In defense of ignoring things I disagree with

Since it is mentioned in two of our readings, I’d like to call attention to this article: Political Polarization and Media Habits.  It is linked to in both the Washington Post article about Facebook and the NYT article on the same topic, but strangely both pieces seem to miss the most interesting part of the study.

The Post and the Times both point to this study and say something along the lines of “look, liberals and conservatives get their news from different sources, so we are all living in our own echo chambers.”  But I’m not sure that’s a fair reading.  The study found that liberals don’t have a single, consistent, go-to news source – they get their news from CNN, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the BBC, etc.  Whereas consistent conservatives “are tightly clustered around a single news source, far more than any other group in the survey.”  Go ahead and guess which single news source that would be.

In general, the survey showed a pro-news bias among liberals.  Out of a list of 36 news sources, liberals expressed confidence in 28 of them.  Conservatives, however, distrusted the majority of those 36 sources.

That doesn’t sound like both sides existing in their own filter bubble.  That sounds like one side consuming news from a variety of sources and one side living in an echo chamber.

I agree that there is a need for a diversity of opinion.  I don’t think it’s helpful to only read news and analysis I agree with.  But I think we need to be careful about the “equality bias” mentioned in Mooney's Post article.  Just because Fox News and NPR say different things doesn’t mean the truth is somewhere in the middle.  In the vast majority of cases, NPR is the truth, and Fox News is a waste of time.  Viewing them as equals is a false equivalency.

Which is why I have no qualms about unfriending or unfollowing someone for being consistently wrong and hateful.  It’s not because I disagree with their politics – I’m happy to debate taxation, the role of government, constitutional law, or whatever all day long with reasonable people.  But when “conservative” news sources focus less on rational argument and more on “Obama is a Muslim and gay marriage leads to bestiality,” I’m not actually depriving myself of anything by ignoring it.

I think it is naïve to suggest, as Dewey’s Post article does,  that polarization can be stemmed by reading news from publications on the other side of the aisle.  I think we no longer live in an age where news with a political slant is meant to convince those the writer disagrees with. Rather, it is meant to fire up the people who already agree.