I'm linking to the complaint here rather than the interviews because I am absolutely astounded to my core by the recent flurry of fluff pieces on the leaders of the white supremacist movement, which permit the subjects to offer gentle quotes justifying their views, with minimal examination of the actual views themselves. Instead, I'd check out one of their YouTube videos so you can get the real messages. We all need to know the truth and a vanity-fair style puff piece does not deliver that. Once you know their ideological foundation, you will see why Bannon is appealing to an obscure thinker you'd never heard of, and why certain laws are objected to, certain names and nicknames and buzzwords repeated. Then you'll know for sure why Trump is their guy; it wasn't a lucky coincidence of a few goals.
One way of getting out of the bubble is to figure out why people with a direct line to the WH argue the 19th Amendment should go, or why they hate and fear Jews so much. Please recall this was part of Trump's actual campaign ads and retweets; not separate, distant supporters. I think most people are deep in the bubble on what's happening with white nationalism; they aren't the weird, ugly Deutschophiles and skinheads we saw occasionally in the past who appealed to pretty much no one. The new ones have very smart leaders who know how to market a sense of fun belonging.
Edited to add other echo chamber thoughts:
I have a major issue here because for a long time I tried to look only at news services (e.g. AP, Reuters), and they made terrible mistakes during the election season. They didn't correct for the mistakes! Ultimately there's a human being on the other end who isn't doing the job very well. When you can't trust basic news services to stick to facts rather than editorializing or using their reporting of facts as a means of trying to influence the narrative, it's a huge problem. And now we have our President-Elect in an ongoing twitter war with the NYT (and the WaPo and USAToday, among others). The good side of this conflict is that the WaPo and USAToday have been doing a lot of terrific reporting, apparently having decided either to make a stand for honesty or else resigned to the fact that they face the same legal issues no matter what they choose, so they might as well let 'er rip.
My attempt to counteract this type of problem is to gather news from a wide variety of fact-based sources, including lots of local news. A lot of times the local reporters will include really important information because the tentacles of the corporate master that wants to remove or spin that information haven't penetrated down far enough, or the story is going to stay local. On a national level, most mainstream and supposedly straightforward news has so much editorializing, I have to wonder what the fuck is going on in j-schools across the nation. I don't think the major problem is a liberal/conservative tilt so much as an overall Corporate and Status-Quo tilt. The only way you are going to find out what is actually going on in Standing Rock, for instance, is to read reports from independent journalists. Since reality has a notable political slant, you're not going to find many reliable outlets to achieve political "balance" on this issue. Of course, that kind of balance isn't really balanced or truth-promoting at all, so that's irrelevant. On other issues, I have found that libertarian journalists and think-tanks often do a pretty decent job of assembling facts. Perhaps their very confidence in interpreting these facts differently and correctly permits them to report facts without blinking, where other outlets simply deny reality.
If there is one thing that terrifies me most after the past year, it's the ability of journalists to report on Not-F, where F is an easily verifiable fact, or even to insist on Not-F themselves after F has clearly emerged. In a world ruled by Not-F, we are fucked. Getting back to local news on that front: it's fascinating to read local reports on things like "why are the streets here always so full of water" and "why is the nuclear power plant actually closing"? Info slips out that would not be permitted into a broader national narrative presented to you by e.g. the networks, cable, big newspapers, or even basic news services. Strangely, the nuclear power plant just hasn't been the same since a historic flood event! And that would not be part of the official story today. Strangely, the Florida town is working overtime to find solutions to its chronic flooding problems, but larger reports on climate change wouldn't want to mention that sea level rise is already an issue. I mean, I think we're fucked. That's where it rests.Statistics: Posted by Phoebe — Sun Nov 20, 2016 11:36 am
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