The work involved to get accurate news
The Weekly Review: Vol VIII Issue 2
Friends, I hope 2021 has brought a fresh outlook for you. If you’re like me, you’re purposefully choosing optimism as we get started on another trip around the sun. But then the events of each week come along … including all that happened in the arena of US politics this month.
This newsletter has been politics free since its inception. But that reality only reflected its author — I’ve never had an interest in the topic. Ever. I spent a good part of my adult life purposefully ignoring anything related to it.
Last year was different. Vastly different. It started with the murder of George Floyd and an increased awareness and concern for racial justice. I wrote about this last spring, but I feel shame that it took so long for me to get a truer sense of the scope of the problem and to care about it.
And that caring continued on through the months of COVID and into the US election. For the first time, I started to see the huge divide that separates a majority of US citizens. Worse, I was finally aware of this truth:
People on the left and right have a starkly different view of what is real.
I don’t mean ideologically; that is obvious and has been the case for a long time. I mean people — intelligent, compassionate humans — on the left and on the right will view an event and come away with a vastly different understanding of what occurred. Their perception of what took place is shaped by how they view the event, whether through the lens of traditional media or social media. “Facts” seem secondary now.
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I can remember sitting in shock in the fall of 2016 as it became apparent that Donald Trump was winning the election against Hilary Clinton and would be the next US president. That shock was due to the fact that it had seemed so unlikely this could actually happen. Everything I had read and seen on social media indicated otherwise.
I realized then how much of a bubble Twitter was for me. In the four years of his presidency, that shock faded a little, but the realization was still present. And it became increasingly clear over 2020. What I see of the world through Twitter (my primary source of news) is greatly tinted blue and far leaning to one side of the US political spectrum.
I experienced a growing frustration through the year. That frustration was twofold:
- It’s hard to know people on both sides who seem to assume the very worst about those on the “other team”. When you know and love and admire people, but know that they might react with anger (or even hatred) towards each other, you feel caught in the middle
- Worse, it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to find sources of news that are not so skewed one way or another that you come away with an unbiased understanding of events
If you’ve lived in the US all your life and have paid attention to politics, none of this is surprising to you. But it had an impact on me, and so I wanted to take the time to sum up my thoughts. And, more importantly, to share some resources I found through the year that helped me realize there is room for hope.
There are people who are concerned about the growing sense of tribalism and the role media and tech is playing here. And so I wanted to share a collection of things I’ve read over the last several weeks/months that have helped me to get a better sense of the issue.
The next email will return to the usual fare, but if you share some of my concerns, maybe you’ll find these articles helpful.
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Items of note
The Final Vote: Should Companies Take A Stand on Social or Political Issues?
I truly started to examine things when Geoff Roberts shared a post about how tech companies should speak up about the events that were taking place (it was mostly in reaction to the post from the CEO of Coinbase). Our team at Wildbit appreciated Geoff’s points and I shared it personally.
In short order, multiple pointed out (to me personally and to our team) that not everyone is interested in a world where companies take sides. Geoff alludes to this reality in his follow up post:
If I’ve learned anything about this topic through those discussions, it’s that this topic is extremely nuanced. Many people who are almost perfectly philosophically aligned when it comes to all other aspects of business blatantly disagree on this topic, while others who have almost nothing in common see things the same way. Perhaps most interestingly, many very smart people aren’t able to articulate their perspective with much in the way of reason.
Whether or not you think they should, Geoff’s two posts raised a nuanced dilemma that got me thinking on the topic more deeply. And we need to have these kinds of conversations, even when (especially when?) they’re hard.
The Five Crises of the American Regime
A more recent post written by Michael Lind caught my attention. He raises some excellent points on the current problem in the US.
What is the meaning of these dystopian scenes? Many Democrats claim that Republicans are destroying the republic. Many Republicans claim the reverse. They are both correct.
At the same time that the parties have crumbled as grassroots federations, politics in the United States has been nationalized. There are no longer any conservative Alabama Democrats or liberal Connecticut Republicans. The party line in each party is set by national leaders and their donors, spin doctors and pet journalists. The collapse of local journalism means that most Americans no longer get news about city and state governments. Increasingly they choose sides in city council races or state legislative races on the basis of national partisan identities.
The more I learned about this topic, the more my frustration grew with the role of journalism and media. How can two different groups of people come away from one event with such a different perspective? Well, if your view of an event comes only from a source biased in a specific direction…
On that topic, Bari Weiss truly got to the heart of the issue for me in a recent newsletter. As someone who left the NY Times due to the lack of unbiased news, she knows firsthand the issues plaguing media. From her resignation letter:
But the lessons that ought to have followed the [2016] election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
In this newsletter, she highlights what America should be about: people from very different viewpoints engaging in civil discourse. She (a homosexual woman soon to be married) and her colleague Robby (she describes him as “among the most important Catholic intellectuals of our era. He is a Princeton professor, a lover of great wine, a wonderful writer, a total gentleman, and one of the most articulate opponents of gay marriage in the country”) should be able to admire each other and engage in intelligent debate despite their differences.
Robby might not want to go to a gay wedding. But I love that at least for now I still live in an America where he and I can sit together, over good food on a dark night in the middle of a pandemic and talk about what is broken and how we might join together to fix it. That act is the whole point of the American experiment.
And she nails the reason why things are in the current state:
Hate sells, as the journalist Matt Taibbi has convincingly argued, and as anyone looking at Twitter trending topics over the past few years can see. If Americans are buying rage, is there a real market for something that resists it?
And finally, Matt Taibbi also shared a recent newsletter where he talks about the lack of trust in the media today.
Balance isn’t about giving credulous coverage or equal time to Donald Trump or Josh Hawley or Ben Shapiro (though I think it’s crazy for news organizations to cut off all conservatives), it’s about being consistent. If you tell us on January 12th that all 50 state capitols are under serious threat — I was genuinely worried — you have to tell us what happens at the end of the story a week later. Was that threat real but deterred? Was it overblown? What happened to all of those warnings?
This has been an ongoing theme of coverage in the Trump years: hyping a threat for a news cycle or two, then moving to the next panic as the basis for the first one dissipates. How many headlines were aimed at our outrage centers in the last four years that were quietly memory-holed, once they’d outlived their political utility?
I share these two quotes not because I think one side deserves more attention than the other. But simply because I find so much of the news paints a picture that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. It seems intended to get a reaction and truth is not really important.
Was Trump a buffoon? Seems like it to me. Was he dangerous? Four years seems to back that up to a large degree. Does Biden’s win in this election solve all the problems that led to Trump getting elected? Most definitely not.
Small aside here: I had an older friend who grew up in the US state that Trump was a decent president, but simply not a great public speaker. I’m guessing my friend doesn’t use Twitter or observe the buffonery that we had to endure from the president’s account. Which was the case before his presidency as well.
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Quote of the week
But over the years, I noticed that social media didn’t feel like a neutral tool. Using social media often brought up feelings and emotions that I didn’t expect from technology, like insecurity, discouragement and angst.
Reality is customized for each person.
As Tristan Harris explains, when persuasive technology exceeds and overwhelms human weaknesses, it is at the root of addiction, polarization, radicalization, outrage-ification, vanity-ification. It’s not that technology itself is an existential threat. It’s that persuasive technology can bring out the worst in society, and the worst in society is an existential threat.
Corbett Barr, What’s wrong with social media?
The quote here is from a name far more familiar to me than the voices above. Corbett, one part of the Fizzle team, recently started writing more again on his personal site. I share three quotes from his piece here because he gets to the heart of the issue that I’ve experienced with Twitter since 2016.
Is social media valuable? To a degree. Would we have known the intimate details of what happened to George Floyd with out? Likely not. But does that mean Twitter is a force for moral good? No. It’s a service designed for the purpose of returning shareholder value — and that value comes from keeping people on the service as long possible to show them as many ads as possible
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And so I found myself increasingly returning to one place in 2020: the media bias chart. How should I take the piece of news that was just shared with me? And I searched for new sources that would help me get a better picture.
If you know of a publication that fits, I would love to hear about it. And thanks for bearing with me here. I had a lot of conflicting thoughts and feelings this past year and it cathartic to get some of them down in writing.
Next issue: how to get started with Obsidian. Something a lot more exciting for me. Until then, peace on you and be loving to those in your life. No matter what side they’re on!