The rea–Sun our nation is the way it is?

The rea–Sun our nation is the way it is?

Something I often wonder about is; why isn’t politics studied more in school...?
When I was in high school we didn’t have any ‘Politics’ lessons, but we used to have ‘Pastoral’ lessons in which we spoke about general issues; these would have seemed like the ideal time to possibly at least touch on the topic, but the teachers never really bought it up.
Obviously there were people who did have at least a basic understanding of political issues (and a couple if I remember who had very strong opinions), but for the majority, they had no idea, and still don’t, “Oh I don’t know who I’m voting for, I’ll just pick the one that wants to legalise weed.”
Am I wrong or isn’t it just a little bit important that the future generations who will be voting in a few years time, actually have some idea about what the parties they are voting for might possibly stand for? Is a massive contributing factor to who wins the elections just ‘Pot luck’ as a result of people just voting for who they randomly choose on the voting slip? Maybe through a lack of personal opinion, a lot of people just decide to vote for who their parents vote for, or maybe there’s more of a sheep mentality going on, “Oh I don’t like them because the Sun says they are bad,” which leads onto to talking about the role of the media as mobilizers, and how they flaunt their opinions in order to indoctrinate people with their own propaganda.

I have been in meetings in the past where people have raised their hands to vote for things because everyone else’s hands went up, and then turned round and said, “What did I just vote for again?” The, “Opinion leaders of taste [in society]” are so influential because no one wants to feel ‘different’ because having a sense of belonging is so important; but when the dominant voice exercises its power to get what it wants, this can become a problem. The sun claimed that it was, “The Sun ‘wot won it,’” when Tony Blair became prime-minister, and it probably was, because instead of thinking for themselves, people tend to follow the most dominant voice. I mean ok with some things, you might not have formed solid opinions yet, which is fair enough, but it’s when people blindly walk through life not even attempting to change and learn how to think things through for themselves that gets me.
I wouldn’t wish for the sun to go jump off a cliff, but only because it would be tragic to see the line of people who followed it to their demise.
If things change, and the paper’s original opinion is now classed as wrong, they just change their opinion – trying to keep themselves popular in the public eye (who’s the sheep now?) – and not only that, but they make it out like it was THEIR opinion in the first place and everyone conveniently forgets where the paper stood not too long ago.

What’s worse than changing your opinion just to be popular, is having two different opinions at the same time just to be popular; as illustrated in ‘Media Communication,’ when the euro was brought into Ireland for the first time, the Sun, made two copies of the paper: the British one which was heavily anti-euro; and the Irish one, which was explicitly pro-euro, even heralding their support by writing the price - which was in Euros for the first time - EXTRA-LARGE to make it blaringly obvious how ‘excited’ they were about it, and plastering the page with their distinguishing tacky puns, “It makes cent to buy the sun,” oh ha ha yes very funny, I’ll never need to watch any comedy DVDs anymore because I get equally good entertainment just from my newspaper...

It’s strange also how the TV has to stay highly professional to keep people’s trust up, but the Sun is more like; before we tell you what’s going on in the world (or at least our version of it), here’s some boobies. How many news reporters on TV lift their shirts before reading out the news? Can you imagine what kind of reaction that would spark off. Mind you I had heard that a lot of people’s preference of which news channel to watch depends largely on who’s presenting it.

In my opinion it’s a pity we can’t say the Sun is a blazing ball of fire millions and millions of miles away.