Burst Your News Filter Bubble with Read Across the Aisle

one thing the left seems to talk about a lot, but not really understand, is personal bias. The left talks about racial bias, sexist bias, and so on, all of which are subconscious, and this is known to be a scientific fact. However, one thing I often see left-leaning individuals fail to recognise is their own bias towards language. The left is very stifled in terms of language, due to concerns about offending people or making social mis-steps around people of specific assigned minority groups. And yet, the left is often willing to direct these deemed-offensive patterns of communication against groups deemed "fair game", such as males or whites. Hence you will often find left-leaning commentary similar to "white people need to X" or "white men are ruining Y". You would never see these phrases directed against black or gay people. My point is that the mainstream left believes in (or at least tolerates) an asymmetric treatment of people based on unchangeable characteristics. The rationale is around how this is "punching up" or that power imbalance between groups makes race-based attacks acceptable or unacceptable in different circumstances, but the key thing you need to understand is that the right is vehemently opposed to this concept and in many ways takes the complete opposite approach.

Modern conservative communication (I'm talking about younger conservative movements - The_Donald, Breitbart, you name it) doesn't generally care what race or gender or orientation you are, and will attack or praise you based on your ideas alone. When right-leaning outlets or communities make anti-muslim comments, the left-wing assumption is "my conception of a muslim person is brown, attacking a brown person is racist, this person is racist" but in actual fact the criticism will often be about perceived cultural incompatibilities. A conservative may criticise BLM or promote "all lives matter", because they oppose racialising police brutality (an issue that is much more closely tied to economic station than race) or some of the acts of BLM-backed groups. In the interpretation of the left, BLM is a civil rights group for black people, the conservative is attacking a black civil rights group, therefore the conservative is racist. The modern right also often goes out of its way to subvert political correctness by using offensive language, for the express purpose of offending the left and in-group signalling to the right. See Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay Jewish man and figurehead of modern conservatism, making Jew jokes at his own expense or talking about how gay he is in thinly-veiled stereotypes or references. And he seems to have fun doing it. Do you really think that a racist or homophobic movement would have people like Milo, Sheriff David Clarke, Ben Shapiro and so on as figureheads if they were motivated by hatred of gays, blacks or Jews?

I hope you don't take this as an attack as it isn't intended as such - but there's a lot of context to understand if you want perspective from the other side of the aisle. I personally see the right as more egalitarian than the left in modern times as it more closely follows MLK's dream of judging people "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character".

> I don't disagree that the media is biased but Trump is the President and still blatantly lying. That is not normal in a healthy government.

Simply invoking "liar" is not in itself important unless you point to an instance of a lie and a reliable non-partisan source that disproves it. That might be a high barrier for agreement but partisanship has reached toxic levels in the past few years.

> And you wonder why accusations of privilege are used? Reform may be needed but not everyone had the luxury of being buffered from the change process as they dismantle environmental regulations, welfare programs, and the institutions of government. This isn't some political game it's people's lives.

You realise it's largely the poor that voted him in? Poor white communities use the most welfare and they voted for Trump en masse. Perhaps it's because dignified people don't want to live on welfare, but want to have a job and contribute to society?

> Is there any objective evidence that the Trump administration isn't corrupt, doesn't have massive conflicts of interest, and isn't "business as usual" for special interests?

That's a burden of proof fallacy. The onus is on you to show that the administration is corrupt, has massive conflicts of interest and is business as usual for special interests. Simply going against your own political beliefs is not evidence of this either - for example, Trump wanting to improve relations with Russia is not evidence that Putin put him in the White House.

> I'm just as biased as you are but come on!! Do the tax returns and refusal to actually divest not bother you if you care about corruption etc?

Management of Trump's brand umbrella has been handed off to Ivanka for his time in the White House. You could argue that anyone who owns any company at all is potentially making corrupt dealings if they land in the White House - that doesn't justify making them detach permanently from their life's work. I'm not aware of any calls from his supporters to divest - only the opposition, who have been throwing so many accusations at him as to render their voice moot. Throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks does not lend itself towards being considered reasonably.

It's not the existence of "farther right wing" media that puts fox near the center, though that is suggestive. It's the fact that fox more closely aligns with mainstream opinion.

Ah, here, this looks like a story on the study I remember:

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-your-preferred-news-outl...

For your convenience, it links to this:

http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/

http://www.journalism.org/2014/10/21/political-polarization-...

that doesn't make sense, because if your scale is based on subjectivity vs objectivity, there is no partisan divide. There is just objective journalism approaching one side (approaching, as I don't think any journal could be truly objective without being purely numbers-based) and highly subjective content from any viewpoint approaching the other. That defeats the whole point of reading across the aisle and is more a metric of yellow journalism vs fact reporting. To attempt to split subjectivity onto a left and right wing would be to cause a lot of difficulty determining the limits and whether a report is subjective or objective at a partisan level would inherently be poisoned by the reviewer's own bias.