“With partisan politics more divisive than ever, the club will provide a forum for policy discussion and debate that is sorely lacking elsewhere.”
When I attended Central Florida Community College (now College of Central Florida) back in 1990, I became involved in the journalism program, and quickly rose to the position of Editor of the school newspaper, the Patriot Press.
One of the highlights of my tenure as Editor there was when I got to cover Vice President Dan Quayle’s visit to the campus, which was hosted by the local Tiger Bay Club. While I was already very much a small “l” libertarian, I was very naive about the nature of the media and politics and the “narratives” pushed by opposing sides.
With no vested interest in either party at that stage in my life, and based on the national media coverage of Dan Quayle misspelling “potato”, I fully expected the Vice President to be a blithering idiot that couldn’t complete an entire sentence.
Was I ever in for a surprise.
Quayle was intelligent and articulate, answering questions both thoughtfully and decisively. While I didn’t agree with every answer, nobody in their right mind could possibly say this guy was “dumb” or uneducated. He knew the issues backwards and forward.
And yet, the media covering the event did. They took answers out of context and used ellipses on his quotes to misconstrue what the Vice President said. Had I not been there in the campus gym in person, my perception of Quayle would have remained unchanged – he would have remained the caricature of a bumbling idiot the media had painted. This was one of the first concrete examples I had that made me realize something was horribly wrong in the field of journalism.
My hope with the new Tiger Bay Club of the Space Coast is to foster respectful dialog and debate on issues and policies without partisan spin. With partisan politics more divisive than ever, the club will provide a forum for policy discussion and debate that is sorely lacking elsewhere.
If you believe in this mission please consider joining today!
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