Liberals Are on Their Bullshit Again
Each morning time when his married woman leaves to work out at the gym, Tom Herbon turns on the radio in his basement wood shop. For much of the day as he works around his dwelling in Troy, north of Detroit, Herbon listens to WDTK 101.five FM, "The Patriot," a bourgeois talk radio station featuring commentators including Sean Hannity and Mike Gallagher. From 1-3 p.m., he switches stations to hear Rush Limbaugh.
Several times a twenty-four hour period, he'll fire up his desktop computer and read the latest news on the Drudge Report, the conservative news aggregation website that gets more than than 25 1000000 pageviews a day.
"I'm a Donald Trump Twitter follower," said Herbon. "I want to hear directly from the horse'southward oral fissure instead of it being misrepresented by the biased media."
More coverage: Interactive Map: What political bubble do you alive in?
Fifty miles away, a unlike soundtrack plays in the Ann Arbor abode of Aric Knuth and Jim Leija. After work, the couple listens to NPR while cooking and eating dinner. Typically, NPR'southward news programs including "All Things Considered" play in the groundwork for three hours each evening. Knuth and Leija, who voted for Hillary Clinton for president, read the New York Times.
"I take the app (for the New York Times) on my phone," Knuth said. "I bank check headlines at least 6 times a mean solar day."
The Ann Arbor couple had never seen the Drudge Written report. The Troy retiree had seldom listened to NPR.
That was about to change.
Herbon, Knuth and Leija were all born in Michigan, are college educated, own cute homes and have upper-middle course incomes. Yet their world views are polar opposites. Ane attribute of their lives that divides them: their sources of news.
Michigan Divided
The 2016 presidential election deepened fault lines in Michigan. Bridge is following 11 people and families throughout 2017 in an effort to understand – and pierce – the political and cultural bubbling in which we too often live. Herbon, Knuth and Leija are participating in the project.
Larn more near Michigan Divided
A generation ago, it's safe to say most Michigan residents got their news from the aforementioned local newspapers as their neighbors, and from nightly news shows on three broadcast networks. Today, conservatives in Copper Harbor can glide from machine radio to smartphone to laptop gorging on a diet of Benghazi, Obama phones and pedophile pizza conspiracies. Meanwhile, progressives in Port Huron tin can spend the twenty-four hours swaddled in podcasts and Facebook feeds assailing the intelligence of Trump voters and speculating when impeachment hearings will begin.
The bourgeois Herbon and liberals Knuth and Leija don't bargain in conspiracy theories or smug dismissiveness of those with whom they disagree. But the yawning gap between the media sources of these three voracious news consumers makes it difficult for them to discover common basis.
To endeavor to sympathize each other more than, Herbon, Leija and Knuth agreed to bandy news sources for 1 week.
Information technology didn't get well.
The news chimera swap
Herbon is a 57-yr-old retired engineer. He is conservative financially, regaling visitors with the story of packing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for work every twenty-four hour period for 17 years. If possible, and Herbon proves that it is, he is even more conservative politically. On Nov. 6, he tied a homemade, 32-square-foot sign supporting Donald Trump to the back of his minivan and parked it outside his polling identify.
Read more about Tom Herbon
He is quick with cocky-effacing jokes, admitting that some probable view him as a "whack chore," and simply as quick to label some liberals as "idiots."
Herbon's news habits veered to the right during the contentious presidential election betwixt now-President Trump and Hillary Clinton. Earlier the election, Herbon'due south daily routine was to listen to "The Today Evidence" each morning. He'd tape the "NBC Nightly News" and lookout man it afterward in the evening with his wife, Janet.
About two weeks prior to the election, Herbon's routine changed. The Today Show, Encounter the Press and NBC News "felt too slanted," he said. "It isn't representative of the real news and facts."
Listening or reading traditional media "made me ill," Herbon said. "Information technology affects my health. I had to plough information technology off considering I got then irate I literally experience like I want to kill somebody."
Starting a few weeks before the November presidential election and continuing today, Herbon gets his news primarily from the conservative site Drudge Study. He doesn't watch Boob tube news, opting instead to work effectually the house with "The Patriot" talk radio playing in the background.
"Possibly they've (traditional media) always been biased," Herbon said, "just we didn't' have a conservative checkpoint to bank check it against."
Leija and Knuth both piece of work for the Academy of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and their temperaments friction match the measured, easygoing voices they hear each evening on NPR (National Public Radio), which they listen to on public radio station WUOM, 91.vii-FM, amend known as Michigan Radio.
Knuth is a lecturer in the English language Department and manager of the New England Literature Programme, and Leija is director of education and community engagement for the University Musical Society.
Read more than about Jim Leija and Aric Knuth
Like the conservative Herbon, the unabashed liberal couple tweaked their news habits in the wake of the presidential election.
"Nosotros subscribed to the New York Times," Knuth said. "We felt we needed to read more we were getting in our x free articles a month."
Beyond the Times and NPR, Leija reads Jezebel, a decidedly feminist-focused web log featuring a mix of opinionated news and entertainment. (The lead story recently was headlined "The T-Male monarch was a Barbarous Predator, but a Gentle and Caring Lover.")
Knuth and Leija agreed to switch from listening to NPR to The Patriot talk radio. Instead of compulsively checking the New York Times multiple times a day, the pair would only look at Drudge Report.
Later some hesitation, Herbon agreed to plow his radio to a station that carried NPR programming. Instead of reading Grubber online, he would peruse the New York Times website and Jezebel.
Knuth and Leija were enthused almost the project. "I love experiments," Knuth said.
Herbon was wary. "I don't know if I can go far a calendar week," he said.
"I AM OUT"
I sent Herbon, Knuth and Leija instructions for their roles in the news bubble swap on Thursday, March 16. The experiment was to begin Monday, March xx and run through the following Sun.
The instructions were emailed at 9:23 a.m.
30-one minutes afterwards, Herbon emailed to say he already regretted like-minded to swap news feeds.
"I merely looked at jezebel.com,"Herbon wrote. "The headline "Federal Judge in Hawaii Blocks Trump's Second Travel Ban But in the Nick of Time" and ensuing commodity is total biased crap. I specifically chose "full crap" because NO respectable news feed I listen to, read or watch draw things as 'shitty.'
"Without even spending another second on this project I can tell you the result,"Herbon said. "…God help us."
At 11:39 a.m. the same twenty-four hours, Herbon sent a second electronic mail. He'd looked at more articles on Jezebel and checked out the New York Times website.
"I browsed more of jezebel.com and cannot believe what I am reading,"he wrote. "This site is zippo more than a ranting website for the lunatic fringe that shows NO RESPECT for anything or anybody. I take no interest in punishing myself by interacting for another second with this website."
At the New York Times, Herbon took offense at an article that referred to a Trump rally as "angry" and "xenophobic."
"I idea this activity would be interesting and fun but at that place is nothing fun about subjecting myself to such irresponsible drivel for another second let lone some other calendar week," Herbon wrote. "I volition NEVER look at that Jez… website again. Life is too short to waste another second going to a website that treats the release of celebrity nude photos (Herbon was probable referring to this article) with more respect than the President of the United states of america.
"The NY Times does not print accurate facts in areas I know, so I have no conviction or interest in reading about things I don't know because I cannot believe what I read."
At 2:53 p.m. that same 24-hour interval, four days before the experiment was to begin, Herbon sent a tertiary email:
"And so there is no confusion, I am OUT of the print experiment," Herbon wrote. "The sources you wanted me to review are so un-American and then out of touch on with real America I cannot support them in any style shape or form."
'A nightmare'
In Ann Arbor, Knuth and Leija stuck with the news swap for 5 days before giving in to temptation and checking the New York Times for updates on the Affordable Care Act repeal bill existence debated in the Business firm of Representatives.
Trying to go along up with the world past merely reading the Drudge Report was "a nightmare," Leija said. Drudge aggregates news stories from multiple sources on the Internet and places them in a listing with the same, modest headline size.
"I found it hard over the course of the calendar week to know what the of import stories were," Leija said. "I felt nether-informed considering all that tiny text creates a sense of not being able to tell what is important. It was depressing in a strange way."
"You accept really of import stories all mixed up with really unimportant stories on the same list," Knuth added. "I just didn't understand how that could ever be a helpful tool for understanding what's happening in the globe."
Knuth listened to The Patriot hours each twenty-four hour period. "I was shocked," Knuth said. "I had never listened to a radio station like that before. I was shocked to run across that it was actually just a series of programs of Rush Limbaugh-type guys. It was wall-to-wall programming of these cranky personalities, who were engaged mainly in complaining."
Later on years of listening most exclusively to public radio, which does not take advert, Knuth was disturbed past the amount of air fourth dimension taken upwards by ads on The Patriot, including 1 ad he heard repeatedly featuring onetime congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul hawking a food dehydrator.
"I was just constantly frustrated." Knuth said. "I like to know what happens in the world, and I constantly felt like I didn't know anything, and also frustrated by the endless sales pitches, which made me annoyed."
"I was just constantly frustrated." Knuth said. "I like to know what happens in the world, and I constantly felt like I didn't know annihilation, and besides frustrated by the countless sales pitches, which made me annoyed."
Where are the positive Trump stories?
Herbon dropped out of half of the news swap, declining to read the New York Times or Jezebel, but he did spend the calendar week listening to NPR instead of The Patriot. He said he found NPR segments on news events, such as Senate confirmation hearings with Supreme Courtroom nominee Neil Gorsuch, to be counterbalanced. Overall, NPR "wasn't too outrageous," he said. "Information technology wasn't torture."
From notes he'd taken during the week, Herbon pointed to several NPR segments he found troubling - one about "Bi,Trans, LGBT in Havana," which he felt had no relation to his life, and a story almost Boston schools changing world maps. The world map most of united states are used to seeing artificially inflates the land size of N America and Europe.
"Boston schools want to alter the map because students coming from African nations had lower cocky-worth considering their home land was being minimized by this archaic map. Actually? We have goose egg more important to talk about than the size of Somalia?
"I heard nix positive about Trump the whole calendar week," Herbon said. "I'd be OK with 60 (negative Trump news) to twoscore (positive Trump news), but 100-0? Really?
"I heard all week the tag line (on NPR), 'You trust what you hear.' I thought, non so much."
"I heard nothing positive about Trump the whole week," Herbon said. "I'd be OK with 60 (negative Trump news) to 40 (positive Trump news), but 100-0? Really?
'No style to agree'
After the news swap, Ann Arbor liberal Knuth deleted his phone app for Grubber Report but added Flim-flam News, and Leija said he wouldn't mind looking at Drudge Report occasionally as part of a healthy "news nutrition."
Troy bourgeois Herbon went into a cocky-imposed "news blackout," not because of the experiment, but because he said he was disgusted by Congressional Republicans declining to repeal Obamacare.
After a week'due south exposure to each other's news bubbles, no minds were changed. The liberals said they felt the bourgeois was being sick-served by his news feed. The conservative said the same for the liberals.
"It made me actually sorry that there is this person who listens to this radio station all twenty-four hours long, that is filled with people who are exactly like him, that say exactly the things he wants to hear," Leija said. "I guess that is the nature of the bubble. That really scared me."
"It made me actually lamentable that in that location is this person who listens to this radio station all day long, that is filled with people who are exactly similar him, that say exactly the things he wants to hear," Leija said. "I estimate that is the nature of the bubble. That really scared me."
As for Herbon, listening to NPR and reading the New York Times, "I was immediately turned off by inaccuracies of what I know to be fact. If people don't know what a fact is, we have a huge problem.
"If they say blackness and I say white," Herbon said, "in that location'southward no way to agree."
So what can we do?
Herbon, Leija and Knuth came away from the news swap maxim they believe the separate between Michigan residents would shrink if they shared a nonpartisan source of news.
Herbon suggests Drudge.
Leija suggests the New York Times.
Bridge Mag News Chimera Swap
Would you like to participate in your own news source bandy? Bridge Magazine will pair you lot with a participant with significantly different news sources, and nosotros'll publish some of the results.
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Source: https://www.bridgemi.com/quality-life/conservative-and-two-liberals-swapped-news-feeds-it-didnt-end-well
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