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Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

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Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#61

Post by throwaway894345 »

XorNot wrote: post #44
burnished wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for me, personally, absolutely not. I want thoughtful portrayal of character in media that I consume, but am in no way desiring yet more religious representation.

This seems like an odd take to me. What is the point of film and fiction if not to see and experience things you otherwise cannot or would not? The question I have is what is being preserved by not having a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities and belief systems in films?

The parent seems to be suggesting that he doesn't want the emphasis to be on diversity, but rather on quality of characters. This doesn't imply that the characters have to be homogeneous.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#62

Post by AnimalMuppet »

joshuaheard wrote: post #32

I have been reading daily news for 50 years. When I first started reading the news, it was objective. It portrayed facts with little opinion. Then during the Reagan presidency, I noticed a trend towards liberal bias in the media. This is well documented by MRC.org. To counter this, conservative talk radio was born, and Fox news was created. In the din of infinite media outlets, the major media outlets must stand out…

Get a list of the names of medium-to-large town newspapers (from, say, 1980, before many of them closed). Look at the names. Note how many papers have "Democrat" or "Republic" in the name. Many of those papers were founded to deliberately support one political party.

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.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#63

Post by aeturnum »

vsskanth wrote: post #8

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: 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…

>All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment.

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.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#64

Post by nkingsy »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #13
vsskanth wrote: post #8

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: 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…

I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim ; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious…

American media is a global industry and is serving a customer base of much more than the US population.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#65

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

Noos wrote: post #45
api wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing a lot of people miss is that there is a profit motive here. You can make money, sometimes a lot of money, by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. You can find examples of people doing this on all sides, especially at the extremes where outrage and other powerful negative emotions can most easily be stirred up. All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorshi…

Not really. Like a recent cancel attempt was Scott Cawthon, creator of the game series Five Nights at Freddy's. His crime? Voting for trump. 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…

Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, it’s indisputable that President Trump is the single most polarizing figure in American politics at the moment. He is radioactive for a large proportion of our fellow citizens.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#66

Post by muyuu »

Grim-444 wrote: post #60
vsskanth wrote: post #8

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: 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…

"They dont talk about or even cover the same things" - this is the number one fake news tactic in play. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's a 2x2 matrix - 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 se…

Not only that, they go out of their way to police the topics in forums and social media.

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.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#67

Post by rhino369 »

abrahamepton wrote: post #52
nateberkopec wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives 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 absolute…

Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented. What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?

I'm not even sure if its true since most media will barely engage with the issue. But Fauci appeared concerned that Covid-19 could potentially be the result of a gain-of-function research that artificially evolved another COVID strain to increase its effectiveness at spreading.

If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research.

Instead, the powers that be sort of dismissed it as a conspiracy theory for over a year until it was suddenly okay to talk about a few months ago.

Again, I can't even tell if any of that is true because most media outlets ignored it.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#68

Post by mrfusion »

vsskanth wrote: post #8

I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: 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…

IMO Comparing viewpoints isn’t as important as simply popping you out of the bubble. The key is to distrust the media more than you distrust the “other side”.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#69

Post by myko »

mrkstu wrote: post #34

My main issue with American news and commentary is the complete lack of skepticism of those on 'their side' of an issue. 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 electi…

> 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.

This is bizarre. No such thing happened.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#70

Post by myfavoritedog »

If you want to counteract the narrative bubbles that you're operating in, you need to work hardest to counteract the one that is the default. If you're like most Americans, you're probably immersed in left-leaning thought. The Left owns the culture. They own the major institutions that are shaping society through Hollywood, academia, sports entertainment, the music industry, social media, etc. They own the bureaucracy that has pretty much eaten up the US government. Even longtime bastions of the Right like the military, FBI, etc. have been taken over by the Left.

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]

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