and moving up. We haven't got to the national, but I think change can happen. It will happen. It can't happen overnight, it's going to happen slow and you have to be persistent.
Speaker 4:2020, summer of 2020, people were out hitting the streets. Doesn't mean that people still need to be hitting the streets in 2023, but they need to remember what made them go out in them streets in 2020 when they go vote First of all, to vote and then remember how to vote. And again, I ain't telling you how to vote. But again, if you have the awareness you make the decision. But you have to develop that awareness. So I think it's been a mixture of successes and failures. Success, certainly, on the awareness front, on the movement front, galvanizing young people, but not just young people, people across the age spectrum, but also bumping up against those institutional barriers that are there, that are very difficult to get rid of. You need, again, more mass voting behavior to support the type of politicians who will go to the institution and change those rules. So that's sort of the next level of it. Yes, we recognize this is a problem, but now we have to recognize where the barriers are in our institutions and decide whether or not we want to keep them.
Speaker 3:So a successful movement in today's generation looks like what then from them?
Speaker 4:A successful movement? I almost feel unqualified to say exactly. From my perspective, a successful movement is one that is multi-pronged, multi-dimensional, multi-layered, multi-leveled, and is a recognition of both. What is what we want, what is possible.
Speaker 2:Fully informed.
Speaker 4:Fully informed, fully informed. Fully informed what we, what utopia would look like, but also what reality looks like, and finding somewhere where we can make the middle, get finds, make some changes. You're not going to get everything. It's not an all or enough, all or nothing proposition right, and that may be the. The real perspective is is not thinking in sort of an absolute terms that I'm going to get everything I want or nothing. That's going to kill your movement.
Speaker 3:All right, thank you, dr Ross. Do you have any?
Speaker 2:Well, now you can see how come I enjoy talking to you, I do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you for being here. This is fun. Thanks for having me. This is the stuff that I like to talk about, and it is you too. It's hard to motivate I feel like my peers to have these conversations, because people are overwhelmed. I mean, it's just Without a doubt Reality. I mean, that's not exclusive to young people, but Exclusive to young people.
Speaker 2:Well, and you know, the thing I always want to say is you know we have people like Kenneth and me here at universities that you can talk with Right, and just staying in your bubble of hopeless young people is not a good thing either.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reaching out to us, letting us reach into you, sharing the things that we, you know, get frustrated about too. And also, the thing I'm always so happy about is I just have lots of time. I've got a lot of life.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So, that is. Our greatest commodity is our time and energy.
Speaker 2:And you're investing in yourself by doing so.
Speaker 3:Keep on investing, keep on building your ability to make good decisions yeah, and I like the point you made about talking to people like dr bryant like that's great advice for young people is like seek, you know people that you can look up to with more life experience, with more education than you and in one-on-one conversations with those people.
Speaker 2:And expect them to care about you.
Speaker 4:Yes, I can tell you, and I'll say this, at least on our campus. It doesn't have to be Kathy or I. There are so many faculty on this campus who care deeply about their students, who care deeply about the world, and will willingly sit down and listen to what you have to share, and so use that resource. And there are so many resources on this campus that can be used. Seek those resources out and use them. They're here, you paying for them. Use them.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. There you go yeah that is a drum I bang as well.
Speaker 1:So thank you for saying that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wonderful Well is there anything else that you want to say?
Speaker 2:Right Thanks for having me, let's go get some wood.
Speaker 3:Yeah, y'all go eat. Let me close this out. This has been the Ask Dr Ross podcast. If you have any questions that you want answered, you can always ask us at adrquestions at gmailcom. That's it for today. Thanks so much for listening. Dr Bryant, thanks for being here. Thank you much.
