The political bubble and how it affects your opinion

[CJD]

(07-23-2019, 09:53 AM)Dill Wrote: I don't think that is just "recency bias." Think back to fights-make-news Gingrich and his 1994 GOPAC memo on the control of media through control of language, emphasizing the importance of words like "traitor" and "hypocrisy" in describing political opponents. https://fair.org/home/language-a-key-mechanism-of-control/.

Not sure West was wrong about Bush; though I have more respect for Bush's judgment than West's.  Trump has not yet sent 4,500 Americans to their death in an unnecessary war, but he is doing more "infrastructural" damage to government than Bush did.

Well, maybe I'm giving the Republicans the benefit of the doubt. I wasn't politically aware in 94, so I don't know exactly what was going on with Gingrich. I just remember the Bush days as, comparatively, tame to what we're doing now. And if Bush did actually not care about black people, he was an awful lot more subtle about it than Trump is haha.

Quote:"They do it more" is not the point of my response though. I am concerned with how the OP/Common Ground has framed the issue using poll results. We are told in the Common Ground poll that 79% of Republicans think racism is still a problem in the US.  But 57% agree with Trump's tweets against the squad, according to a USA Today poll.https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/07/17/trump-tweets-poll-unamerican-offensive-partisan-divide/1748737001/. Only 45% found the tweets "racist."


And a Marist poll showed that Trump's popularity increased after the tweets. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/07/22/trump-approval-rating-new-high-npr-pbs-poll-after-racist-tweets/1796556001/.

These are not fringe numbers. So if one asks people "Is racism still a problem today?" there need be some further qualifying questions to ascertain what they mean by this. E.g., Dems could mean that racism, as in discrimination against minorities (especially black), is still with us. Others could mean that whites are now more discriminated against (like Christians! lol).  So if Dems guess that only 50% of Republicans think racism is a problem, as Dems understand racism, they might not be so far off as 79% suggests. 

You know...I honestly didn't even think of it like that. It's just such a foreign thought that white people or Christians are the ones suffering from racism in America that it didn't even occur to me that Republicans may actually feel that way.  

I saw that article but didn't read it. I found it pretty hard to imagine. It may be one of those cases of people "being sick" of being "called racist" and are therefore sticking up for someone else who's "being victimized" by the "racist left" in that way. I hope it isn't because the racists were super happy that he was blatantly racist. But you never really know what people's motivations are.

Quote:Also, when formulating poll questions, it is good to remember that Americans as a group sound "progressive" when asked about principles. E.g., is equality good, racism bad etc. But when you ask about specific policies or cases, results are often flipped, as we have seen with the Trump tweets.


The question of "demonization and caricature," in my view, is made more difficult by media bubbles, and in turn makes describing/defining media bubbles more difficult. E.g., is it "demonizing" Obama and Susan Rice to claim they used government power to spy on the Trump campaign? Not if one believes they did, and certainly not if they actually did. 

In my view, people striving for "common ground" or to repair division would do much better to address the issue of how "alternative facts" and the like come to circulate so little contested in the current mediascape. Part of this has to do with the discrediting of institutions like the MSM and the FBI, which enables new "bubbles" to arise protecting disinformation, in part by making people resistant to counterfactuals and counterarguments from the get go as "far left" liberal media propaganda.

So I think reaching common ground or repairing the division and battling alternative facts are...basically the same thing. Like, look no further than the interaction at the beginning of this thread. I mentioned that Republicans and Democrats are pursuing the same basic goals (Ending or minimizing illegal immigration and decreasing the number of abortions in this country) but going about it in completely different ways, in terms of policy. And for making that distinction, I was accused of being politically blind for the mere sin of making the liberal viewpoint appear to be "rational."

Now, obviously, stating the liberal goals in those two instances the way I did was meant to expose that Liberals really aren't open borders loving, baby killing maniacs that they're made out to be by politicians and, as you said, media outlets like Fox News...but that they're, you know...rational people. With goals rooted in logic and hope to reach a better position than we are currently in.
In effect, combating the "alternative facts" of what Liberals actually believe. Unfortunately, it was not taken that way (whether intentionally misunderstood or accidentally misunderstood is not really important). The point is I failed to break down that wall of alternative facts in that scenario. But that was the theoretical end goal.

As far as demonizing the media, I think lies, like Obama spying on Trump, are definitely demonizing. It's one thing to have proof of something and it making the other party look bad. It's another to just say nonsense and hope your followers eat it up with no investigation into the sources and their reliability.