This just in, fresh off the Pew Polls Website! 55 percent of journalists really suck at their job and have no ethical compass. So I’m paraphrasing a little:) Let me show you what I found…
The link below reveals that 55 percent of journalists are ok with going against ‘bothsideism,’ which is a word I just learned that means giving equal representation of the facts of all sides of any story. You will also see that this compares to only 22 percent of non-journalists (just average Americans) thinking it is ok to jettison ‘bothsideism’ ala ‘objective journalism.’ I find this to be alarming.
Does this mean an average American is more likely to give an objective telling of an event than an average mainstream journalist? (Maybe that is why I find some of these tiny little YouTube channels to be so much more reliable.)
Fifty five percent of journalists are happy to serve as activists under the auspices of journalism. My guess is they probably think they’re doing a good thing. I could see universities getting particularly infected one way or another with some idiotic ideology and end up cranking out a wave of bad journalists for a couple decades. Maybe this has been going on forever. Ir just seems if my memory serves me, when I was working in journalism, anyone not 100 percent on board with objective reporting would be encouraged to do so or lose employment there.
Because media outlets are allowed to get away with these biases in the realm of politics, it has the damaging effect on American culture by reinforcing the idea that all Democrats or all Republicans are a monolith, since the biases seem to fall right along party lines.
They make you unaware of the fact that a certain percentage of your Democratic neighbors are actually quite pro life. They make the other side think no Democrats ever agree with them on anything..
They make you unaware of the fact that a certain percentage of your Republican neighbors are actually quite pro choice. They make the other side think no Republicans ever agree with them on anything..
votes and encourages others to vote Democratic. Or they make you you ina creates a dangerous illusion that all people who identify as one party or the other are unified in their opinion on all issues, and worse, in direct opposition totally to anyone affiliated with the other party. In doing so, it creates a peer pressure, and the only ones who speak up against peer pressure are the few people who are either incredibly confident, or are total weirdos who were never socially acceptable anyway or don’t seem to notice or mind when everyone is hating on them. It has the effect of silencing many people across both parties, effectively giving extremists permission to create a totally false narrative, based on scant or no actual real research…and when extremists on the other side react, something equally bad crops up on the other side…
But when you look at these Pew Polls, which I find reliable and parallel with numbers of other leading polling services, huge swathes of people may be a minority, but a significant minority, going against their party’s dominant opinion. For example, a significant percentage of Democratic voters were never comfortable with gay marriage, and a significant number of Republican voters were rooting for gay marriage before it was written into law. Some of these minority opinions can be as high as 30 or 40 percent on certain issues within their party affiliation! I wish I could locate the graph i saw that perfectly illustrates this. It was somewhere within the link below. The Pew Polls website is amazing by the way, to anyone yet to discover it. There you will find tons of demographics on all kinds of issues.
I wonder if Conservatives and Liberals can do more within their social circles to express themselves when they are going against the media’s depiction of how a good conservative or a good liberal should be thinking? I wonder if it is evidence of mind control to have a fear of speaking your voice if it is a minority opinion within your community? For any numbers geeks, I’ll buy a coffee for anyone who can find a graph within that Pew Poll website of political parties on one axis and issue on the other axis. It perfectly illustrates the true diversity of opinion among most Americans! I’m In a sense it makes you realize if the media weren’t constantly reinforcing caricatures of one side or another, we’d probably realize that most of us Americans really are more similar than different…
Tales from the Little Shed 