There is a line between scurrilous nonsense and serious discussion that laps over, especially in this day and age when you've got all this electronic media and these blogs and this kind of fanatical impulse to bring down the opposing candidate.
I think that one of the challenges for a parent and myself as a parent is that we live in a very electronic media age. That's obvious to everyone. And I'm not opposed to time on computers or time with television or time with any other electronic media but I think that quiet, thoughtful interaction between one's self, your mind and words is an irreplacable thing.
As an American, no one expected Donald Trump to ever be a serious candidate for President. I don't think he even expected to be a serious candidate. He wanted the free media he would get.
First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago.
If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.
For almost a year, I sporadically made these rather lame video blogs in my dorm. These video blogs were reflective of most video blogs during that time in that they had no real structure and were kind of just all over the place.
But because media is what media is today, any stupid, absurd remark made by Donald Trump becomes the story of the week. Maybe, just maybe, we might want to have a serious discussion about the serious issues facing America. Donald Trump will not look quite so interesting in that context.
If you really watch 'The Voice' and follow Adam, he's very ADD. He's kind of one place here, and then he's over here the next minute; he's kind of all over the place. When it comes down to being very serious, and especially when we were talking about the finale song, he's actually very serious, and he's a very good listener.
I try to swim once or twice a week. I basically hold my breath for, like, 12 laps, down and back, to kind of expand my lungs so that I can have better breathing when it comes down to two-minute drives where you've got to play a lot of plays all in one series and you're hurrying up.
Part of the mystique of blogs is their protean quality: They work both sides of the divide between politics and media, further blurring the already fuzzy distinctions between reporter, pundit, political operative, activist, and citizen.
Thanks to Twitter, Reddit, web media, and social media, we have the opportunity now to kind of blur that line between the people who produce the content, the people that watch it, and instead make it a conversation, make it a real community.
See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
We like to be punks. We like to still be kind of edgy and if being edgy means you might teeter on that line of being inappropriate, I'm still willing to teeter on that line, even at my age. But some of them go over that line and you've gotta draw that line somewhere.
There's bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there's bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between.
To be honest with you, I walked into media day (in February at Daytona), and there were two people standing in line to conduct interviews, so from day one of this year, everybody’s kind of written us off.
There's no question that the media today has a relationship with Barack Obama that... I can't say it's unique, because the modern-day media is the Democrat Party and their objective is to advance the Democrat Party agenda as well as try to discredit any opposing agenda, which would be us and the Republicans. But the relationship they've got with Obama is above and beyond that.
Globalization was supposed to break down barriers between continents and bring all peoples together. But what kind of globalization do we have with over one billion people on the planet not having safe water to drink?