Yes. The debate is a good example of public opinion dynamics. @whstancil.bsky.social is right: the event matters but the media commentary changed opinion too.
And that’s happening in a trash heap of bad media structures and incentives.
(Moving this to bsky b/c convo is better here.)
In the past few decades we have mostly been laissez-faire, hard libertarian, about our media.
But media is intertwined with democracy, and there are structural things we can change to make media better: e.g. consolidation and ownership rules, public subsidy in some form, etc.
And I’m a broken record but:
We basically had this debate, across democracies, in the context of radio, in the 1920’s-1940s.
Here’s one example of the product of that debate.
Not saying we need a US BBC. But there are ways we can act today to structure media to better inform the public.
The vast vast majority of people also already thought Biden was too old *before the debate* which is why he was already losing to Trump and should have dropped out
