TL;DR If you let other people tell you what you should think, don’t be surprised if you end up doing things that are not in your own long term interest.
Niel Postman was right, we are Amusing Ourselves to Death.
Soundbites cannot communicate nuances of ideas
For whatever reason, few people take the time to really find out what is going on in the world, being happy to be few a soundbite by a politician or demagogue. Since I have the CO2 level shown in the sidebar, a good soundbite to use as an example is “CO2 is Plant Food”. Yes, CO2 is required by photosynthesis in plants, but the role of CO2 is much much more complicated than that.
Television and Radio news rely on soundbites, and as such are destroying public discourse about important matters that as a society we need to deal with. And yes, I know that TV and Radio news have some value, but that value needs to be considered in the light of what it also does to our understanding of science, technology, economics and the political choices facing us in the 21st Century.