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Some Americans are breaking out of political echo chambers

• andred14 5y ago
  The problem is our mainstream news sources lie constantly. We have caught them in many MANY lies about you know what. Coercion of people to take experimental drugs goes against the Nuremburg Code. There WILL be trials.
• gnicholas 5y ago
  I'm not sure this is news or reflects any actual trends in 2021. I work in this area and almost all of the tools/websites in this article have been around for years — since Trump's election or even before. 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!
• refurb 5y ago
  Nothing wrong with reading biased news sources. I think the difference is one should read sources that: 1) are upfront with their bias and 2) argue from a more neutral perspective. 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”.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    It's not just how biased they are, I'm having issues with how little they're about news and how much about pure clickbait. I used to think up until recently, that CNN was a legitimate (left leaning) news source but it's all "watch this person react to that person saying something" and amazon product recommendations for stuff no one needs.
    • sumtechguy 5y ago
      It has been going on for a while. Many of them have gone to the hot take reaction style opinion pieces. CNN copied the Fox 'formula' to try to get ratings. The 3 panel yell at each other format with maybe some news possibly scrolling at the bottom. It is not news. It is opinions presented as 'facts' when they are usually curated opinions to hit market share. The stuff before about 2010 was better disguised but it was still very similar to what you observe. Little news, lots of opinions. After that point I think they just stopped bothering to disguise it much. It is kind of 'interesting' to watch but you are not going to get much out of it. I cut a bunch of that sort of 'news' out of my life. It was not giving me news but curated opinions to have. I found my stress levels were so much nicer.
• boringg 5y ago
  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.
  • tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    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.
    • Server6 5y ago
      It's been like this forever and why gerrymandering is even a thing.
    • rsynnott 5y ago
      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_.
• ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  I identify pretty closely with one side. But certainly there are Outrage Machines on both sides, a network of media and personalities hyping up the latest calumny that the other side committed, for views and clicks. These machines can't slow down -- even if the other side has been quiet lately, all those people need something to do and talk about. They'll find something.
  • api 5y ago
    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 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.
    • myfavoritedog 5y ago
      Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech 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.
      • jakelazaroff 5y ago
        No need for the hypothetical — that happens regularly, and people on the left criticize them for it. They just don't often describe it as "censorship". Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
• barbazoo 5y ago
  I didn't know about https://www.theflipside.io/latest-issue 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?
  • mr-wendel 5y ago
    Not sure I'm a fan of this site in general, but I do like their list of sites at https://swprs.org/media-navigator/ https://swprs.org/media-navigator/. I've picked up some great regular reads from that list.
  • gnicholas 5y ago
    I launched Read Across The Aisle to help people find new news sources and balance their news media diets. It’s totally free. http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com
  • frakkingcylons 5y ago
    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.
• vsskanth 5y ago
  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 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.
  • dev_by_day 5y ago
    This site is great for trying to get different takes https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news 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.
    • brlewis 5y ago
      Allsides is prominently featured in the article.
      • medicineman 5y ago
        >implying they read the articles
      • dev_by_day 5y ago
        yes! I meant it more as a +1 to allsides but should have clarified that.
    • andrepd 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• djevdj 5y ago
  The glorious promise of the post truth world (Andrew Odlyzko) https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=3061712 https://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=3061712
• jccalhoun 5y ago
  I am starting to think that it isn't really the "news" but the commentary. Most sites will cover many of the same events. There will be different focuses but a large percentage of the information is the same. 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.
  • robmccoll 5y ago
    I live in one of the (upper?) middle class parts of Atlanta and I really hope they don't do that. Crime rates are up in a bad way, and the city can be pretty mismanaged, but taking your ball and going home isn't a real option. It's just going to hurt the city that will still be right next door, and that has your sports (some of it, Braves are gone), museums and culture, restaurants, a lot of work spaces and shopping, etc. You can't just wall it off and you do take part in it, so stay, keep paying your share, and fight to make it better. It'll be worse than when people outside the perimeter vote down taxes to cover transportation infrastructure and refuse mass transit, but are the ones commuting into and through town increasing the burden on the transit system. We're all in this together, so let's try to work together to improve it.
    • prepend 5y ago
      In general, I agree with you, but in the case of Atlanta and Fulton county that narrative is in conflict with repeated poor management. Lots of cities have incorporated over the past 20 years and ended up with better services and lower taxes. Part of that is due to siphoning off funds that would help worse off, but most is just due to more efficient management. 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.
• joshuaheard 5y ago
  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 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.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    What I continue to be surprised by is how the left-leaning sources keep denying their liberal bias. Fox news more or less admits to being right-leaning, but CNN is still insisting that they're unbiased, which is almost comical. I think that somehow left-biased types really, honestly, believe they're actually considering both sides of every issue, and just coming to the conclusion that "reality has a liberal bias".
    • myko 5y ago
      CNN isn't biased to the liberal or conservative viewpoint, it is biased towards clicks and views. A lot of the blame for trump gaining acceptance as a viable voting option belongs to CNN for uncritically promoting him and giving him coverage. When looking at US politics reality does have a liberal bias. Look at how conservatives handled the pandemic and losing the 2020 election. The minority party with a majority of the voting power in the US actively believes and promotes a false version of reality.
• vmception 5y ago
  > “We can’t pretend the Constitution doesn’t say what it says.” And then you read how some Supreme Court justices make a decision and you’re wondering if they are even reading the same document
  • ixacto 5y ago
    We also pretend the law doesn’t say what it says. Look at the sanctuary states for illegal immigration and marijuana. Then the red states started doing the same thing with second amendment sanctuary states. Looks like if there’s no political will to enforce the law it doesn’t get enforced.
    • shadowgovt 5y ago
      The US system is, perhaps, unusual in that it started from a set of independent states that formed a federal government. While the balance of power has shifted century-upon-century towards federal centralization, the power of the federal government to enforce federal law is still constrained by the money spent on federal-level enforcement; states are not generally legally obligated to go out of their way to assist federal law enforcement (and proving obstruction of justice in an inter-jurisdictional situation is pretty difficult most of the time if the states just use "malicious compliance" and stick to the letter of the law). Hence, "sanctuary cities" where the state and local government just doesn't feel obligated to hand over records and resources they aren't legally compelled to. It's basically daring the federal government that if the law is so important, they can spend the money on ICE / FBI / ATF / etc. resources to enforce it (because those resources are paid from a completely different pool than the state or town police).
  • acuozzo 5y ago
    I can hardly imagine how our technical jargon will change in the next 250 years. If you'll permit me… 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.
• pmoriarty 5y ago
  Long ago, before the rise of Fox News but after discovering my political identity as being on the left, I listened to a lot of AM talk radio (particularly Michael Savage) both to get out of my bubble and in a "know your enemy" sort of way. 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.
• hn8788 5y ago
  An underrated way to get out of your echo chamber is to actually talk to people in person. I lean fairly conservative, while my wife and her friends are very liberal. Whenever we happen to talk about political topics, most of the time we end up understanding where each other are coming from, even if we still don't agree.
  • standardUser 5y ago
    Perhaps your political viewpoints are fairly mild compared to mainstream conservative discourse? It's difficult to have civil discourse with someone who says your identify (or the identify of those you love) should be outlawed or otherwise severely restricted by the state. That's been a core tenet of conservative politics and policy for several years now and I do not have the intellectual tools nor the emotional strength to find common ground with people who view the world that way.
    • hpoe 5y ago
      Well I am conservative and don't believe that so maybe you should consider talking to more conservatives.
      • StephenAmar 5y ago
        Well, but do you vote for conservative candidate that may believe it? 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.
    • dbrueck 5y ago
      You could not have more completely proven his point.
    • TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
      The liberal viewpoint is vastly different from the conservative viewpoint, but only if we find a way to communicate and find common ground will we ever hope to move forward together as a nation. Seeing your political opponent as irredeemable is the first step towards sectarianism, which can easily lead to war. 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.
• prof-dr-ir 5y ago
  > "Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides," she says, "you don't understand the issue." 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.
  • UncleOxidant 5y ago
    > 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. 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?"
    • bena 5y ago
      It's not accurate for all topics. Can you make a passionate argument for a flat Earth? One that isn't rooted in ignorance or denial of something basic? 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.
    • aidenn0 5y ago
      I don't know that you should absolutely not have an opinion without understanding the other side, but if you don't spend at least a little bit of time understanding what motivates people to believe in conspiracy theories you will struggle to understand over half the population of the US. 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.
• mrkstu 5y ago
  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 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.
  • myko 5y ago
    > 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.
    • Impassionata 5y ago
      Fascists don't care about truth. It's that simple. And people are that easy to mislead. At least for a while.
      • mrkstu 5y ago
        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 Clinton asset, it doesn't matter, and that would be even a bigger issue that should have been the story. Can't have it both ways. I'm perfectly happy to not have Mr. Trump around any more, but I'd prefer the media not carry water for their preferred candidates and let me make those determinations [0]: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/09-29-20_Letter%20to%20Sen.%20Graham_Declassification%20of%20FBI's%20Crossfire%20Hurricane%20Investigations_20-00912_U_SIGNED-FINAL.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/09-29-20_Lett...
• fartcannon 5y ago
  There's a thing that happened with the Canada subreddit. It used to be kind of an interesting sub where youd get neat Canada-wide local stories (mostly Ontario) that were genrally pleasant. It was a nice place to visit after being inundated with American politics. Then, sometime in the early 10s and it gradually became very partisan and political. Which, to clarify, means it got substantially worse. 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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • multiplegeorges 5y ago
    It's interesting to see how you've characterized what happened in r/canada. I think it is itself an example of polarization. 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.
    • gruez 5y ago
      > Then, sometime in the early 10s and it gradually became very partisan and political. Which, to clarify, means it got substantially worse. I just checked the top posts for last week and it looks pretty... non-partisan? Certainly better than something /r/all. https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/top/?t=week https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/top/?t=week
• underseacables 5y ago
  I think this is missing the darker point, which is that the main stream media along with the political parties that support them, are the the echo chamber. It’s not that we are caught in an echo chamber, rather it’s the information from mass media corporations that has created the echo chamber. If anything, to break out so to speak, is perhaps as easy as simply turning off all news, and paying more attention directly to what politicians are saying.
  • cbsmith 5y ago
    > I think this is missing the darker point, which is that the main stream media along with the political parties that support them, are the the echo chamber. 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.
  • mmcconnell1618 5y ago
    Better to pay attention to what politicians are doing rather than what they are saying. Take a look at who donates to their campaigns, how they vote, and who they hang out with on a regular basis.
• zwieback 5y ago
  I wonder how different the polarization is at the local level. It's easy to get outraged about policies in another part of the country if your position doesn't really affect you. I'm guessing people have more nuanced views about, say, fertilizer or pesticides if they live in a very agricultural area or about investing in mass transport if they live in an urban area.
• ape4 5y ago
  I would suggest reading news from other countries about USA. https://www.bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada https://www.bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada
  • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    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.
• benzible 5y ago
  AllSides buys wholesale into right-wing framing. By what measure is CNN's news coverage on the leftmost side of the spectrum? Is MSNBC really the equivalent of Jacobin or Mother Jones, especially when it devotes 3 hours each morning to center-right Morning Joe? https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > By what measure is CNN's news coverage on the leftmost side "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.
    • Impassionata 5y ago
      This is the problem with concepts of polarization: when one side is completely corrupt, reporting on that corruption (that is, observing basic reality) becomes a political act easily described as 'biased.' The Republican party is fascist.
      • miked85 5y ago
        Posts like yours are a great example of the polarization.
        • Impassionata 5y ago
          Once you send a mob at the Capitol to interfere with the peaceful transition of power, there can be only one side that calls itself American.
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  More americans have migrated to 4chan and Gab. Interesting art, mind expending videos, and news about as accurate as the weather forecast from your grandpa. Apparently, "2 more weeks" boys.
• lkrubner 5y ago
  Who cares? The framing of this issue is strange to me. I know what my values are, I know which side I'm on, I know what I fight for. 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/0812979303/ 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-Security/dp/0393352285/ 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-Project/dp/0805090169/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=the+limits+of+power&qid=1623686223&s=books&sr=1-3 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-Context/dp/1936166356/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=the+emergence+of+china&qid=1623686252&s=books&sr=1-1 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.
• Noos 5y ago
  Nah, the echo chambers are tightening into dominant and submissive; it seems like people are because they are reacting to patently extreme behavior, but in reality modern culture is very much a leftist dominant narrative with a submissive conservative boogeyman narrative. 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.
  • Impassionata 5y ago
    >submissive conservative boogeyman narrative. The Republican party is engaged in a fascist lie about the validity of our elections. Wake up.
• myfavoritedog 5y ago
  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/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... [edit: fixed a typo]
  • rejectedandsad 5y ago
    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 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.
    • TMWNN 5y ago
      >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-appeal.html 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-voters-2020.html 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-trump-clinton.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/us/politics/ohio-campaign...>). One guess on which the press and the Clinton campaign chose.
• Causality1 5y ago
  I've found that I have to carefully tailor my arguments depending on the audience, to a greater and greater degree lately. In many places it seems the only way to get someone to listen to you is to couch everything you say in the terms of their pet causes. If I argue for LGBT rights with a conservative I have to make it about constitutionality and government overreach. If I discuss male victims of sexual and domestic violence with a leftist I have to talk mostly about female victims. If I advocate for the free speech rights of racists I get called a Nazi and when I advocate for the free speech rights of Drag Queen Story Hour I get called a communist.
• andreygrehov 5y ago
  I worked at a large US news agency for several years. It's a for-profit shit show. 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.
• ggggtez 5y ago
  The problem of course is that not every issue needs a "both sides" treatment. Sometimes there are questions of objective facts that reading lies from alternative sources do not actually help you in understanding the truth of the world. 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.
  • UncleOxidant 5y ago
    > The problem of course is that not every issue needs a "both sides" treatment. 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?
    • cbsmith 5y ago
      It is important to understand the different sides. Understanding a side doesn't mean it is on equal ground, or really any ground at all. A failure to understand allows the underlying causes to remain in place.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
      Actually I would say it is. Not because the argument for slavery actually had merit, but because that position did not form in a vacuum and it is important to understand how such ideas came to be and why people might be unwilling to give them up.
    • slibhb 5y ago
      > 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? Yes and it's disturbing that you (and many others) have no interest in understanding other people.
• Impassionata 5y ago
  Haidt's work gets trotted out a lot, but it was prior to the fascist turn of the Republican party. Now Republicans live in a mostly imagined political reality.
  • rejectedandsad 5y ago
    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 objections in 00, 04 look mild. The Democrats didn’t spend early 2017 storming the capitol or recounting Wisconsin for the fourth time. HRC never said she’d be reinstated by August.
    • myfavoritedog 5y ago
      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 protesters cleared out of Lafayette Park for a photo op. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/09/lafayette-park-not-cleared-donald-trump-photo-opp-report-says/7622478002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/06/09/lafa... "HRC never said she’d be reinstated by August." Hillary Clinton spent years claiming that the election of Trump was illegitimate. Has Stacey Abrams even conceded the Georgia gubernatorial election yet? It's pretty rich for a party that claimed that George W. Bush was the "Commander in thief" and has Congressionally protested all the recent elections gets upset when Republicans did the exact same thing for even better reasons. The 2020 election was ridiculous. Democrats used the excuse of COVID to change election laws in multiple states while mass-mailing millions of ballots. They created an environment that was ripe for corruption and then assumed shocked faces as corruption was alleged.
• sandyarmstrong 5y ago
  > 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.
  • elefanten 5y ago
    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
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      > Christmas doesn’t signify religion in America Yes it does...
      • cm2012 5y ago
        I grew up going to a school maybe 20% practicing Christian. Everyone celebrated christmas, got and gave gifts, had family dinners around then, etc.
        • renewiltord 5y ago
          Yeah, dude, that’s what it means to have a defacto state religion: it becomes the default thing. A classic characteristic of state religions is that even those who do not believe will institutionally practise. So, for instance, even Buddhists in Jordan must not eat in public during Ramadan. Considering everything I was told about America, I was surprised to see that it is a Christian nation (I expected it to not be because of nominal separation of church and state). Instead, many laws are based on Christianity, leaders invoke the Christian god for justification for actions, and the state has official holidays for Christian events. Modeling America as a Christian nation led to a more accurate prediction of reality. This has led to less surprise on my part than most to see that local governments were amenable to bending to Christianity a lot more than others. SF has recently made specific parking laws for churches that close the streets. No such policy exists for synagogues, in comparison. Some were surprised. But I wasn’t. I expect governments at all levels in America to act to privilege Christianity. After all, in action, America is a Christian nation. In practice, it is indistinguishable from the UK which has a de-jure (and de-facto) state religion.
• fallingfrog 5y ago
  What I don’t like about articles like this is that they never ask the obvious question, why?. So people from rural areas are more likely to be conservative. Why? Because in a lot of places, like most of Latin America, the opposite is true. So what are the cultural and material reasons for that? 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.
• throwawaysea 5y ago
  This article mentions Blindspotter, which is a great way to explore the bubbles around Twitter accounts (https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter) and also Subreddits (https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/ https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/). For example, try: John Oliver - https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter/iamjohnoliver https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter/iamjohnoliver Tucker Carlson - https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter/TuckerCarlson https://ground.news/blindspotter/twitter/TuckerCarlson r/politics - https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/politics https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/politics r/moderatepolitics - https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/moderatepolitics https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/moderatepolitics r/conservative - https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/conservative https://ground.news/blindspotter/reddit/conservative BTW Blindspotter is built by Ground News (https://ground.news/ https://ground.news/). They're like All Sides (https://www.allsides.com/ 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.
  • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    This is fantastic! Thank you for sharing.
  • arecurrence 5y ago
    Surprised to see you downvoted when so much complaining in this thread is already covered by Ground News. I suppose Hacker News itself is unable to escape its own echo chamber.
    • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
      HN is very, very authoritarian left.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > “Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides,” she says, “you don’t understand the issue.” 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.
  • marcodiego 5y ago
    Better take: Until you can't passionately make arguments for any side you are biased.
    • UncleOxidant 5y ago
      Yes, I'll admit, I'm biased against slavery. Proudly guilty as charged.
  • firebaze 5y ago
    As much as I despise slavery I'd definitely be interested in understanding the way slavery was rationalized (if it was? if not, how did they cope with the suffering etc.?). We have to understand the principles allowing such an emotional and rational detachment from our set of ethics to prevent something like this happening again. 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.
    • UncleOxidant 5y ago
      I think we agree. Understanding why something was rationalized is important (slavery, the holocaust, etc). But being able to make an impassioned argument for those things isn't necessary for that kind of understanding.
      • firebaze 5y ago
        Yes, I agree. I missed this part, thanks for pointing this out!
• shockeychap 5y ago
  I'm sorry, but I find articles like this entirely disingenuous. It opens with a rural Tennessee classroom in which the teacher and a lone student bravely try to help a bunch of Trumpers understand their perspective. It continues with another example of a right-leaning former WV legislator coming around to the leftist position on transgender participation in sports. But what I did not find was a single meaningful example of the opposite. The best the article could muster - for appearances of neutrality - was an example of reduced support for minimum-wage increases by a group of Democrats. Nothing concrete. Sorry, but the lady doth protest too much.
  • finalis 5y ago
    The article may not do a good job highlighting where the left moves right but I believe that is because that movement is the status quo given obstruction on the right. 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.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  I wonder why the FCC's fairness doctrine is rarely brought up in articles like this. They used to enforce certain standards whereby news being broadcast on the public airwaves had to be both relevant to the public interest, and presented without overt bias. Then, under Reagan, they just stopped doing that, and to me that's when an already imperfect news industry started to really go off the rails. 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.
  • mmcconnell1618 5y ago
    I would be in favor of reclaiming some words like "News" with regulatory controls. Just like the FDA doesn't allow someone to label their product as "Organic" without meeting certain standards, I would argue that we should enforce some basic standards in order to label yourself as "News" or "Media Organization." It would be a slippery slope to navigate with the first amendment and the internet but there is a large group of citizens that will believe anything if it was on TV and came from the "News."
    • xmprt 5y ago
• every 5y ago
  Here in the US I try to get the majority of my news from NPR and PBS, both of whom are heavily reliant on AP. Your mileage may vary...
• at_a_remove 5y ago
  If I read something and it's just super-intense wow how can you doubt me you scumbag, I immediately attempt to find evidence disproving it. Generally, I look for something that will contradict the stance, and the more intense the stance, the more I will look. 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.
• Layke1123 5y ago
  Hacker News, a place for hackers to read about interesting topics and discuss things like political echo chambers while ignoring the political echo chamber that is venture capitalism. Ahh this site sucks now.
• WalterBright 5y ago
  I miss Jay Leno, who through pretty even-handed comedy would present the news.
• bovermyer 5y ago
  Something else to keep in mind is that liberal/conservative is a false dichotomy. We have at least four major cultures in the USA - some scholars put it as high as eleven - and they each have differing core values. 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.
  • munificent 5y ago
    Related, I really really enjoyed George Packer's "The Four Americas" article from a few days ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-...
    • barbacoa 5y ago
      That was a very interesting article to read. Thank you for sharing.
    • bovermyer 5y ago
      That was an interesting read, thank you. I'll have to go through again more thoroughly and jot down things to research further.
• vincent-toups 5y ago
  I'm all for people getting out of their bubbles, but the idea that the truth is "somewhere in the middle" or is even discernible by a process of digestion applied to the two "sides" of the American political spectrum is pretty dumb.
• imbnwa 5y ago
  One thing that comes to mind on this topic is that I neve rhear anyone discuss the genealogy of moral outrage in recent America culture. Daytime TV in the 90s was _all_ moral outrage and proto-reality TV as theatre of legalo-moral adjudication: Jerry Springer (the vulgar pinnacle of it), The People's Court, Judge Joe Brown, Riki Lake, etc etc. Americans had already proven market fit for "outrage media" a long time ago.
  • jarjoura 5y ago
    IMHO, moral outrage is just a consistent human trait. I don't think there was a time or era in known history that we didn't shame the other side. 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.
• fancyfish 5y ago
  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 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.
  • mseidl 5y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/ For some funny times.
    • Dma54rhs 5y ago
      Why post this left wing talking point narrative here? What does it add to conversation?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • bart_spoon 5y ago
      Replace "funny times" with "endless straw men" and you are spot on.
  • 5y ago
• jonathanwallace 5y ago
  That's why I use https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news. Makes it very easy to see across the spectrum.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• abap_rocky 5y ago
  The problem with aggregators like this is they themselves have their own implicit bias in how they define the boundaries of the left and right. 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=20 https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1231353446336548867?s...
• snowwrestler 5y ago
  If you’re thinking of things in terms Republicans vs Democrats, or left vs right, you are already behind the 8-ball. The entire framing of this article is counterproductive to clear thinking. 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.
• dukeofdoom 5y ago
  Michael Malice has some very insightful comments on this very subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9HqHzA3atQ&t=647s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9HqHzA3atQ&t=647s
• jkingsbery 5y ago
  > Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides, you don’t understand the issue. 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.
• Black101 5y ago
  I thought that Dang said that posts with more comments then points were getting automatically down-ranked yet this post has 188 points and 463 comments and it is number 4 on the front page. Also, this post has only one top level comment on the first page of comments.
• lamontcg 5y ago
  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 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.
  • stadium 5y ago
    > 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. 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.
  • trophycase 5y ago
    Unfortunately the whole "Lab Leak" COVID thing has given them another 5 years of legitimacy probably.
    • 5y ago
• marsrover 5y ago
  No they're not.
• imwillofficial 5y ago
  Echo chambers are fine. It’s okay to have firm beliefs that you aren’t interested in changing. This isn’t appropriate for every belief, but for some, it is.
• andred14 5y ago
  MSM lies to us constantly
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mjparrott 5y ago
  Almost all media outlets are shifting towards more and more opinion content, which drives clicks and revenue for them. Even the New York Times has dramatically shifted to opinion content and even dramatically increased the share and prominence of opinion on their front page.
• mjparrott 5y ago
  Here is an awesome take on this subject: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-information-diet/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/10/01/the-low-informati... 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  As a non US citizen,I would say US politics is not all that bad, neither party can be overthrown or something. I have plenty American friends who live or used to live in various states and different segments of society. Like anywhere else it's not perfect, but top 5 in the world I would say. In many latin American countries there is a fierce divide between left and right, the distribution of wealth is unlike anywhere else, the poor live in favelas, the middle class lives in gated and secured communities, simple things like leaving a gated community can be a danger to your wallet or life. The leftists are very extreme, the middle class is conservative, they want their status protected. Neither side realizes that it's better anywhere else in the world, almost literally. The left does not even offer a social system for the unemployed, this cannot deserves the label left and leads to most of the crime, they happen due to dire economic straits. No really, the USA are doing fine. Some people say the left in the us is a right wing light, but that is not accurate. Some states are as left as many EU countries. If you think either Obama or Trump were the worst, don't worry , Europe has worse, in the UK, Farrage, the hypocrite, Boris fake name Johnson and many more.
• bobthechef 5y ago
  I sense that in a lot of these posts, "objective news source" = "they agree with me". 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.
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  I don't understand the jabs HN is taking against Centrists - Centrists do not give equal importance to, say, Holocaust deniers and QAnon consipiracists. Listening to other side and believing it in are two different things. The alternative of camping out in your echo chambers is far more terrifying that exposing yourself to the entire spectrum (and ignore lunatic theories).
• wolverine876 5y ago
  I strongly recommend: https://www.memeorandum.com/ https://www.memeorandum.com/
• oarabbus_ 5y ago
  Wired has gotten considerably more political lately, which is a major disappointment. I canceled my print subscription to them for this reason. 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.
• oytis 5y ago
  In my opinion if you want to break out of echo chambers, you'd better read books, not news. I don't mean books written on occasion by the same people who write opinion columns and blog posts - rather great books that go deeper in how things work. 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.
• AzzieElbab 5y ago
  Somehow I saw absolutely no examples of the subject line statement in the articles body. I also see no evidence of broken echo chambers in the wild, the only thing that is changing on both sides is accelerating distrust of media
• patrickscoleman 5y ago
  To break free of the sensationalized partisan news, I've switched to reading The New Paper's [0] Monday-Friday daily email + Wikipedia Current Events [1] (delivered daily via email [2]) + HN (I try to check just once a day). 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/ https://thenewpaper.co/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events [2] https://dev.to/kiwicopple/daily-email-of-wikipedia-s-current-events-fid https://dev.to/kiwicopple/daily-email-of-wikipedia-s-current...
• eyelovewe 5y ago
  It seems to me that culture war posturing is one thing, a deliberate source of divisive power that some milk for outrage. 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.
• shrimpx 5y ago
  When we speak of centrism in terms of political parties, the implicit false assumption in some of this discussion is that Trumpism is a legitimate political position. These days when we talk about "the right" we largely mean Trumpism -- the GOP's new political stance (including Mitch McConnell, btw). 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.
• ajoy 5y ago
  Assigning a person a label of right or left or center is too simplistic. People are more complex. Their preferences are tied to issues. For each issue, every person might have a tilt/preference and they may not always tilt in one direction on all issues.
• RickJWagner 5y ago
  You can always find incendiary articles from both sides at RealClearPolitics, too. I regularly read it, Fox news, CNN, NBC, and Breitbart to get ideas about what my colleagues might be thinking.
• fleddr 5y ago
  I want to given an outside perspective as somebody living in a full opposite of your binary political system. I'm from the Netherlands, where we have too many political parties, so many it's becoming a joke in itself. 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.
• petemyers 5y ago
  I wish the issue is as simple as what the title suggests. Just read both sides, our political divide can be bridged. Well, what if the two sides don't agree on the facts. It may be a good idea to have centralists on policies, but the notion of centralists hardly applies to facts. It may be possible to have compromises on policies only when both sides at least assume good faith of the other. In today's American politics, I don't see an easy solution to agree on facts or good faith. It is sad.
• KwisatzHaderack 5y ago
  The Week magazine pretty much does this already. For every issue, they present what left and right leaning publications say about it.
• pgsimp 5y ago
  I think it is misguided to think all that is needed is to understand each other. Maybe that was the case for a while when everybody was well off, and all that was left to discuss was philosophical issues. The real issue is that people actually want each other's stuff. It's like quarreling over a source of water - both parties need it to water their plants. It doesn't help to understand that the other side also wants to water their plants, because you still have to water YOUR plants. At most you can sit together and work out a compromise. Simply understanding the other person's view point won't be sufficient.