Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers
wired.com
wired.com
It sounds hopelessly naive in 2021, when suggesting that the press can even attempt to be objective marks you as a rube. Yet it seems like enforcing some expectation of fairness would be an improvement over having none at all. It may not be possible to actually be objective, but in the same way that we can't stop people from killing or robbing each other, we still insist on asking them very nicely not to, and holding them to account when we catch them at it. Most would say it's better to have some pretense of civilization than to just give up trying: why have we given up trying?
I'd even suggest that removing the standard of fairness allowed a different set of ethics to fill the vacuum: good journalism is attention-grabbing and serves the ideological base that forms your revenue stream. You could see this happening with the cable news explosion in the 80s, but it went supernova with the internet, and the changing economics of the post-Facebook era.
Clearly, the FCC can't control the global internet, and broadcast television and radio is not much of a factor anymore. So, any modern equivalent to the fairness doctrine would likely have to come from aggregators like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc., which may seem impossible because it's at odds with their business model. But, I'm hopeful because there is a history of industries adopting their own standards before they have more restrictive ones imposed on them by regulation.
It, like the comment sections on Canadian news websites, leaned heavily to the right. So a group got together and made alt Canada subreddit that leaned heavily left called OnGuardForThee.
Originally, I thought it would be helpful to compare the two subs to get something closer to the middle but instead all that happened was I got twice as much screaming hot garbage.
I unsubbed from both and now individually sub to all the Canadian town I can find. It's better now. There's so much less anger.
We did some threat tracking for certain organizations as a result of the growing extreme rhetoric in some of these communities and with social media aggregation tools it became very clear that there are a lot of paid political shill accounts.
Facebook's toxic communities are far more grass-roots in comparison. They're also, at least in the cases of the files I was on, a lot more violent, and a lot more volatile. Surveiled Facebook groups looked a lot more like Parler than brigaded reddit subs.
If the sub leans 60/40 one way, the minority group will see all their posts being downvoted, and gradually leave. As more leave, the downvote pressure on the remaining few gets more intense, and they leave too, until you're left with a veritable echo chamber.
r/canada used to be great, as you said, but it didn't become polarized in a right vs. left manner. The moderators were self-admitted alt/far-right people who were pushing a particular agenda.
When the country as a whole votes left at a consistent 65-70%, then r/canada simply no longer represents the Canadian viewpoint. r/canada used to give center-right viewpoints attention at about the same rate as the support they got in elections. The push from right-wing mods to move to an even or greater split doesn't reflect the political reality of Canada.
r/OnGuardForThee is now a far more accurate representation of the political landscape of Canada where 70% of people vote center-left to left.
I just checked the top posts for last week and it looks pretty... non-partisan? Certainly better than something /r/all.
But I recently visited my senior citizen parents and got some exposure to Fox News. During their commentary shows they just throw outrage after outrage at the wall and see what sticks. One example was trying to stir up a controversy over not covid testing people crossing the board illegally. Another was a rich part of Atlanta trying to break away from Atlanta and they were blaming it all on defund the police and black lives matter.
Yep. We’re all addicted to “rage-ahol” [1], but it gets eyeballs which means they can charge more for ads.
What’s worse IMHO is that we consume so much “news” that we can do nothing about [2], and I believe that contributes to people feeling quite helpless, and learning that all they can do is nothing.
[1] Homer Simpson https://youtu.be/JKRn2nEw7rY
[2] Fires, car chases, etc. And even if there is, indirectly, something we could do, the reporting never mentions it.
I used to not support the idea of reforming Milton county, but it makes more sense as Fulton funds are focused on Atlanta and away from the tax base. Especially with stupid stuff like no Atlanta police chief for a year, etc. And no Marta in north Fulton. And minimal court services, etc.
I live also live in one of the (upper?) northern burbs of Atlanta. I had to handle some property tax stuff and it was kafkaesque in how out of touch and poorly managed it is. Driving an hour to downtown atlanta to meet with an assessor who has never been to my town. Then meeting with a board of “peers” that also don’t even know the town where I live, listen to my arguments, ask no questions and then rubber stamp the county.
I’m not sure how to fix this and it’s so appealing to just give up and work on local stuff.
This accounts for much of the infighting we see in political parties and the various factions that arise.
I'm not so much a progressive Democrat as I am a member of "Yankeedom," as Colin Woodard dubs it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-...
I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
(Ironically the search for counterarguments would often strengthen my position because they would turn out to be quite weak. Nevertheless I think that the exercise is important.)
I think the words "well-reasoned opinion" describe it well: try to see what part of your opinion is fact, which experts you trusted for that, and what part is morality and ethics.
First of all, if you have skin in the game then it becomes even more important to try to understand the opposition's arguments in order to convince them to join your cause and to prevent others from joining the other side.
As for your example, I am convinced that trans people have a battle to fight for greater acceptance in most (all?) societies. But I would still insist that they have only earned the right to call someone, or something, trans-exclusionary, if they have given careful thought to the argumentation and the positions actually taken.
Sometimes this is easy: if someone says "trans women are not women" then in my mind that is not even a coherent position (define "woman"). But if someone says "most trans women have not had the same childhood experiences as cis women" then that is (to me at least) a statement of fact. Calling the latter statement trans-exclusionary is not what I would call a well-reasoned opinion.
Is it though? If you want to convince someone of something, you have to understand the opposing viewpoints well. Many rational viewpoints labeled TERF don't "infringe on the validity of [trans people's] identity." For example, trans women competing against women in sports. You wouldn't convince anyone by straw manning one side by saying that people who oppose trans women competing against women are all simply transphobic; you would say that they believe that trans women have a physical advantage over non-trans women in sports.
> I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
There's a difference between "understand" and "make a passionate argument for" a given position. It's become standard for just about any ideological position to claim that anyone who disagrees "doesn't really understand" and to primarily use extreme emotions paired with unverifiable claims. At what point does one "understand" in these conditions?
The idea that most issues today have two reasonable sides arguing is itself an ideology. Often there's not even one reasonable position.
It's a nice quote, but I don't find it accurate for all topics. Should I be trying to figure out how to make passionate arguments for the Q Conspiracy nuttiness? There are lots of antivaxx conspiracy theories that are pretty close to mainstream in parts of the US - should I be trying to figure out how to make a passionate argument for those?
For many of these conspiracy theories the 'understanding' part should probably be more along the lines of epistemic forensics - "What kind of misinformation got them to this point?"
So obviously there are some topics in which you can understand the issue well, but still not be able to make a credible defense of the other side.
Now, the point of the exercise is valid. We should always be approaching an issue from the perspective of "What am I missing?" or "How am I wrong?"
Of course, bad faith debaters will ask this of you while not doing it themselves. Or they will do so only superficially. They won't actually try to disprove themselves.
Which makes discussing things with such people exhausting.
Most of the main tenets of QAnon are recycled conspiracy theories that predate Q, which is why the "X% of people believe in QAnon" headlines that have been going around recently are so misleading.
Epistemic forensics is necessary for an awful lot of things people believe (true or false) given that for many things personal experience is insufficient to uncover the truth, and for any single truth, only a tiny fraction of the population is making direct observations at scale.
They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across.
In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not mention the other side or present a very simplified or exaggerated view and provide an opposing viewpoint.
They cover the same thing differently depending on which party is in power. The border crisis is a good example of this.
All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment. Eventually I just gave up and read Politico, Bloomberg and FiveThrityEight now. They seem to be used by pros from both sides and mostly report on what's "happening" rather than provide opinion. I can then form my own opinions.
(According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2])
Worse, this seems to be increasingly prevalent in the academy as well. Indeed, the study cited in the article (from University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative) also doesn't mention these points of context and the paper is pretty overtly propagandist.
[0]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-characters-muslim-riz-a...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States
[2]: http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem
Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them.
It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
When analyzing data typically the first thing you do is take out the outliers and then focus on the remaining data. News outlets do the opposite, the take the outlier and make it the headline story and ignore the other 99% of the data.
If one goes to the desert, they should not expect to see maple trees.
Yeah, this is a key thing to realize. People seem to think that Fox News, for example, just trots out falsehoods all the time, but if you skim the news, I'd say very little is actually factually incorrect. It's more about the story selection, who they choose to interview to get the quote, how they contextualize (or don't) statistics, etc.
But once you realize that, you realize it can apply to, e.g. WaPo, which many Republicans say is very left-biased, while many Democrats say it's neutral.
I think an amusing non-partisan example of how story selection biases viewpoints is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0] where for whatever reason shark attacks became a part of the summer's zeitgeist and got extensively covered. Meanwhile, shark attacks weren't at any particularly elevated level, contrary to what many people ended up believing.
This is why we need more than just fact checkers.
It’s extremely easy to construct a biased, opinion-manipulating political hit site composed entirely of truthful statements.
Proof by politically-neutral analogy: imagine a newspaper that published an article every time a roulette wheel stopped on 6, but never for any other number.
Last week in English news it headlined an anti masker/antivax March in London which the BBC didn't mention at all.
The google vs DuckDuckGo search results for the same exact phrase "list of conservatives banned by twitter" yield utterly different results. None of the admittedly right wing websites are even listed in the google results for that search. The only site in common on the first page is Forbes, but even then the two articles are different even though they came out the same exact day.
If you use google, you'd think that twitter isn't censoring conservatives. If you use duckduckgo, you'll think that they do.
Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this.
It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after they've treated both sides.
It also doesn't fall neatly into any liberal/conservative divide. It tends to be socially progressive yet only interested in solutions that can be practically implemented, pro-free market but deeply concerned about externalities and the environment, pro-democracy but with hard-headed realpolitik.
Plus probably half of what each weekly issue covers is news you won't find in any other American publication, at least -- it's a global publication and one of the best ways to simply learn about the entire world's political and economic news.
It's certainly not only interested in solutions that can be implemented. It's interested in solutions that enforce the free market, and it paints non-market solutions as infeasible, even though they often work and are implementable. But this is invisible ideology and very easy to mistake for pragmatism, because a pure pragmatist will certainly appreciate many market solutions.
The final synthesis is not after having treated both sides. It's after having treated two sides, which are editorially chosen.
As far as dialectics it would be much more interesting if they could dialectically analyze their own internal contradictions between democracy and interventionist realpolitik, or between free-market fundamentalism and concern about externalities. But it doesn't really grapple with those, which is a sign that it's only applying dialectical thinking in convenient ways.
In any case, the Economist is not any worse than any other mainstream publication. Often they do pretty good reporting. But you absolutely must not rely on it solely especially for foreign reporting where you don't have bearings.
The issues come weekly with really interesting topical stories, so I always add them to my reading todo list, but they just pile up so fast.
This past year and 1/2 of WFH life meant, I now have about 50 issues to go through LOL.
Mostly i feel more articles coming up that are worded in a way to convince the reader or a certain point without any data. This is something i never really noticed in the past.
It might just be me though.
I stopped reading it about 10 years ago for a few reasons. During the housing crisis the coverage wasn't as deep as it should have been and I would read articles that were nothing more than "nationalizing banks is bad" without explaining why.
Their coverage of US politics was also laughably bad. During the push to pass the ACA they overstated the GOP's position and willingness to deal. I used to get it from a library a few towns over so I would be 3-4 weeks behind. One time I was reading an article where Charles Grassley was being made out to be principled and respected and I'm laughing because he had recently endorsed the death panel nonsense.
I really, really wish I could recommend the WSJ, however they declined pretty heavily after Murdoch bought them. The number of long form articles declined and I was seeing less journalism and more ideological fluff in the non-editorial sections.
I agree its a well put together publication, but a socialist (for instance) would argue it is deeply ideological.
If a group is left-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the left and everything bad about the right, If a group is right-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the right and everything bad about the left. For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, and you'll almost never see Fox News write an article critical about Republicans. So you end up without much overlap between the two.
They'll only report on the same things when those common things are important enough / loud enough to where they can't ignore it, or when they're able to put their own political interpretation on it when telling the viewer what to think.
Mentioning the wrong topics gets people labelled as pushing "talking points" or "conspiracy theories" with total disregard to the factual reality behind. It doesn't serve the partisan narrative and that's all one needs to know. Insisting will get your suspended, muted, banned or deboosted/shadowbanned.
Except for everything Democrats and Republicans agree upon.
Which is a lot.
There's a massive amount Americans miss because thet witness very lively debate on very circumscribed topics.
I can name one CNN reporter right off the bat who does and his post is nearly always in the headline section for the topic being covered:
Chris Cillizza
Find me the same thing on Fox and I will accept your arguement.
The problem with Fox News and CNN is the biased attitude. They report everything good as amazing and everything bad as horrible. The anchors are "performing" the news, telling you with their tone, body language and vocal intonations how disgusted you should be or how much you should be rejoicing. This phenomenon has infiltrated the NYT and WSJ as well, and I've stopped reading both.
Not true at all. Here's one critical about Democrats as being too beholden to progressives: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro...
Here’s one critical about the current Democratic VP largely for being too concerned with (and ultimately ineffective at) undercutting Republican talking points. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro...
And that's just one day.
Except for stuff responding to new Trump-era revelations, they don't seem to have much current criticism of Republicans not buried within criticism of how Democrats deal with them, representing their actual bias in critical opinion coverage, in that it focuses on people currently in power.
(When Republicans held the White House and the Senate, they had more direct criticism of Republicans.)
While they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They cut through much of the partisan, mainstream BS - and get to the heart of many issues, all while debating ea. other in a civilized way.
https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-k...
It is INCREDIBLY refreshing, if you've fallen into the rut of mainstream internet or tv news.
Which I hope stay online to show how they are professional. I also hope their new show gets the graphics and tech to catch up quickly, as they are a refreshing source of truths that need to be told, and I'd like others to be able to watch and feel the same without being distracted and wondering if the new/current as of June 21 make them amateurs with uninformed opinions - instead of the professionals with the history and knowledge that some of us have become aware of.
So glad to see them doing real and truth - we need more.
When I caught part of on TV the other night with Sharyl Attkisson
( eg https://youtu.be/ol-6AwoPLH4?t=947
) I had a similar - jaw drop - OMG someone is telling the truth and they are on the air and not in a mysterious car accident! This is amazing.
EX-CNN aparrently(?) - maybe it's going to be a new movement of like ex-X-cult - no longer beholden to Y -
Perhaps old media is not just losing but started to be lost.
I want a browser extension to highlight individual reporters and info about past biases - as it's too hard to pin a portal as being one way or the other, when there are shills mixed in with regular reporters and editors all mucking up everything it seems.
Someone on Hacker News a while back recommended the Wikipedia current events portal[0] and I have to say this feels like a more efficient way to consume the news. It feels less tied to trending topics and manufactured drama, and is more centered on what actually happened in the world that was especially notable on a particular day.
I feel like a lot of "news" that's reported in the American political media is just ideological argument, which after you've read the same argument for the nth time doesn't come across as very interesting any more.
He operates just a little to the right of my own political persuasions, but even when I disagree with him, it's a respectful disagreement. Isaac's positions are nuanced, well-reasonsed and kind.
That newsletter is exactly what we all wish political debate in the US was like.
Rage makes more ad money than facts.
Alternatively, use the Internet Archives to read news from this date from 2-5 few years ago. You'll probably find that most aren't worth reading, which gives you a good sense of how important the news you read today will seem in just a few years.
I think the idea that media can be neutral is pretty unrealistic anyway. Even non-profits like PBS or government orgs like VOA will have their slant so it'll always require the extra work.
I used to do what you did(just read a bunch of major publications from differing political orientations) but also found issue with not being able to compare different perspectives easily.
I started reading international news. That is, focus on publications outside country X when reading about X.
Reports from Sweden, Korea, Russia and UK (thanks google translate!) translated into English, awkward wording and all, plus a minimal dose of CNN and Fox works better for me than a mix of American media. Just my 2c.
I might even wrap it up as a convenient page or app.
Is it some fake news site, or some radio personality's take? Or is it some twitter spat / spam?
I don't think 'the other side' is all that simple to cover / has an obvious quantity to include with every news article.
It has highlighted to me some biases from some of the sources I follow on a day by day basis (NYT, Washington Post).
Bonus points for the Economist, because you also get coverage and analysis of events across the world many of which get almost 0 coverage in US press.
Our tech ingests articles from different publishers, groups them into topics based on the story they are covering, then analyze and score them based on how informative they are and present curated articles as best perspectives from left/right/center.
All of this automated and running continuously on our website : https://www.thefactual.com/news and also in our app : iOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-factual/id1537259360) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=group.thefactu...)
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This is a big issue. But at the same time - it's not clear to me what the solution when every side is pushing hype rather than news. How do you publish an "opposing take" on something the other side is publishing that isn't real in the first place? It's not ideal to even acknowledge lies.
After quitting reddit I'm often oblivious to clickbait flamebait minutiae that my colleagues all get worked up over.
Also- are there any reputable conservative print news sources?
Maybe study each side like you're studying a gang. Get to know the symbolism and language.
There’s a growing number of writers on sub stack covering the same issue from different sides. Often this is formulated as a response of rebuttal to the left-leaning media’s coverage of the issue, but that’s fine because you still get both sides of the story if you read things in conjunction.
The thing I look for in good political writing isn't objectivity, which is mostly fictional, but an honest centering of perspective. This has two parts to me - a clear declaration about what the author thinks is the right answer and a commitment to making sure any opposing viewpoints are given as the holders of them would give them before being attacked. Like...I do think the US Republican party is not serious about many of their stated concerns, but I think it's easiest to see that when you contrast their stated views with their mostly political action.
This can get a little distasteful with racist or other hateful views, but there's no need to go into detail with the views of the groups you are writing against. You just need to describe them in a way they can recognize before you tear them apart.
So I guess I do not think good writing requires even treatment - it just requires demonstrating that you have understood what your opponents have said before you move to disagree with it. So, so, so much writing in US politics takes place between commentators who, for all appearances, have no real understanding of what their opponents want or why they might want it.
Here’s a simple one: Last year, when anti-asian crimes were on the rise, the NYTimes dutifully reported the crimes.
But repeatedly omitted details like ethnicity or name, until a white attacker made the news.
For those earlier details, the rag the NY Post (conservative and borderline tabloid) was the paper to go to.
Eventually—as in many months after—the NY Times stated covering the full details because the problem was too obvious. Even then the Ny Times uses every opportunity to downplay the issue.
I’m sure conservative journalists are just as biased in their own way.
Those are the sources you tried to balance with? Every one of those is a fringe hard-leaning source, except maybe Wapo which can't be trusted because it's owned by Bezos. You need to seek more moderate sources to begin with.
Shout out to Annafi– how are you all doing there?!
I've noticed this as well. Going from WaPo to Breitbart (or vice versa) is like going to an alternate world. When they are talking about the same thing often they are doing so in a belittling manner (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-ant...). I feel like the tone taken by MSM outlets like WaPo and the NYT has become harsher and more condescending, but it could just be me paying closer attention to it.
Bias by exclusion doesn't get talked about as much as it should. One way you can tell when a media establishment doesn't like something is that they do what they can to ignore it. During the Dem primaries it had become a meme in some left wing communities the length the MSM was going to ignore Bernie and his popularity. Another popular example is how Noam Chomsky is largely shunned by the MSM.
With a pillow...
Until they go away.
They compare similar headlines and also show you what you might have missed because one side doesn't even surface the headline
Edit: this article is about allsides, if you read it
The coverage/focus is the perspective.
In my experience, the biggest contributor to the echo chambers is a lack of memory.
I do not think people's memories are bad, but rather they willfully ignore the other party's position, never learned it in the first place, or are justifying it because their party is in power. This is what centrists frequently get mocked at "both sides" about. They aren't saying "oh both sides are trying to stage an insurrection" they are saying "both sides are not going to let immigrants across the border" (but it'll be generalized to everything being both sided).
I think the way to cure this is also the way to make parties better. Criticism. We should always critique our parties to make them better. Unless you believe they are perfect already and getting direct commands from god, it is deserving of criticism. But we've encouraged a culture where criticism isn't (effectively) allowed. It is allowed by certain people who speak in a certain way, but not for the average person. (e.g. if you are speaking to someone you don't know that well and politics are brought up and you criticize something x party recently did it will be presumed you are of the opposing side). I believe part of this is because we are comparing politicians and parties rather than judging them independently (this is also why I'm a big supporter of Cardinal voting as opposed to the common Ordinal propositions).
This is essentially the root of whataboutism. The classic example is one I had my parents many times over the last decade. I suggest Trump should be investigated for his connections to Epstein given his frequent contact. And my dad would be like "but what about Clinton!" and my response has always been "yeah, him too." Because it isn't about parties, it is about the crime that was potentially committed. If something is bad, then it is bad if the other party does it or if your party does it. Tribes don't matter. The whataboutism is just a distraction technique.
TLDR: Don't forget the past. Criticize everyone. Stop saying "what about...".
The truth is that news sources for each side presented completely different stories. While one side got a certain story, the other side was completely silent. So you had two groups of people who had two different sets of unrelated stories, and very rarely did they overlap. The media did an amazing job of putting each group into their own silo, making it impossible to discuss anything between groups or for any positive Trump news to ever be known to a large percentage of the population.
Some examples: Persuasion, The Dispatch, The Bulwark, and an assortment of substacks.
I get my news from Reuters with a sprinkling of fox/nytimes/reddit thrown in
It's amazing how much scoop you can get on both the establishment, and the opposition from first hands.
Just ask, politicians are talkative types. You are blessed with living in a country where you don't end on the bottom of a lake for asking politician a wrong question.
https://ground.news has an interface that highlights which news outlets with what general bias are covering which stories, which is sometimes fun to take a look at
Check out Counterspin, from the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).[1]
They monitor mainstream media and critique it from a left-wing perspective.
I don't always agree with them ideologically, but I find it valuable to hear a perspective on US politics & media from outside the usual Right/Center-Right binary.
I remember seeing Twitter chatter from the right re: the Fauci email dump, and so I went on various liberal outlets to try to get the left-wing perspective, and it was complete crickets.
Especially when it's something I can't just read and form an opinion on myself (Fauci's email dump was absolutely massive), I depend on journalists to accurately summarize and contextualize primary sources. And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article.
https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronav...
What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?
Gets tiring responding to the rights lies.
Some center-right outlets that are still worth reading* (and I say this as a raging leftist):
The Hill, National Review, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, The Economist
*(as in they provide both informational "what's happening" and insightful analysis without venturing into flat out fake news... as long as you avoid their editorials and comments)
I suppose those are "classically conservative" news outlets, as in "small government but with a general respect for evidence-based governance, science, and the truth". I don't know of any reputable populist-right/alt-right outlets. I don't know if there even IS a reputable populist-right/alt-right movement to begin with, but that's another discussion.
Side note: Google News (as of a year or two ago, when they revamped their algorithms) unfortunately now also gives you a bunch of worthless blogs and fake news (the literal kind) outlets. I have hundreds of sources in my "never show this source" blacklist and even then it's barely usable. That said, it's still a useful way to see different takes on the same topic. Their grouping algorithm is a lot better than their vetting algorithm. Some of those sources should just not show up for anyone.
I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.
(Of course, even then it's not simple. There's also party infighting, subparties, etc, so even if my opinion on "what the issue is" lines up, my opinion on "what the solution is" might not.)
Edit: another complication is strength of conviction. For example, standard American left/right dichotomy comes with very strong conviction about guns. I have very very weak conviction about guns. Even though I tend to agree with my ideologies' opinion on what should be done about gun control, I don't really care that much either way whether there's no gun control or super strict gun control. So while I do "identify" as my ideology here, there's clearly a disconnect from the mainstream form of it.
Like sure, neither of the major parties in America matches all of my opinions exactly but I still have strong opinions on a number of things, and they tend to align with a particular party.
I imagine this is the position most Americans find themselves in.
IMHO, the most inflammatory and dangerous things in our political discourse nowadays are the "we're under an existential attack (by our domestic political opponents)" narratives. Shit stirrers in both camps are enthusiastically engaging in them, and in the short term that keeps their bases enthusiastic and committed, but it leads to a vicious cycle that might actually bring about one of the feared scenarios in the medium/long term. Power play responses to the "existential threat" posed by the other side are likely to themselves be interpreted as "existential threats" by that side.
Deescalation is needed, and that's going to look like compromise that the activists/partisans are going to be really unhappy with.
As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that.
The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.
For example, lots of left-leaning Asian Americans agree that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, which puts them at odds with many of the people they'll likely vote for.
I mean sometimes I fit with the far left (for example, mother Jones had a great article on private prisons a while ago), but for the most part I'm a conservative.
Anyway, my friend pointed out it's disingenuous to basically always end up with conservative views and claim to be independent because you want the brownie points. And he's right.
All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorship. Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. What the outrage is about is money. While you can still speak elsewhere or on your own web site, being kicked off the majors makes it hard to monetize that speech.
Deplatforming really knocked the wind out of a burgeoning outrage-for-profit industry that had some influencers making millions by being controversy and outrage trolls on social media.
No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1...
I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought.
You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever.
You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.
The LGBT community was [1] and still are violently attacked for the mere act of existing. The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane.
Voting is a political act which affects others. If someone votes for a politician who gives cover and support to a group which - as an example - believes atheists are unfit to have the right to vote - then they are voting to strip the right to vote from me and I do not and will not support them or their personal enterprises.
Similar to how I think that racism is bad and systemic and must be eliminated and there are people who make a good living on raging about stuff. People building on a cause doesnt mean that the cause is bad.
I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.
>cen·sor (sĕn′sər)
>1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and *to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.*
Being authorized by twitter to do it on twitter is still censorship. A simple non-political example: censor bars on nudity in media, literally labelled 'censored': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images
The mental gymnastics to excuse censorship by private entities when it's done to the "correct" targets or for the "correct" reasons is infuriating.
Censorship is censorship. It doesn't matter who is doing it.
Since when? You're attempting to give default context to a word that has none.
Somehow, api, I doubt that you'd be attempting that redefinition if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were silencing people and organizations of the Left.
edit: I guess I hit a nerve, lol
They are part of the echo chamber. They aren't the echo chamber. Social media does a fantastic job of demonstrating that people naturally construct their own echo chambers. We tend to judge the main stream media & polities without appreciating a context where they don't exist. It's increasingly clear that for all their ills, they do deliver, albeit in a flawed and limited degree, on their espoused objectives.
They're terrible, except as compared to all the alternatives.
I don't at all care what you do with your life, and really I'd like it if you gave me the same courtesy.
But, if you believe that because I consider myself more conservative than not, I must then hate your lifestyle, how can we ever come to a happy coexistence?
I'm glad you don't care what I do with my life. If you vote for candidates that legislate in ways that do restrict my life, I ask that you please stop.
So maybe a person is believes in X, but if they continue to vote for candidates or parties actively promoting "not X", you can understand why this advice rings hollow.
I lean to the right, and yet regularly talk to and see the humanity in liberals on a pretty regular basis. We are all people, even if we see things differently.
On the far right yes, but not in mainstream conservatism. For example, a recent poll shows that 55% of Republicans support gay marriage (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004629612/a-record-number-of...). And that is even putting aside the question of whether wishing for gay marriage to be illegal really constitutes a severe restriction of someone's identity or the identity of those they love.
In Ireland, say, there's a pretty sharp divide on the issues (Dublin was Yes+50 in the same-sex marriage referendum, most rural constituencies were more like Yes+5-10; similar though not quite as extreme split on the abortion referendum), but there isn't even remotely as large a divide on the _parties_.
I've found that when the news is less "exciting," I'm a lot less inclined to read it. I still know enough to participate in most conversations, and if something seems really important, I'll read more in other outlets. I still forget most of the news the next day (just like I did before).
Overall I feel equally informed and less stressed out and better able to focus on the things in my life that have an impact.
[0] https://thenewpaper.co/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events [2] https://dev.to/kiwicopple/daily-email-of-wikipedia-s-current...
The first is that, by reading from both sides, they’ll balance and you’ll arrive at an enlightened center. This assumes the Overton Window is balanced, stationary, and not tilted to one side or the other. You’re beholden to the good judgement of each side to not move themselves further left or right.
Another is that the opposing content can actually be merged. In many cases the content will cover different pieces of the same broad issue. Or the interviewees will present their opinions in a completely different fashion. Up to you to carry all this context in your head, or make simplistic summaries of viewpoints that don’t add much value beyond what is already commonly known.
The third assumption is that being at the center or having this detachment from either side is a political position in and of itself. I think it’s too simplistic to say you’ll be the net sum of whatever each side puts out, but you’re taking a position all the same.
You’re not obligated to give equal credence to the opposing side on a number of issues. At best it will make you more detached from politics over time, splitting hairs over policy stances at the voting booth instead of more impactful grassroots political action.
That enlightened centrism subreddit listed below is up there with the most toxic sub reddits I've seen on reddit where people "dunk" on the idea that anyone would be so brave to have the gall not to conform precisely with progressive rhetoric on anything. It somehow seems like some of these people are more offended with the center than the other side.
Anyway yeah, I'm a centrist and it's not because I'm trying to be neutral, it's because both sides are terrifying cesspools the further you get to their extremes and the best outcome for partisan politics is to give either of those groups as little power as possible. It's not some abstract goal of evenly seeing both sides on the issues.
Moreover, research shows that reading different sides, when they are both presented in an informative fashion, helps people appreciate different viewpoints if not change it at times. It's only when viewpoints are presented with highly inflammatory language that we tend to dig into our pre-existing beliefs.
This isn't about finding some mythical center. People are often curious why people have different viewpoints. Indeed, I think this is a big reason why comment sections like HN work so well. The net effect likely is one of moderation in one's beliefs, which seems like a good thing overall.
The democrats’ economic stances are a good example of this: they've moved towards neoliberal economic policy since the 80s, to the point where the democrats and republicans have a materially indistinguishable stance on unions, workers rights, public benefits, Wall Street, etc.
This may seem like nit-picking but I think it’s important to clarify that some policies that lie outside the overton window are “extreme” because those in power want them to seem extreme, not because they are actually unpopular or unrealistic.
This may be wrong, but when I think of centrists I think of people who decide where they stand on each policy on a spectrum that extends from what the Dems deem acceptable to what the Republicans deem acceptable. If you’re someone who decides where they stand on an issue regardless of these arbitrary endpoints I think “independent” or “non-partisan” fits better.
Second: I think there's some value to increasing awareness of counter-arguments. I do not believe that good discourse inevitably drives out bad, but I do think there are practical advantages when people I agree with understand opposing arguments, and I think some percentage of people I disagree with will think twice if they know more.
(Yeah, you can figure out which are which from my comment history, but I like a good Rawlsian veil of ignorance.)
There is definitely a line between "all sides are of equal value" and "this is what the different sides are saying." It's a difficult one to draw. The stated intent of Ground News seems quite good, for example.
If differently aligned parties cover different sections of a broad issue, then aren’t you gaining more knowledge by listening to more varied sources? V.s. listening to just one political angle that would give you only a narrow slice of reality.
Also, what is “commonly known”? I personally have found when taking in 3-4 different sources that the amount of common knowledge is vanishingly small! How many of the pro covid lockdown group know anything about the death rate for your age group? Or knew accurate ratios of outdoor v.s. indoor spread? How many of the anti-lockdown group knew these things? There’s a lot of things which should be common knowledge that really aren’t.
You can combat some of this by reading “both sides”. But if you’re doing that, doesn’t it sort of mean that you trust neither of your sources? Aren’t you doing extra overhead to sort out where each side is wrong/lying? Seems better to just find a source that you trust instead.
1) Some negotiated middle between viewpoints
2) Some converged position based on a winning argument.
3) War
If viewpoints remain diverged for a sufficiently long period, 3 is almost inevitable. Understanding the different sides helps lead to either 1 or 2.
My ask with family members who are on the other side of recent issues has always been to broaden their news/media consumption. Reading the other sides media has given me insight into why they feel the way they feel, even if I don't believe the feeling is valid.
2. Whether or not opposing content can be merged is irrelevant if there are many different ways of thinking about a topic than a simple binary right or wrong. Often reasoning from first principles yields vastly different results if slight changes are made up and along the chain of reasoning. And different people can have vastly diverging points of view even though they did their own thinking. Therefore to be in the center simply means not to drink the Kool-Aid the latest politician is selling.
3. I think you could reasonably argue being in the center is itself a valid political position if you agree that, again, there are more than two sides. If there are many more viewpoints some not even discussed by current politicians why must everyone pick a side that is currently most fashionable? To be in the center doesn't mean you'll be the net sum of each side, it means you have your own opinion and do not necessarily buy into the narrative that is being sold by either political parties.
It might result in people seeing how much common aspects a story has, and that helps to divorce the factual aspects from the editorialization. Maybe.
It might result in a broader intake of facts (if both/either side is being selective).
It might result in a litany of things better than the binary dung-hosing we have now.
If the worst that happens is people attempt to be less binary, I'd still consider that a small victory.
Being centrist is not inherently bad either, it just is. The only concern there I would have would be if one intentionally tries to triangulate towards a middle, as opposed to arriving there naturally.
It's what Paul Graham referred to as an "accidental moderate" versus and intentional one. http://www.paulgraham.com/mod.html
Not at all.
1. The assumption is that reading from multiple sides, you'll arrive at the enlightened position, center or otherwise.
This is the same assumption as in a courtroom. The idea isn't that the prosecution and the defense are both equally valid positions. (They don't.) The idea is that vigorous argument will yield the truth.
2. There's a lot of news that isn't necessarily "a side" but that you'd miss from a monotonous diet.
For example, in Jan 2020 I watched some Tucker Carlson episodes on Fox News. At the time the news media was overwhelmingly focused on Trump's first impeachment, but Carlson chose to cover this new "Chinese coronavirus."
I want to know what's going on in the world and it's absurd to think one particular source covers it all, even it wanted to.
Or, alternatively, and I think this will be a rather more accurate description of most centrists, it means that the partisan axis doesn't really describe any "principal component" of variation in people's actual opinions.
Indeed, this is broadly what political scientists find, IIRC: very few people hold the opinion "we should do as little as possible", but many people hold an opinion on one issue that gets them classed as "left-wing" and an opinion on another issue that gets them classed as "right-wing" -- and see no real contradiction between the two.
I can understand what's credible or not on both sides but what matters to be is WHY they believe these positions. I don't want to synthetise them as much as I want these people to either stop suffering or stop believing they suffer.
So I vote not for more socialism or more traditionalism, but to remove the need for tradition while lowering the grouping effect of socialism. It is obviously a position in itself to reject the left or right visions of a path forward.
Your mistake maybe is that there are two sides to a political spectrum while there are many dimensions to the political hypercube.
Democracy isn’t about “finding the truth.” It’s not really even about “truth” anyway. Most disputes are about differing moral judgments not disagreements about facts. For example, liberals I’ve talked to are often a bit surprised to learn that a fetus stops being “just a bundle of cells” very soon, and by 12-13 weeks has all its parts, a face, etc. That doesn’t cause them to go “oh, now my view of abortion is totally the opposite!” Views on what stage of development entitled a human to a right to life isn’t about truth finding, it’s about differing moral judgments. In a democracy, the most important thing is accommodating those disparate world views so we can live together productively.
The contrast is stark compared to the US because in our political system, a coalition has to be formed after each election to form a majority.
This means building consensus and thinking multi-partisan is the default. This pretty much rules out the "total war" approach on political opponents as it means shooting yourself in the foot. You may need that other party to form a majority.
Therefore, centrism in the broadest sense, which I see as the spectrum center-left, center, center-right...is the heart of the matter here, instead of some barren wasteland. Over 90% of the population votes within that relatively narrow bandwidth, therefore this is the negotiation space.
And negotiate we will. Whilst we too have pockets of extreme left and right getting disproportionate media attention, reality on the ground (voting and policy) is basically centrists all around, with minor tweaks to the left and right.
The above system isn't perfect, above all it does lead to slow progress at best, as policy is watered down due to the nature of coalitions, but let's not stray too far off topic.
The US political system indeed seems designed to destroy or at least "win" from the other party, and basically...anything goes.
Without any choice, centrism is not represented, at least not in media. But that doesn't mean centrism does not exist. I would expect in any developed nation the majority of the population to be in the center or fairly close to it, the so-called silent majority.
The thing I find most baffling is how besides polarization between the left and right reaching new heights, many of you seem so indoctrinated into this us versus them dogma that many if not most comments below heavily criticize or even attack centrism.
You should take some time to think about that position. The point of the article was to break out of your bubble, yet you double down. When you reject both the opposing party as well as centrism, you basically reject some 50-70% of the typical population. This besides the ridiculous notion of reducing something as complex as a human being to "friend" or "enemy".
Way to miss the point.
I've picked up some great regular reads from that list.
And then you read how some Supreme Court justices make a decision and you’re wondering if they are even reading the same document
Looks like if there’s no political will to enforce the law it doesn’t get enforced.
What it means to execute code on the "bare metal" has changed over time. If you track its usage on HN, it is now common for programmers to use this to describe running a program outside of a Docker container or hypervisor/VM, but still atop an OS.
(I personally think this change in meaning is silly, but my feelings on this matter don't matter.)
Interpreting security policy making use of this "bare metal" term is now tricky. Choice #1 is to interpret the policy in the context in which it was written. Choice #2 is to attempt to interpret the policy in the context of how the term is now used.
(The best choice is, of course, to rewrite the security policy in question to address the change in definition, but for the sake of argument let's consider this to be too impractical to even consider.)
Let's assume that the 1996 policy in question is: "No company-written code that interacts with the Internet shall run on bare metal."
If we strictly interpret the policy in the context in which it was written, then we're in a pickle. Agner's hand-rolled x86_64 HTTP server is permitted. It runs atop GNU/Linux, so it's not freestanding and therefore isn't a "bare metal" program.
On the other hand, if we determine that the modern use of "bare metal" is compatible with what the authors of the policy intended, then the security team is clear to insist that Agner run his HTTP server within Docker, for instance.
If you really want to break out of your political echo chamber, you have to first decide how you want the world to be, and why, and then look for people and orgs who can help make it that way. You have to start with facts and policy and then find partners to work with, and politicians who will be open to your preferences. This is how the pros approach governing, including the names you read in the paper every day.
Partisan politics is the tool that powerful people wield to get what they want; it’s not a core part of their identity. If you’re not approaching politics with the same pragmatic skepticism, you are the one getting used by them.
Russ Roberts, host of the podcast Econ Talk, is really good at this. Independent of the guests political background, he does a good job of offering debate using a charitable interpretation of other people's arguments (even ones he doesn't disagree with). He also is pretty good at trying to find common ground with people he disagrees with, and when he realizes he's made a statement that would demonstrate his bias, he's pretty quick to call out his own bias.
Among the modern writings, Arendt's Human Condition was a real eye opener for me. I hope to find more modern book of such quality of thought, but older ones by classic philosophers don't lose their relevance either.
I have full access to Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. I go to Wired to read about tech, not some worse version of a take made in WaPo or WSJ.
While this may be true for many issues, I don't think this is true for all issues. Imagine someone saying that just prior to the civil war on the issue of slavery, for example.
This is quite similar to Germany's handling of the 2nd World War. You cannot just pretend it didn't happen, and you cannot just pretend everybody was devil's child and pure evil. You have to accept that "normal" people may act like absolute beasts, and try to understand why, not ignore it.
If we don't, then we'll repeat history. Oh well.
If I find a source has been manipulative in the past, I lower the faith I have in them to be objective in the future.
If someone makes some kind of desperate reach or strawman to "win," I wonder what else they are reaching about.
The shorter the quote, the longer the original source text I want to find from which it was drawn, because so much gets taken out of context.
Similarly, Twitter is too short to allow for nuanced commentary.
If I can find notable hypocrisy from someone, well ... their worth goes to about zero.
The person who desperately tries to cite "50/50" liberal and conservative sources in the article is the worst kind of fence sitter. Sometimes, one side or the other is just wrong, or their position is disingenuous. It doesn't make sense to provide a fair and balanced view when the other view is that maybe there are literal demons running the government.
One of these sites outright says they offer a "conspiracy theorist" feed. While there is some educational benefit to understanding what those people are reading, in the context of getting a balanced perspective, we should acknowledge it's useless information to most people, if not downright harmful.
Exactly. Imagine saying that it's important to be able to make an impassioned argument for slavery?
To make it contemporary: Should I be trying to get into the mind of a Q Conspiracy theorist? An Antivaxer? How many conspiracies do I need delve into and understand such that I can make a passionate argument for them?
Another point is that there aren't "two sides" to political issues but a wide variety of sides and that often, when you pick the two supposed sides of an issue, you've actually picked the answer - without, say, having to have an argument for this answer.
Unpopular note: HN has had too many of these garbage articles leveraging this vacuous and manipulative "two sides" rhetoric - "Ivy League" article but several others. And these have had an actually pretty strong center-right bias and just generally detract from the site imo.
If you want to look at TV entertainment, even something as "wholesome" as Lucy or Leave it to Beaver all they way from the 50s is chocked full of outrage at anything not considered acceptable at the time.
While sites like The Federalist and Breitbart may offer an accurate sampling of palatable far right viewpoints, this does not extend to the far left. The deficiency is exposed with the inclusion of CNN and MSNBC in the far left category. You need only look at the 2020 Democratic primary and observe how these cable channels reacted to the Sanders campaign[1] to get a sense of how incoherent it is to place them there.
What is lost in defining the left border as such is the erasure of publications on the far left that help describe some of the ideas and thought that drove Bernie's popularity. Of course he eventually lost the primary but can we really call CNN and MSNBC far left when they played a role in the demise of the most viable left-wing candidate in recent US history?
This is an important consideration because a news diet of the CNN, NYT, WSJ and Ben Shapiro may appear to be balanced but there is no left source that is the same magnitude of the right wing Ben Shapiro.
[1]: https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1231353446336548867?s...
Abby Martin's Breaking the Set show is what got me to pay attention to just how coddled by our domestic media our government is. There are so many things that they straight up don't cover at all.
It's not a slant in stories, it's a total refusal to cover important things.
It seems to me that there are some issues with a clear right and wrong: the climate emergency. We essentially cannot overreact, we should be doing 309% of what we are currently doing to go zero carbon. In such a case as the “real world outside our society” id involved, it would seem that there are objectively right and wrong courses of action, in addition to many complex calculi that can have mixed value even if implemented with purely good faith and intentions. (Aka actual error)
It would seem that legions of conservative and prudent scientists from diverse fields are to be considered “political radicals” for merely telling the truth.
When it comes to an issue like, say, climate change, I spent years reading the blogosphere, reading blogs like WUWT and whatever Judith Curry would come up with, and then the rebuttals, sometimes waiting years for the science to come out.
For any issue around climate science, there's probably a web page on it at skeptical sicence. I've probably skimmed at least half the papers on that webpage. After many years of that (I'm a veteran of the mid-2000s global "pause" debate) I've made up my mind.
The idea that having made my mind is a horrible thing, is just a tactic to try to creates wedges of doubt to try to keep a zombie political idea going. One side is getting very desperate because of how incredibly wrong they've consistently been.
And implicitly I bet it isn't Fox News viewers that you see starting to listen to NPR (although I'm certainly they'll pick out some individuals that do) it is predominantly working to get the open-minded-liberal crowd and Joe Rogan viewers to spend some time letting Fox News pour information into their head in the name of being better informed about both sides.
Some news really is equivalent to trans fats and highly refined sugars for the brain. Trying to achieve "balance" there isn't actually healthy. Some of it is just bad. And the two outcomes are either that you're going to get sucked in (and not even realize it) or that you're just going to get angry at it.
Agree completely that it's used as a divide and conquer tactic.
However, convincing the consumers of said wrong information, or more than wrong just outright fabrications in many cases, is a tough sell. Telling someone that their major belief system and ideology is "wrong" will usually harden their beliefs further.
You're an extreme minority in how in-depth you've looked into the science. The only really rational position for someone who hasn't done so is at most vague trust based on the scientific consensus. People who both haven't sufficiently looked into the science and yet who still have a strongly held belief are part of the problem even when they happen to be right.
Then the political implications are a different matter to the scientific question. There is a whole range of political positions you can come to even given a consensus on the science. Do you drastically reduce carbon usage or accept the warming and adapt? Maybe both? That is where the political x/y/z axes come in.
And I'm not a veteran dating back to mid 2000's. I'm a veteran dating to the late 80's at which time I was very concerned. But the dire predictions simply didn't come to pass. We have been burning coal for well over 200 years. And oil for over 100. Where is the massive climate change? Where is the massive increase in extreme weather events?
So I highly doubt the accuracy of many models. I also highly doubt a slightly warmer wetter world will be net negative for humanity should it come to pass.
I don't see my skepticism to be anti scientific at all. My purpose for posting this is not to argue against climate change, simply to point out that the magnitude and ultimate effects are not settled in my mind at least. The issue isn't closed. It's not "fact". It's a hypothesis as to what the effects will be and the way forward is very much opened to debate. It's certainly not "one side is absolutely right!" at all.
Thankfully, she declined. But the point is of course: here we are.
Let's be honest here, the direction of this thread, and people most enthused about the linked article are people who are sympathetic to right-wing ideologies. Currently, because of demographic trends, the right-wing is scared that their ideas will be run out of the marketplace of ideas. The only way to prevent that is to 1. Embrace enlightened centrism, and 2. Complain that their opinions aren't being treated "equally".
People that follow the ideology of echo-chambering that you're proposing is exactly what we don't need at this time. Labeling centrists with condescendence of fetishism is uncalled for. I suggest RTFA.
The press is doing a poor job of omitting facts (which is different from lying) because they don't echo back in their chambers. People that follow your proposal would be illinformed of the facts that are omitted.
If you're looking for new philosophies or perspectives, I strongly suggest two things:
1. fiction
2. history
I don't think day-to-day news coverage can ever be written at a level where it might affect your fundamental values; among many other problems, it is typically written in a hurry, with a lack of context, and so it lacks long-term perspective.
In terms of books that have changed my perspective on some subject, here are some important ones I've read over the last year:
Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Lolita-Tehran-Memoir-Books/dp...
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes
https://www.amazon.com/Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Se...
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich
https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Power-American-Exceptionalism-...
The Emergence of China: From Confucius to the Empire, by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks
https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-China-Confucius-Ancient-Con...
Azar Nafisi's book is both a true life action story, and it's also an intellectual journey, a consideration of how authoritarianism slowly takes over.
Sarah Chayes book is remarkably ambitious, not only did I suddenly see corruption as a global issue, but she connects it to religious extremism and then reviews the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 1400s and how that lead to Martin Luther and that era's own explosion of religious extremism.
Andrew J. Bacevich's book is a sober look at all the things the USA probably cannot do, even though it has the worlds most powerful military
The Brooks book about China was eye opening for me. I previously knew nothing about the Warring States period, or the intense intellectual debate that occurred over the meaning of the state and the duties of the leader to the people. I wish more Westerners knew this story.
Should I expect this kind of writing from the daily newspaper? Absolutely not. It's ridiculous. It's a category error. That's now what the daily newspaper is for. That's certainly not what the 24 hour news cycle is for.
Sometimes I want actionable news I can use, which is partly a matter of knowing which candidates might have the best chances of advancing my goals. Especially during primary races, day-to-day political news is useful to me when it gives me the information I need to decide who of many candidates I should donate money to.
But when I want new perspectives and philosophies? I turn to books.
If I had to guess, this seems like a well-placed piece to raise awareness for the startup Ground News, which has begun advertising heavily in recent months (and is the only new tool mentioned in the article). Either way, congrats to their team on the work they're doing, and on being mentioned in this piece!
I’m going to suggest that unless you work directly in the news media industry yourself, you too should be paying absolutely no attention to the news.
“It is all Bullshit”, is what Mr. Money Mustache says, “You need to get the News out of your life, right away, and for life.”
The reasons for this are plentiful, from the inherently sucky nature of news programming itself, to the spectacular life benefits of adopting a Low Information Diet in general. But let’s start with the news.
News programs are, with the exception of a few non-profit or publicly funded ones, commercial enterprises designed to turn and maximize profit. Many of them are owned by larger shareholder-owned corporations, most notably Rupert Murdoch’s News corp. The profit comes from advertising, and advertising revenue is maximized by pulling the largest audience, holding their attention for the longest possible time, and putting them into the mental state most conducive to purchasing the products of the advertisers (which turns out to be helplessness and vulnerability).
Another great perspective on this: This Video Will Make You Angry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
In the din of infinite media outlets, the major media outlets must stand out from the crowd. They do this by extending their bias to outright advocacy for their political side. This is happening on both sides. Other niche outlets are doing the same thing to be attractive to a specialized set of readers.
Unfortunately, it has gone from advocacy to outrage. A daily outrage occurred in the media in response to Trump, where every action created an outrage from one offended group or another. It was more than just Trump. "Cancel culture" was created where those who were outraged by something someone said on social media "cancelled" the speaker's life by erasing them from society. They lost their jobs and were ostracized by their peers.
Where does all this lead? I hope it is not violence. However, the political violence I see everyday in the form of violent protests and riots is not a welcome sight.
So "it was objective" may be a bit much. UPI, AP, and the national news were pretty close to unbiased. Local papers often had their slant, which would include editorials, local news, and maybe even which national stories were covered.
It was far better than today, I'll grant you.
The media has always had biases. How can it not, it's run by people.
Look at the propaganda during the Spanish-American War. That's the most obvious U.S. example of how biased media can be. And we enjoy the temporal distance to not be invested in the events so we can evaluate it from a third-party perspective.
Are you saying the media became less biased after that then more biased?
After watching CNN's technical director saying on spy cam that their publication is entirely driven by propaganda, I lost trust in all the news agencies out there. Quote:
> Yeah. I mean like Trump, we did it, like when Trump was, I don't know, like his hand was shaking or whatever I think. We brought in like so many medical people to like all tell a story that like, it was all speculation, that he was neurologically damaged, that he was losing it. He's unfit to, you know, whatever. We were... we were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about, you know? That's what -- I think that's propaganda, you know? We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off the bow just hoping something would hit, you know?
I'm a massive centrist, not a US citizen, trying to be as objective as possible. A shit and for-profit/power propaganda is flowing from both ends.
I regularly read it, Fox news, CNN, NBC, and Breitbart to get ideas about what my colleagues might be thinking.
The idea of "centrism" makes no sense with Trumpism on one side. "Yes I am pro-democratic republic and I also want to be ruled by a dictator who hollows out and weaponizes public institutions and muzzles his enemies."
The center means there is common ground but Trump scorched the GOP's half of it. The only way I can envision a center is if the GOP figures out how to move beyond Trumpism and rebuild themselves into a conservative party. Currently the only people offering a shred of hope, by for example cooperating with the Democratic center, are the likes of Romney, who got booed offstage by GOP supporters.
Sorry, but the lady doth protest too much.
Remember when "$2,000 checks out the door immediately" became $1,400 checks after weeks of delays and the left leaning media outlets and thus liberals went along with it?
Remember when Biden dropped plans to help out with student loan debt and nobody batted an eyelid?
Remember when Medicare-for-All and Green New Deal were things liberals pretended to care about?
The left constantly moves right by accepting the status quo. They don't need to document specific examples in an article because it is the basis behind every major policy topic for at least the last 10 years.
How often do you see Christmas used as a plot device? Or a church used as a setting? Or a priest character?
I would be shocked if context didn't imply that > 95% of American film characters are Christian.
Far less than 60% of the time. And you can celebrate Christmas without being a Christian.
If you just consume random media, you're getting the left-leaning perspective. It's the right-leaning perspective that you probably have a deficiency of unless you make a great deal of effort to swim against the current.
Take, for example, Haidt's work on analyzing how well different political ideologies understood each other.
The bottom line: Moderates and Conservatives understood the Liberal perspective better than Liberals understand other perspectives.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...
[edit: fixed a typo]
> Even longtime bastions of the Right like the military, FBI, etc. have been taken over by the Left.
What? What does this even mean?
The idea that the right understands the left better than the right is silly - how many Fox News profiles are there of Whole Foods shopping Democrats in Arlington? Of Black voters in Gwinnett county? Meanwhile, NYTimes did countless stories for four years about rural voters in diners that still like Trump despite the scandal of the week.
No news source is "unbiased" as in "not guided by what the newspaper things is valuable". It's a ridiculous notion. Even when full honesty is assumed (not sure why anyone would; all newspapers publish what they want you to think for all sorts of reasons), even putting aside external factors that constrain or compel what is said, there is a selection process informed by what is held as important. I am not dismissing the objectivity of value (no fact-value dichotomy in my world), but in practice, you will see a variation in what people hold that to be or want to hold that to be.
Also, this post has only one top level comment on the first page of comments.
John Oliver - https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter/iamjohnoliver
Tucker Carlson - https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter/TuckerCarlson
r/politics - https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/politics
r/moderatepolitics - https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/moderatepolitics
r/conservative - https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/conservative
BTW Blindspotter is built by Ground News (https://ground.news/). They're like All Sides (https://www.allsides.com/) in that they provide displays that let you see articles from across the spectrum on a given story. But they also measure how much of a blindspot there is for the left or right based on how heavy or sparse the coverage of a story is from news sources of various biases, since much of the time we're not dealing with biased articles as much as selective coverage.
I learned nothing except that this guy was a tremendous asshole, saying things like "I want the US to nuke a country in the Middle East, I don't even care which one". Hearing shit like that, and his arrogant, bigoted, hate-filled bashing of everything to the left of Hitler diatribes just pissed me off, and I decided I really didn't need to hear more right-wing garbage.
While I was there, though, I did listen to others, like Rush Limbaugh and various other right wing "luminaries" (including going back to William F Buckley), and while Michael Savage was the most extreme of the ones I listened to, they were all just different shades of crap.
The same goes for listening, reading, or watching mainstream media like CNN or MSNBC, which I consider way too conservative for me. When I heard them defending the Iraq war, endlessly interviewing generals and other pro-war figures without interviewing any serious anti-war opposition (like, say, Noam Chomsky, or any of the other leaders of the antiwar movement), when they give trite, superficial coverage of protests and focus on sensationalism rather than issues the protests are about, when they (say) crap all over Obama for not wearing a lapel pin (instead of something serious like him enabling the surveillance state), when they give endless air time to Trump or can't stop talking about him (pre-election.. it's harder to ignore him when he's President), when they have an unquestioning support of capitalism, then I wonder why the fuck am I listening to this?
Yes, I'm out of my echo chamber when I listen to right-wing and mainstream news, but what's the point? They're really not telling me anything new... I already know how pro-war, pro-capitalist, right wing, anti-left they are.
Even consuming left-wing media mostly just upsets me because all they do is talk about the injustices of the right and quote right-wing media back at me, which just pisses me off more.
If I was politically active maybe this would be more bearable, as I'd have an outlet for my frustration, but as I'm not I really try to limit my consumption of news, left-or-right.
In theory it would be nice if there was more real communication between the left and the right, mutual understanding, and cooperation on issues we do agree on.. but I just don't see it happening. Both sides see each other as super biased, unfair, and close-minded, and it's hard to see how that's going to change... just getting out of one's echo chamber is not enough.
"The latest Trump scandal shows how much we must still discover about his presidency's assault on democracy"
"Trump's DOJ continued to pursue a CNN reporter's records even after a federal judge called the reasoning 'unanchored in any facts'"
"A senate report reveals new details about the stunning security breakdowns ahead of the January 6 attack but omits Trump's role"
"Ex-president Obama says he never thought the darkness that rose in the GOP during his tenure would reach the party's epicenter"
"Exclusive audio of a 2019 phone call shows how Rudy Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Biden"
These are CNN headlines from just the past week.
On the right, when Trump hadn't yet gotten control of the party, there was some persistent reaction against him from established conservative media. Once he got control, it was almost complete silence.
On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's election team was completely made up and water carrying by the media of Clinton's team's planted story has never been owned by the participants.
There are near infinite examples of this on both sides. I just want media that is skeptical of those in power and those seeking power. All of them, not those on another team.
This is bizarre. No such thing happened.
The most obvious reason here, is that when you go to college it tends to make you more liberal. Because you learn about the world, which makes you more tolerant and less religious.
But I think there are some psychosocial forces beyond that going on too. America was founded on the idea of going out and getting a bunch of free land and being self sufficient, so being godly and being self sufficient and being American all got tangled together. And if you’re wealthy and live in the country, you probably have a lot of property, which makes you conservative too.
Anyways there’s a lot more going on here and nobody ever talks about it, everything gets blamed on whatever the new explanation for every problem is, the internet currently. The internet exaggerates and intensifies these tendencies but it’s not where they come from.
The issue to me is more that the extremes are so extreme as to be unworkable; you have people being unironic nazis, monarchists, and marxist-communists, so anything else will seem sane and balanced. But it's definitely not being out of an echo chamber.
This isn’t appropriate for every belief, but for some, it is.
You’ll learn something reading a liberal or conservative argue why their position is correct versus then other side. You can usually distinguish these article because they fairly state the other side’s position.
You won’t learn much reading something whose basic premise is “of course our side is right, let me tell you about all the bad things the other side is up to”.