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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

#571

Post by baybal2 »

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…

When I was living in Canada, I managed to get myself to caucuses of Christy Clarke though I wasn't even a citizen. Still have few photos of me in a $20 Chinese suit feeling very odd in the setting of the Vancouver club.

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.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#572

Post by majormajor »

rayiner wrote: post #432
pmoriarty wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CNN and MSNBC are not the opposite of Fox News. The opposite would be something like The Nation or Democracy Now! .

Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years, while CNN and MSNBC have moved quite a bit to the left. You see it more on cultural issues than say economic or foreign policy issues. Joy Reid, for example, just says the most outrageous falsehoods and goes completely unrebutted: https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1403950560907300865?s=20

I got the "the civil war wasn't about slavery" line fed to me in school. Reconstruction was a bad thing, too, and it was good when the North stopped meddling. So where's the most outrageous falsehood here? The "nothing to do with" bit? That's not the exact version I got, but the gist was: "the Civil War was about states rights, it's just a coincidence that the right in question was the right to have slaves, but the South wasn't morally in the wrong because states rights are actually that important."

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#573

Post by rsynnott »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #22
boringg wrote: post #3

TBH I am over political news and over biased sites on both spectrums. Too much information and too much making hay. Soo much of it isn't news - and it hamstrings any politicians able to talk to the other side when they report on the minutiae.

I sometimes think American politics has been reduced to a census ... whether people claim blue or red are strongly correlated to income, age, urban/rural and other factors.

Political divides are pretty demographic in most places (in particular, urban vs rural is a big one). It does seem particularly extreme in the US, but that may be partially down to the two party system, which encourages tribalism.

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_.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#574

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

ape4 wrote: post #41

I would suggest reading news from other countries about USA. https://www.bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada

RT is fantastic for criticizing the US government. Though I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them when covering Russia.

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.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#575

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

mrkstu wrote: post #134
Impassionata wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascists don't care about truth. It's that simple. And people are that easy to mislead. At least for a while.

Sigh- voted against Trump twice. The fact of the matter is the Ratcliffe Letter [0] shows that President Obama was given an briefing well before the Steele Dossier was leaked to the media that the Russians' had picked up intelligence that exactly that kind of fake evidence would be planted by the Clinton campaign. I really don't believe in a coincidence that big and unless Steele was simultaneously a Russian and Clin…

>Sigh- voted against Trump twice.

You cannot vote "against" someone in any election except a recall.

Who you voted for is who you voted for.

Simple example: When I voted for Howie Hawkins in 2020, who was my vote "against"?

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#576

Post by vaishaksuresh »

NaturalPhallacy wrote: post #520
parafactual wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link? You may be right, but such a study seems very easy to bias, even unintentionally.

Here's a short article on the paper: https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand... The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...

Published in 2012. lol! good times!

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#577

Post by tomc1985 »

slumdev wrote: post #513
laputan_machine wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of the second type? I see this kind of strawman argument against centrism all the time, yet I rarely see "worst of both worlds" outcomes in a political sense

Most Americans support an abortion ban, but they also support exceptions for rape or incest. If the fetus is a human person with rights, there should be no exception. If the fetus is not a human person with rights, then restrictions of any kind are unjust. The provenance of the fetus has no effect on the moral liceity of killing it. It's a lazy opinion formed by appeals to emotion.

> Most Americans support an abortion ban, but they also support exceptions for rape or incest.

This is news to me, can you qualify this statement?

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#578

Post by astrange »

cwkoss wrote: post #475
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.

Isn't the exact same thing true of CNN and MSNBC, but just in the other direction?

What "the" other direction? There isn't a single dimension here.

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#579

Post by bobthechef »

tomrod wrote: post #491
cwkoss wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the exact same thing true of CNN and MSNBC, but just in the other direction?

I see more pushback, but also find CBS and ABC to be relatively objective. This mapping has proven useful https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/

That seems like a preposterous claim. Those are classic regime television stations. And I find this diagram biased.

Also, "middle" or centrist is not the same as objective. The path of least extreme disagreement is not the same as the truth (ask a Christian: he'll tell you that Jesus is the truth and that the world hates Jesus). Besides, the middle of what? The neoliberal paradigm? The current spread on offer?

Re: Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

#580

Post by slowhand09 »

lamontcg wrote: post #495

I don't understand this fetishism with centrism and all opinions being treated equally, and that having made up your mind on an issue is necessarily wrong. 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 clim…

I listened to and contributed to NPR for years, long before Trump, Hillary , or Obama were things. I watch Fox news also. When you distinguish between news and opinion shows, Fox is at least as good as CNN/MSNBC/ABC/CBS. When you watch a cropped clip, then the full clip, and the entire circumstances change that should be a sign. Notice the Wired example mentioned kids in a TN classroom, and it was the liberal kids they implied were scared to express their opinions. I'm pretty sure they cherrypicked that. Because that is the opposite in most states, especially those where the teachers assign specific homework based on opinion shows, demonizing specific parties and ideas. Your initial point about climate science... It was cooling, then heating, now change, and sea level rise. Most people you would characterize as "climate deniers" believe in climate change. Many do not agree that by adopting electric cars and burning ethanol(remember that transfer of wealth?) in the US, we control change after crippling our economy while China churns out multiple times what the rest of the world does. I'm sure they'll stop tho, once the completely dominate the world economy. Wanna talk about gun control now?
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