I read this Charlie Sykes column in the Times, and I related. Boy, did I relate. Because as we saw played out in the primary, knee-jerk skepticism about known facts (and how to interpret them) is not the exclusive hallmark of the right wing:
For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.
The news media’s spectacular failure to get the election right has made it only easier for many conservatives to ignore anything that happens outside the right’s bubble and for the Trump White House to fabricate facts with little fear of alienating its base.
Unfortunately, that also means that the more the fact-based media tries to debunk the president’s falsehoods, the further it will entrench the battle lines.
My blogger friends and I have talked about this for a couple of years (the women, at least). We did very well at teaching readers to be skeptical about the media, but not so great at teaching them to be discerning consumers — i.e. learning when you can trust the media.
Being skeptical is easy; being discerning is hard. I know; I am constantly looking up sources and connected institutions to try to figure out where something came from. It takes a lot of time.
I just don’t need to have an opinion about everything right away. I make a mental note, and I come back to it.
What tripe! I defy you to name any moment in history when the architecture of right wing thinking was founded on fact. States Rights, Jim Crowe, Slavery, Taxation, Political Correctness, all a paranoid mash.
” We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled.”
Bullshit. You knew exactly what you were doing. You were building the infinitely reprogrammable voting base that made the election of Trump not just possible, but inevitable.
And you’re absolutely right about being discerning, getting good information has become a skill, and snap judgements in this environment rarely lead to anything useful. I have found that I can get good information from a variety of sources if I know enough about the sources to factor out their specific bias. I often find doing this to be frustrating, and thus tend to gravitate towards sources I already know how to properly read, which probably narrows the scope of what I get, but I don’t find myself caught out in misconceptions much.
I guess we have to learn to do journalism for ourselves if we can’t trust what is served up to us as journalism, or at least learn to recognize the difference.