This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap?
A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. How’s the country doing, overall? Is the economy booming or busting? Is crime climbing or dropping?
Anyone can, of course, reach their own conclusions on those questions, independent of the news they consume. But their views will necessarily be influenced by their own individual circumstances. Did they just get a promotion — or laid off? Do they feel safe sleeping with their front door unlocked — or did they just get mugged? Their own personal data points might align with a larger trend — or they might not. And news stories have traditionally been a big part of how people figured out which was which.
But we’ve just concluded an election cycle that suggests something important has broken in that feedback loop. How people perceive the economy and crime are major factors in whether they reward or punish incumbents with their vote. And decades-old patterns in that process seem to have gone a little haywire.
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Parts of the media are misreporting this on purpose.
Most of corporate media are. It’s no longer an independent branch of society. Holding an org accountable to shareholders instead of truth tends to end poorly. As with most civic institutions, there’s insufficient money to be made for unfettered capitalism to produce responsible stewards.
The economy literally is a mess. It’s not ‘vibes’, it’s the resources available to the average working American versus the costs they’re facing.
The reason there’s a disconnect is that the economic measures are all designed by and geared toward the owning class. Wages are still stagnating, rent is still skyrocketing, and food still costs an arm and a leg. Energy bills are still ridiculous and increasingly hot summers means more air conditioning. Chasing after quarterly profits means a constant diminishment of value for consumers. We can’t even get 24 hour egg mcmuffins anymore.
Maybe boomer retirees are confusing the math more than it would be otherwise? But what’s broken here isn’t people’s perception of an economy that’s good actually, it’s the measures of an economy that involves extreme (and growing) wealth inequality.
Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.
While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.
Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.
If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy
Is it. That assumes people who are doing well themselves. Do not see the truth about people not considered friends or colleagues.
Modern Society rarely gives people the opportunity to interact with different classes as friends. But most can see the numbers and recognise how many people around them are working for much lower wages. While realising how close their own income is the survival. It really does not take huge empathy to recognise the national data does not match the witnessed world.
So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?
Because costs are higher. More people who are copping will be noting higher energy food and rent etc compared to their own incomes.
So even those coping will recognise how much harder it will be for people on much lower incomes. And recognising your own situation is only just above water. Tends to mean most people notice how many around them are in worse situations.
My guess is this will be happening way way more in cities where these interactions tend to be more common. And often higher earners are also renting and moving more often than in rural areas. Leading to them noticing an increase in housing costs every few years. Or more.
But the basic truth is humanity is a social based tribe. And when forced into close living we tend to recognise a little more how much our life depends on others around us.
This is in part why left of centre politics is more common in more urban areas.
So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?
I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.
Likely: with gains on the low end, people saw themselves closer to the low end suddenly, and that’s a problem I guess.
The public’s perception of the world and reality is based on the information given and fed to them by the media that is corporately owned and controlled by a small group of people.
If I placed you in a room and I was the only person who told you what existed outside the room, I could basically describe to you whatever I wanted you to see because you would have no choice.
It’s not the public’s fault that they are gullible … it’s the fault of an entire community of professionals, politicians, academics, journalists, media owners and thousands of other people in the industry that don’t mind working and living in a world that has all it’s information funnelled through a very narrow opening owned and controlled by those with all the power and money.
It’s not the public’s fault that they are gullible … it’s the fault of an entire community of professionals, politicians, academics, journalists, media owners and thousands of other people in the industry that don’t mind working and living in a world that has all it’s information funnelled through a very narrow opening owned and controlled by those with all the power and money.
That’s simultaneously reductive and painting with a broad brush. I can’t really speak to the motivations of those outside of journalism, but if there are reporters gleefully misconstruing things sted challenging their livers to a death match, I’ve not met them. Sure, the folks holding the purse strings have differing views, but they’re not the ones going around and committing journalism in broad daylight.
We don’t expect schools to report the news, so why should news orgs be teaching media literacy? This isn’t a flippant question; education was intentionally gutted in the states starting under Reagan to produce a gullible enough population to allow Trump’s grotesque ascent. Putting a government failure on your local paper (if you still have one) fans the distrust further, so that’s not only misguided disappointment but contributes to the precise collapse you lament.
The other thing to bear in mind is the number of seasoned journalists who’ve tapped out from the bullshit content-production grind that really gathered steam about a decade ago. We don’t want to produce what shareholders want us to run. So you have kids fresh out of college at national outlets who will be gnawed to the bone, spat out and replaced in three years. At least there isn’t that pesky copy desk draining resources by fact checking.
The people doing the work are not to blame. Casting it on them is demeaning atop the already miserable circumstances they didn’t sign up for when they were young and idealistic and thought journalism could be a fun way to change the world.
Unbridled capitalism, and specifically private equity, is the problem here. Our economy is no longer set up to encourage independent journalism at scale; blaming the victims in the newsroom is gaslighting at best and toeing the party line somewhere in the middle. When someone gets rear-ended on the road, nobody says the car that was hit was the problem in the first place.
You think media either wants to fix, has any incentive to fix what they broke on purpose? Independent outlets maybe, if people can afford to access the reporting.
Many independent outlets are not hard paywalled, e.g. 404 Media. Yes, you have to provide your burner email, but that’s really not a big ask in the era of mass government and corporate surveillance.
Many independent outlets don’t even require email. You can read them for free (what I don’t understand is why so many of them are using Cloudflare if I may say so). We shouldn’t forget to donate if we can, but principally it’s free.
You guys can stop gaslighting now, the election is over.
