Political echo chambers and other fun things

[Cyborg Girl]

So first off, I have to say, I don't like they way this guy calls Black Lives Matter "far left". It's pretty damn sad, IMO, that people trying to raise awareness of some really nasty racist shit get auto-pigeonholed as "far left"... A mistake that, incidentally, owes a lot to the American right being the major source of racism now; and might be more difficult to make if the contents of the article below did not apply.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting article, and seems to be well researched.

https://praxis.ink/2016/08/the-conserva ... o-reality/

But, he doesn't directly state the elephant in the room. Which is:

If the research he cites is correct, a considerable majority of Americans are centrist to center-left. And political power in Congress does not reflect that distribution at all.

No freaking wonder people feel like the government is out of touch.

[Swift]

From the link, it opened with this:

One of the more interesting developments since the emergence of the web as a mass medium is the establishment of a conservative media presence. Prior to the internet, there were basically no large-audience right-leaning media operations aside from a few talk radio programs.

Since the 1996 establishment of Fox News and the popularization of the web, it has now become possible for a conservatively inclined people to consume all kinds of news and opinion catering to their specific tastes and viewpoints. Many right-leaning people have hailed this development, believing that they have finally defeated the hated liberal media. They suppose that because they can now obtain their news entirely from conservative-leaning media that this is what others do as well.

It is actually funny you should post this, because something I saw on Facebook was prompting me to write a response that addresses both these things.

My friend posted a link to a NY Times article about these 50 GOP officials saying Trump was a threat to national security. In response to that, someone she knows posted this:

I notice the NY Times article (itself a liberal rag), says many of these establishment cronies don't care for Clinton either.

I think both the linked piece and the Facebook comment illustrate to me one of the most damaging things Fox News and similar outlets have done, and it is something you hint at in your comments GJ.

The lies that they have been pushing for decades is that all news outlets are biased, and that news outlets such as the NY Times and the Washington Post are just "liberal rags" that are slanting their reports in favor of the extreme left. That and a general moving of the goal posts, so that positions that were once centrist, they call left, and were once left are now socialist.

They have repeated these lies long enough that a lot of people have come to believe them, particularly the "all news outlets are biased" lie. That way, they can excuse their lies with "well, everyone does it" and "we're only balancing things" (you know, "Fair and balanced").

Christiane Amanpour mentioned this in a recent interview on the Daily Show, that presenting both "sides" is often not News, since both sides are not of equal validity. To pick an extreme example (which she did not use), giving equal time to a Holocaust scholar and a Holocaust denier is not news. There actually is a truth out there, and at one time it was expected that news organizations would present it.

By convincing people that NO news organizations present truth, Faux News and similar outlets, are free to spread their lies.