The political bubble and how it affects your opinion

[Dill]

(07-25-2019, 12:53 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: It's a double edged sword, though. What I have found with social media is that I can get more unfiltered and real journalism from the journalists themselves without any editor "interpretation" included. It's just all about being selective of who you follow.

Ay, there's the rub.  Whence come one's standards of selection? Above I mention the new documentary, The Great Hack, which addresses the power of Facebook to create and shape political division in the US. I also think of the role that Facebook played in the Russian interference in the last election, counting on a special type of "unfiltered" news, AKA "Fake news."

(07-25-2019, 12:53 PM)Belsnickel Wrote: I do agree that both sides are very guilty of the "otherizing" that has been going on for some time, now. I will just point out that this is a direct result of Newt Gingrich's tactics. I'm not trying to downgrade the blame the Democrats hold, because they went tit-for-tat right away, but this all can be traced back to a memo inspired by Gingrich's tactics that was sent out by GOPAC in 1990: https://web.archive.org/web/20130902053532/http://web.utk.edu/~glenn/GopacMemo.html

This is what really kicked off the war of words we see in Washington, today.

Yes, I mention this memo above. No one doubts "both sides" do it to a degree.

But I do not see anything like equal magnitude.  The Gingrich memo was to set the tone for Republicans as a group. There is really nothing like that on the Dem side, even if an occasional Dem goes off on personal attack. the GOPAC memo was a conscious effort to change party discourse as whole, and that of sympathetic journalists as well. And it did become the new norm for an expanding segment of that party.

Further, "liberals" seem, nevertheless, much more ready to say "we all do it" and "we all need to do better," including themselves in charges of bad behavior and striving to reach out to and understand the other side. I can think of at least three books written by liberals in the last three years striving to speak to and listen to "the other side" (including one written by the author of the Guardian article). I cannot think of a single such book representing the other side, reaching out to understand or "listen to" the liberals.

Liberals may feel they are becoming "extreme" if they even seek to describe this situation accurately, for fear of appearances or fear that such description would only worsen the divide.