The Surprising Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News
politico.com
politico.com
It's not really that right wingers think the news is lying to them in a direct sense. It's more like they believe the entire frame of discussion is wrong. I'm not an American but I'd concur with that sentiment in general when I listen to NPR. You could listen to NPR for years without realizing the experience of many Americans directly contradicts the story themes on offer, yet many other Americans do have an experience which is sympathetic to the same themes.
This is because of social class. Different people have different experiences - but because of social stratification what has happening is that some people consistently have a difference experience of the world.
In Hidden Brain - an NPR podcast - a social science researcher and mother relates how she had the impression most mothers breastfed their kids, bought organic food, went to yoga. It's only through her analytic research that she came to the understanding this is a minority, a sort of elite.
A zip code away - you'll have some people who have had their car broken into 17 times, burglarized 5 times - every time by people with the same skin colour.
I leave the results to your imagination.
NPR and Russia Today will make one of those scenarios sound normal, the other abnormal but they're the result of the same sorting affect.
Scott Alexander makes the point that this clustering affect can happen even when you go out of your way to prevent it. He says he doesn't have any Christian Republican friends on his Facebook account - but they're half the country. He didn't try to do this - it just happened that way.
The probability of this happening by accident is astronomical - yet each one of us is in a similar peculiar bubble. Worth reflecting that this makes it harder to understand each other.
Or a piece not marked as "opinion" is obviously not factual reporting. A not-uncommon example is "fact" pieces that assume the mental state or thought processes of various public officials with no quotes or really anything to back them up.
Perhaps journalists were always often dishonest. But these days they often seem not to even be trying to make those deceptions convincing.
I think - and this risks sounding self absorbed - that we've become more sophisticated because of the Internet - at least in some ways.
Closer feedback loop because flow of information is higher. You might have thought "this is bullshit" before but this feeling was more widely spaced before when journalism was in print form.
Some subgroups in society like the extremes were easier to dismiss as irrelevant because we couldn't really point to anything concrete representing their existence. This will probably be a downvote attractor but I wouldn't have believed SJWs were real people before the web existed. I'd heard of them before but presumed them the ravings of hyperbolic conservatives.
The number of people in these subgroups isn't large but large changes in society usually happen when the subgroup mainstreams an idea - so appreciating that extremist minority groups are important - is important - that idea development is an ecology and even that policy cannot come from the center. I think this is why when politics stalls support flows into fat tails - normally thought of as a bad thing but it's a survival instinct - this idea is slippery because from the evolutionary view conflict isn't a pure bad - lack of reproduction is.
> A not-uncommon example is "fact" pieces that assume the mental state or thought processes of various public officials with no quotes or really anything to back them up.
I really hate this, I'd call it an allergy! The worse version of this is that most dishonest form of journalism where the piece attempts - inception-like - to insert the thought process into yours. It's not compare and think or think within this framework - it's think like me. For this reason I dislike Fox but I really, really hate NPR.