Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers • Hacker News Board

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#271

Post by axguscbklp » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

smt88 wrote: post #112

threatofrain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google News gives you precisely this portfolio of vendors. Why would anyone subscribe to a single news vendor? I'd also advise adding WION, Al Jazeera, Axios, and The Guardian + BBC.

Google News is a dumpster fire. They include Sputnik and other govt propaganda sites from oppressive regimes.

I do not see that as a problem. Most news media is at least to some extent propaganda and basically all of it is biased. At the end of the day, if I want truth then I have to evaluate each bit of news media for its credibility whether it comes from state funded propaganda or from some supposedly impartial organization. So what I want from an aggregator is to just show me relevant content without trying to sort it by credibility. I trust myself to sort news media by credibility much more than I trust any aggregator to sort it for me.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#272

Post by rejectedandsad » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

myfavoritedog wrote: post #253

rejectedandsad wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s quite hard to reason with a political movement in which half don’t believe the guy that got 51% of the vote and 306 electoral votes isn’t the president, to the extent of sympathizing with an attack on the electoral vote count and “auditing” the ballots repeatedly. A majority of the house republicans caucus effectively voted to bypass the will of the people during the electoral vote count - makes the Democratic o…

to the extent of sympathizing with an attack on the electoral vote count The Left thought it was hilarious when Trump's Secret Service moved him to the bunker when violent protesters were threatening to breach the security of the White House. I remember late night jokes, CNN/MSNBC mocking of how big a coward Trump was, etc. It was a great deal of fun and tied in with the lies about how supposedly Trump had peaceful p…

> the bunker when violent protesters were threatening to breach the security of the White House

Yeah because they didn’t and Trump hilariously lied about the incident. Even they weren’t saying “hang Mike Pence”

> Hillary Clinton spent years claiming that the election of Trump was illegitimate.

She did win the popular vote, while Trump won neither while claiming he did win both….

> They created an environment that was ripe for corruption and then assumed shocked faces as corruption was alleged.

Biden won 81M votes, the most in history. Have fun with the next 4-8 years.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#273

Post by pmoriarty » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #216

pmoriarty wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, seeing a movie on the Himalayas is no substitute for visiting the Himalayas, and that's no substitute to living in the Himalayas. But I'd rather have there be movies on the Himalayas than not, even when we are aware it's not a perfect substitute for the real thing. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The problem is that movies influence what we think the truth is. Is Tokyo like the Godzilla movies? I would hope that everything not obviously related to the fictional attack is realistic to how the people actually live, because like it or not movies influence us.

If your only view of Tokyo is what you get through Godzilla movies then you definitely have a problem.

The solution is better movies on Tokyo, not no movies on Tokyo.

You're in luck, though, because there are plenty of great movies on Tokyo -- movies that even people living in Tokyo find give great insights in to their own society.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#274

Post by solidasparagus » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #189

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, not really. Christmas may have been a product of Christianity (hijacking a pagan holiday...), but it has long since become just a western culture tradition with no particular religious significance for a lot of people. Most Christmas movies don't even mention Christ.

> it has long since become just a western culture tradition with no particular religious significance for a lot of people I think that people have a tendency to underestimate the degree of Christian influence on their way of life, and the vast majority of people who practice xmas are Christian, even if they are not weekly church attendees. I was raised in an atheist household, we definitely viewed Christmas as a reli…

Christmas is a very secular holiday. There is still mass, but in American culture the religious aspect of Christmas is minuscule in comparison to the secular and consumerism aspects. "Most of the songs are very religious" is just not true for most mainstream Americans.

For most Americans Christmas is about family, Santa (Coke's version), Reindeers, Elves, Trees, and Gifts. And then local or family traditions which may include mass, but for most, it does not.

If you'd like some stats - 90% of Americans celebrate Christmas. Fewer than half of Americans consider Christmas primarily a religious holiday. Among younger generations that is much lower (30% of Millennials consider it a primarily religious holiday). A majority of Americans say that Christmas is less of a religious holiday than it was in the past. Only about half of Americans will go to church on Christmas (compared to 82% that will spend time with family).[1]

https://www.pewforum.org/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-...

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#275

Post by throwaway894345 » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #213

asguy wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Xmas is most certainly Christian. ... didn’t Xmas start being used exactly for that reason, i.e. to separate the event from religion. I didn’t grow up believing in Jesus, but I definitely believed in Santa Claus.

> didn’t Xmas start being used exactly for that reason, i.e. to separate the event from religion. No, its a Christian abvreviation originating from the ancient use of the greek Chi (visually identical to Latin X), sometimes along with Rho (Latin P) — the first two letters of Christ in Greek — as an abbreviation for Christ. Itsl dates back to, IIRC, the 16th C with similar forms back to the medieval period. Its been r…

Whatever its origins, I have the distinct impression that, in addition to being a shorthand, it is used commonly to disambiguate Secular Christmas from Christian Christmas. I agree that Fox News blows this out of proportion and isn't correct on minutia about its origins, but that doesn't mean it isn't commonly used to distinguish between secular and religious variants which is IMHO the more substantial point.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#276

Post by bosswipe » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #168

dragonwriter wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, 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.c…

CNN is a bad example of a left leaning news outlet. They're quite centrist. The reason mainstream media appears to be left biased is because people use the government's political center as their frame of reference rather than that of the populace. The media caters to political beliefs of actual average American. The federal government caters to the center of voting power, which is heavily skewed towards smaller state…

Super interesting take, thanks! I've always been so confused by conservatives labeling all mainstream media as left-biased when I, as a liberal, see them as centrist or conservative.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#277

Post by munificent » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

apocolyps6 wrote: post #221

elefanten wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Christmas doesn’t signify religion in America. And I can’t remember the last time I saw church in a movie that wasn’t a comedy using the setting for a set-up

Do your Muslim friends celebrate Christmas? Do your Jewish friends? Most non-religious americans are something like Christian Atheists. They don't believe in a god, but their worldview, ethics, and cultural norms are still originating in Christianity.

> Most non-religious americans are something like Christian Atheists. They don't believe in a god, but their worldview, ethics, and cultural norms are still originating in Christianity.

I like latkes and challah, but that doesn't make me Jewish.

All groups influence culture and culture influences all individuals. But simply having adopted a piece of culture that came from some group does not make one a member of that group.

My wife and kids and I all celebrate Christmas. We are not Christian.

If celebrating Christmas made one Christian, then anyone including a yule log in their festivities must also be pagan.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#278

Post by dandersh » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:51 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #111

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 highly recommend the Economist . 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 the…

There are some benefits to the Economist, such as the ones you mentioned but I don't know that I could recommend it, at least without a secondary source for what you're reading there.

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.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#279

Post by frakkingcylons » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

barbazoo wrote: post #6

I didn't know about https://www.theflipside.io/latest-issue which compares news coverage of left and right leaning sources. Anyone know more sites like that they can recommend?

If you skip the opinion section, reporting from business news operations like Reuters or Bloomberg is basically as objective as it gets while still not being a plain recitation of facts.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#280

Post by takeda » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 5:52 PM UTC

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…

From my observation they (at least Fox News) do report on all the same things, they just made the articles not fitting their agenda buried deep in their websites, and on their TV channel they don't report it, or just quickly mention it on their non opinion segments.