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

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#401

Post by TrispusAttucks » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

anm89 wrote: post #346

fancyfish wrote: post #287

The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. 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 l…

Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…

Agreed. The center is the glue the holds the populace in check. We need these people. Once the center is eroded things will not go well.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#402

Post by notsureaboutpg » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

boredprograming wrote: post #263

losvedir wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things 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,…

Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.

Am I the only one who feels Tucker Carlson is so popular because he (a lot like Donald Trump) was willing to challenge the false idols of the Republican establishment (e.g. we need to be at war in Afghanistan/Iraq, the free market isn't always the best especially if it leads to outsourcing and offshoring, etc.)

Might just be me. I dislike 90% of fox news but I listen to Carlson sometimes and never find him to be horrible or BS-y (admittedly I don't listen in all the time so I may be missing some stuff)

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#403

Post by slumdev » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:29 PM UTC

anm89 wrote: post #346

fancyfish wrote: post #287

The elephant in the room is that this sort of enlightened centrism, while it sounds noble, rests on several ill-formed assumptions. 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 l…

Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…

There are two centrisms that can't be confused.

The first kind of centrist examines each issue on its merits and arrives at a principled conclusion, regardless of how other people think about an issue. This kind of centrism is reasonable. This person can't really even be called a centrist. He's just non-partisan.

The second kind of centrist looks at the existing parties to an argument and averages their viewpoints: "Group A insists 2+2=4 and group B insists 2+2=6, but I'm a virtuous centrist, so I believe that 2+2=5."

I don't think anyone has any issue with the first kind of centrist. But there are far too many of the second kind.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#404

Post by arecurrence » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 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…

Ground News handles aggregating and showing each source that is discussing the same topic event. It has become the first site I go to for news and from there I can easily access virtually everything else while knowing what the perspective that I'm stepping into is in advance.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#405

Post by rayiner » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

boredprograming wrote: post #263

losvedir wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They dont talk about or even cover the same things 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,…

Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.

Does anyone watch TV anymore? I read Fox News online, which is fine, but I don’t think I’ve ever tuned into shows. My parents have CNN on a loop, and even my dad (a die-hard Carter fan) calls it “DNC talking points.”

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#406

Post by marvindanig » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 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…

I recommend the newsletter The Flipside [1] by Annafi Wahed. She and the team are doing an amazing job bringing the two sides together.

Shout out to Annafi– how are you all doing there?!

[1] https://www.theflipside.io/

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#407

Post by TMWNN » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

rejectedandsad wrote: post #98

myfavoritedog wrote: post #70

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 bureaucrac…

Most of this is because the cultural tastemakers have long been college educated cosmopolitans, and the modern right has taken an extreme turn that has alienated them. Orange County votes Democrat on the presidential level now! > 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 th…

>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.

myfavoritedog's point is that the default position in the Times is of Whole Foods-shopping Democrats in NoVa. You couldn't read a book review, or sports column, without anti-Trump snark suddenly appearing in there regardless of the subject matter (seriously, it was like there was a quota to meet),

The pieces you mention invariably

* treat the subjects like they're a new, just-discovered animal species

* frame their fears and hopes, needs and concerns, in very patronizing ways. Example: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/trump-macho-a...>, which a) attributed Latin male support for Trump to their desire for the same kind of authoritarian machismo that ruined their home countries (as opposed to the same reasons that other blue-collar workers, Latino or not, voted for Trump) and b) made wanting to provide for one's family sound like a bad thing. Outcome: Trump in 2024 didn't just again outperform expectations with Latinos in 2024 (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/trump-latino-...>), but also increased his Latin support.

(Needless to say, there's never, ever any Times article discussing how Latinos' support for a large welfare state hearkens back to their home countries' social models.)

* dismiss those being profiled as aberrations. Example: In 2016 the Clinton-friendly media backfired on Clinton by missing the facts on the ground. If in Ohio—for the past 150 years perhaps the quintessential swing state—and Iowa Trump was 10 points up in the polls, the right conclusion was that the rest of the Midwest was swinging to him too. The wrong conclusion was to come up with imaginary reasons why Ohio is suddenly no longer representative of the region or country (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/us/politics/ohio-campaign...>). One guess on which the press and the Clinton campaign chose.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#408

Post by mikepurvis » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #316

boredprograming wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.

We don't even have to litigate whether Fox News airtime is distinctively malignant if we just acknowledge that all 24/7 cable news channels are bad. They kind of have to be, just by the nature of how they compete and what they have to work with in both audiences and source material. Just don't get your news from the TV.

A fair point, but I don't think the concession is worth what you get out of it. A citizen whose sole news source is Fox is considerably less informed than a viewer who might watch exclusively CNN (or possibly even nothing at all, see [1])

Fox News really is worse, and while there may be lessons learned there which can be applied to the other outlets, such as insisting on clearer labeling of opinion content vs reporting, I think it's an all-lives-matter-style distraction to throw up our hands and say there's nothing that can be done and they're all equally bad because it's a problem inherent in the medium.

[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#409

Post by arecurrence » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

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…

Ground News points this out every week in their Blindspot newsletter.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#410

Post by nomdep » Mon, Jun 14, 2021, 6:30 PM UTC

elefanten wrote: post #135

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #124

> I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian 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.

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

Daredevil (a Netflix series)