Charlie Savidge
cs351916@ohio.edu
Over the past four years it has been nearly impossible to avoid the clear political divide within this country. It often seems that people are living in two different worlds, and in a sense, that is true. You have people getting their information from different sources. You have people within the country living two very separate life experiences. You have people that have never left their own city and people that haven't left their small farm town. This combination of the media they consume paired with these living experiences has been incredibly volatile.
This divide can be seen clearly throughout coverage of the Charlottesville Protest and subsequent terror attack that happened during it. You can read more about the political divide in Tyler Fisher's piece over on Politico. You can see what articles got passed around by both left and right wing users online. And while some of the partisanship is obvious, such as people on the right sharing an article from Breitbart, but there is a more subtle theme.
A lot of the coverage on the right tends to focus on headlines that mention more events, sharing or shifting blame, or criticizing other outlets coverage. Not everything comes from right-wing sources. For example right wing social media shared an article by Joe Heim, Ellie Silverman, T. Rees Shapiro and Emma Brown from Washington Post that says "One dead as car strikes crowds amid protests of white nationalist gathering in Charlottesville; two police die in helicopter crash". Notice that this headline mentions nothing about race or political affiliation despite the first words of the article saying "Chaos and violence turned to tragedy Saturday as hundreds of white nationalists, neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members — planning to stage what they described as their largest rally in decades to “take America back” — clashed with counterprotesters in the streets and a car plowed into crowds, leaving one person dead and 19 others injured." All the while the same group of people continue to share Breitbart articles with headlines like "Gov. McAuliffe in Charlottesville ‘No Place in America’ for Alt-Right, Refuses to Condemn AntiFa" written by Raheem Kassam. That article goes on to criticize the media for their "one-sided coverage" condemning the racist protest and Donald Trump for failing to condemn white supremacists.
This trend of sharing articles with self-reinforcing ideas not only applies to the text within the article, but pushing the message even if it is through the headline alone. The message on the right is clear. It is entirely reactionary playing into what President Trump has been saying throughout his entire political career. That is to say that, "The media is lying to you, they are not reliable, only the movement itself is reliable."
This can be seen through the sharing of both the Washington Post article and Breitbart article. If neither are criticized by the President and the further right wing movement, they are accepted. But as soon as it criticizes Conservative members of the government and white supremacy, then the message must be gotten rid of. This can be seen as President Trump called CNN and Washington Post fake news via The Hill.
But where does this distrust of the media come from? While it is true that there are many people in the media that are liberal, that doesn't make the coverage inherently left wing, especially if all the reporting is factual. However, there has been plenty of things for the media to criticize in the past two decades as the pairing of online blogs and journalism that have an ease of access to information with the issues stemming from the United States involvement in the Middle East. This constant and frequent coverage of a Republican lead government and a war that many felt mixed on lead to a lot of people speaking out. However, when President Obama came into office the right had its turn as outlets and online forums pushed baseless birther conspiracy theories, criticized him for things such as wearing a tan suit, wanting to use Dijon mustard.
But it wasn't just the right that created this issue, however they did normalize coverage like that about political figures. There is a joke that if you want to know what is shown on CNN you can go watch Fox News to find out. They are quick to critique their competitors in their primetime time slots. But what media and news outlet continued to do was to focus on the conservatives instead of holding them both to the same standards. You don't have to look very far to realize that a lot of politicians on both sides take tons of money from big money donors and that they are beholden to them. The media often talks about what these politicians say or do, as they should, but they are much less likely to say why the same politicians are voting the way they do on bills and blame it on partisanship. However, there is a story there involving the money in politics, even if it is just an accepted part of the political system.
In terms of interpreting the news, this is where the education system is lacking. Outside of writing a paper, people aren't often told what is and isn't a reliable source, and many aren't able to discern them figure it out for themselves. The ability to do this is what is known as media literacy and it is a scale. A person can be less literate in navigating the media than another, but everyone in our society has witnessed or interpreted media in some way, shape or form. An important thing to note is that younger people are often more media literate than their older counterparts. This is because they are used to navigating media online from a very young age, whereas someone that grew up before televisions were common in American households would have a harder time discerning the news as being false because they took the newspaper to be true and they followed journalistic standards. Even people not as old that grew up with three or four channels, the news was comparable and that message was taken directly from the companies to the people.
While younger people do have an advantage, tackling misinformation in the future and creating trust in the media will require a lot of change. A few things that could be done are things like starting a campaign to promote journalistic integrity and educating people in and out of school to discern whether or not the information they are receiving is correct. Tackling misinformation does a lot to get rid of hate speech and racism, as the more informed and diverse the general public is, the more they understand others.
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