This was originally part of my post on the changing media environment, but I decided midstream that, while related, it deserves to be highlighted separately.
As part of his long essay arguing that the right-wing media has overtaken traditional voices to dominate coverage of American politics, TNR editor Michael Tomasky observed,
Liberals, rich and otherwise, live in a bubble where they never see this stuff. I would beg them to see it. Watch some Fox. Listen to some Christian radio. Experience the news that millions of Americans are getting on a daily basis.
While I’m not exactly a liberal, I have been accused by a couple of our rare Trump-supporting commenters of being in an information bubble. They have a point, although perhaps not quite the one they intend.
I have long been intentional about being widely read and exposing myself to alternate viewpoints. But I now realize my approach has a systemic bias. While I engage with a wide variety of ideas, exposing myself to various viewpoints along the ideological spectrum, I limit myself considerably in terms of the style and manner in which those ideas are expressed.
When I was a staunch Republican, I read a lot of Democratic-leaning press (indeed, I considered the NYT and WaPo in that camp) and pundits. Decades ago, I subscribed to both National Review and The New Republic. Since starting blogging, I’ve engaged with liberal commentators in good faith. But it was people like Tomasky (whom I debated many years ago on the old BlogTalkingHeads show), Kevin Drum, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and others who took an intellectual, facts-based approach. I didn’t—and still don’t—spend a lot of time engaging with what I considered the Loony Left.
The same has long been true of my consumption of right-wing sources. While I was an avid Rush Limbaugh listener for many years, I’d grown tired of his schtick by time time I launched OTB. Even in the blog’s early days, when I was not only much more ideological but cranking out a dozen or more posts daily, I quickly stopped reading the likes of Lucianne and other hard-right sites because I couldn’t take them seriously. On literally the first day of the site’s existence, I called out Ann Coulter for intellectual dishonesty.
So, while I’m well versed on the arguments being made across the ideological spectrum and believe that I engage them fairly, my aperture is on Establishment and otherwise respectable sources and the style of argumentation that predominates the academy, think tanks, mainstream punditry, and the like.
I’m honestly not even sure how to fix this, in that I’m not constitutionally wired to engage in discussion with those operating on their own set of facts and immune to evidence from sources I consider unimpeachable.
It is, I suppose, useful to know that the bizarre “They’re eating our pets!” meme originated in an alternate information ecosystem rather than being made up on the spot by our former and future President. Given that, it’s perfectly reasonable to treat people spouting that talking points as misinformed, rather than as trolls who are intentionally trying to derail the discussion. But if these people treat statements from the mayor of the town in question, reporting from the mainstream press, academic studies, FBI crime statistics, and any other evidence that, no, goddammit, they’re not eating our pets as lies and propaganda, the difference between them and a troll is one without distinction.
