June 29, 2024
Dear editor;
I found the dueling op-eds written by Wayne E. Johnson in the liberal corner and Bill Suhayda in the conservative corner to be very entertaining, but their extreme differences and obvious dislike for each other is a bit disturbing, probably because it is a reflection of what we’ve become as a nation. It’s no secret that our extreme partisanship is tearing at the fabric of our country. Both political parties have become dominated by their extremes, All too often, the result is either gridlock as seen in our federal legislature or, a whipsawing between extreme liberal or conservative policies when one party or the other manages to dominate. Compromise is now rare and becoming rarer. Even worse is that we ourselves are becoming more partisan. We all know people who seem normal in every other way who have such extreme views that it is almost impossible to reason with them. Once unusual, this condition now seems common.
How is it that we have gone so far down the rabbit hole?
Most of us would agree that media bias is a big factor and in that, we tend to think of big publishing and broadcasting companies, but there is another kind of media that is very powerful: Our individual electronic messages: Email, Facebook Reddit, Tik Tok, and others. Importantly, both kinds of media have one thing in common: To succeed, they need to supply us with what we demand so they give us what we ask for, and they have become very good at it.
In the past, publishers and broadcasters used polls to roughly gauge what people want, but only in general terms. Today, the Internet allows them to be much more precise. Every time we click on a story or view a video, we show preferences and are inadvertently asking for more of the same. The bean counters learn what we seek and are quite happy to provide. Unfortunately, our appetite for news isn’t much different than our appetite for food: We don’t really crave what’s best for us. Instead, we are tempted by junk food and fake news.
A similar dynamic applies to social media messages that go viral. We tend to forward those messages that are the most cute, funny or shocking so propagandists (defined simply as anyone with an agenda, whether nefarious or benign), design their messages along those lines. The result is that a great deal of misinformation finds its way to our eyes every day. As they say, a lie told often enough starts to sound like the truth and when voters cannot distinguish lies from truth., democracies stumble and can even fall. So what are we to do?
The only way for us as individuals to avoid unintentionally viewing and/or passing on fake news is to learn which sources are accurate and to avoid those whose veracity is uncertain. This should be standard for forwarding any news stories and in truth, for almost any search for information. So how do you decide which media outlets can be trusted? Fact checkers such as Snopes or Politifact can be invaluable, but it’s worthwhile to independently check both the media and the fact checkers themselves as well. You can often do that without a great deal of effort, especially when the media disagree with each other on statements of fact.
For instance, I learned a lot from the reporting on COVID. Some media sources breathlessly reported massive casualty numbers, while others claimed that those numbers were grossly exaggerated. Once the dust settled, it was easy to see who was right. Large numbers of COVID deaths would have had to create a big bump in total deaths from all causes in 2020 and 2021. Searching total deaths by year is literally a two-minute job. Try looking it up yourself to see if you have been trusting the right people. After that, ask the fact-checkers. See if they all agree.
Craig Zabel, Sugar Grove