About ten years ago, Cass Sunstein observed that the Internet would have the effect of providing most of us with a self-selected news diet that would reinforce our biases and polarize us. An early adopter of the Internet and someone who disliked the mainstream media of the time, I bristled at the notion. As I recall, the time was marked by breathless reporting in the mainstream media about pretty much every unfounded or marginally founded calumny Clinton’s political opponents could sling at him; leading to the impeachment. We’d been treated to the O.J. trial and what I considered slanted coverage of the 2000 election, leading to a Presidency of questionable legitimacy. And we were about to be treated to “journalism” of such irresponsibility that it would put us in Iraq for years to come. Judith Miller and the aluminum tubes, anyone?
Be that as it may, Sunstein was correct. We are able to, and many of us do, select media packages that reinforce our biases. This undermines Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous maxim, “you are entitled to your own opinion; but you are not entitled to your own facts.” Increasingly, disparate opinions are not based on common facts. Instead, citizens are coming to view the country based on independent sets of facts. It’s as if a jury were empaneled, then half of them listened only to the prosecution and half of them listened only to the defense, then they were thrown into a room and asked to reach a verdict. Compromise and mutual understanding in such a situation would be understandably difficult.
Frequently, the media outlets commanding the most loyalty are ones that treat their readers and viewers to a daily diet of existential threats. One of the most recent horrors to hit the news is the nutjob in Oslo who murdered nearly a hundred people. I will be shocked if we find out that he regularly consumed a balanced media diet. Instead, I am almost certain we’ll find that he pretty much read and watched only those things which reinforced his particular neuroses. But it’s not just him, there are branches upon branches here. Where the shooter is mentioned as Christian, we’ll have more people poisoned by media packages that reinforce the notion that only Christians get singled out as Christians when this kind of bloodshed occurs. And we’ll have other media packages that insist that, when it’s a Christian, the person is always a lone wolf; but if it’s a Muslim, somehow it’s the entire religion that’s responsible. Replace religion with gun rights, and there will be another set of self-reinforcing narratives. (With interesting alignments — the pro-Christian set, I’ll wager, will by and large be coupled with the pro-gun rights set.)
And, for those who seek “balance,” often as not, they get pablum that can’t do any more than pick two sides and take an arbitrary middle. See, for example, the recent study of BBC science coverage determining that it gave too much weight to fringe scientific positions, creating the illusion that they had comparable merit to positions much more widely held in the relevant scientific communities. Or, as John Cole put it in more memorable language (albeit in a slightly different, more partisan context):
I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
I don’t have great solutions except to recommend everyone read a lot and to read things that make them uncomfortable. My reading is varied, but weighted to the left — I have a lot of the neutral and a little of the left and some sprinkling of the right. But, at least for me, I get more or less daily checks from commenters here at the blog who have a decidedly different world view than me. We probably aren’t convincing each other of much; but it’s a little like when the Christians collided with the Muslims during the Crusades. Both learned a lot more about the world, just from having interacted, even if it was in a bloody, destructive kind of way.
This post is fallacious. It is based on the false premise that there is overwhelming evidence for one side on many complex issues.
The real issue is that most of the “problems” we face are extremely complex, and evidence one way or the other is weak. This is exactly the environment where both sides can cherry pick the data they want to “prove” their chosen hypothesis.
Getting a “balanced media diet” does nothing to change this fact. On many issues, we are simply at a philosophical dead end: how do you deal with issue after issue that are literally unknowable?
More specifically to you main point, you’re speaking in code about Fox News. But someone who gets a diet of Fox News gets a balanced diet, because we live in an aquarium where the water is the mainstream media. It pervades everything. Someone who is not paying attention still can’t keep from knowing what the mainstream media thinks and reports, because it is still everywhere.
And, of course, the mainstream media is still so dominated by the New York Times. And who writes for the New York Times?
The children of the elite, Ivy league grads to a one.
Normal people don’t work at the Times.
Glad I can be of service.