Escaping the Echo Chamber

[Alatar]

Ah, 1916 has a very different resonance for Irish people

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Ah, Rose, I was wondering if that was what you had meant.

[RoseMorninStar]

Sorry for the error folks.. I'm not dyslexic so I don't know what my excuse is.

[RoseMorninStar]

A subject I know very little about came up in a book I recently read; that of public/federally owned vs. public/state vs. private lands. I am aware this is a controversial topic but I am a blank slates as to the particulars. I have the impression that the subject also touches on tribal/native lands & rights, but I really know nothing about it. I attempted an internet search on the subject but wasn't sure what site might give an even-handed account. Does anyone have interest/opinions on this subject?

[N.E. Brigand]

Noting this New Yorker interview with AG Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, which wrangles with some thorny questions about whether journalists should demonstrate "objectivity" vs. "independence" and may illuminate one factor that leads to people living in bubbles. Here are two excerpts:

The posture of independence is not about being a blank slate. It’s not about having no life experience, no personal perspectives. That is an impossible ask. That’s a parody of the long debate over objectivity. The idea of objectivity, as it was originally formulated, wasn’t about the person’s innate characteristics. It was about the process that helped address the inherent biases that all of us carry in our lives. So the question isn’t “Do you have any view?” The question is “Are you animated by an open mind, a skeptical mind, and a commitment to following the facts wherever they lead?”

Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters [at smaller newspapers] are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.

Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism. The work of reporting is expensive. As traditional media faded, and particularly local media faded, and as digital media filled that vacuum, we saw a full inversion of how reporters’ days were spent. The new model is you have to write three to five stories a day. And, if you have to write three to five stories a day [as opposed to the old norm of three stories per week], there is no time to get out into the world. You’re spending your time writing, you’re typing, typing, which means that you are drawing on your own experience and the experience of the people immediately around you. So, literally, many journalists in this country have gone from spending their days out in the field, surrounded by life, to spending their days in an office with people who are in the same profession, working for the same institution, living in the same city, graduating from the same type of university.

Sulzberger also notes that the Times and some other national outlets have bucked the trend of collapsing media -- the Times in particular has turned around in a big way from a financially shaky period in 2009 and now has nearly ten million subscribers -- but he's very concerned about the loss of local newspapers and frustrated by people who don't recognize the value of journalism:

I think it is so interesting that our industry is obsessed with making the news free, even though the news is so expensive to create. The New York Times was the only newspaper that had a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan every day of those conflicts and still has a full-time presence in Iraq and Afghanistan today. Think about the implication of that. Had the New York Times not borne the cost of covering this war on behalf of the American public, we would’ve had a conflict where American troops were on the ground, but no American journalists to hold them to account, to bring the reality of the conflict back to the American people. I think there’s been this hangover from the terrible conventional wisdom of the early Internet that “information wants to be free.”

Anyway, lots to ponder in that piece.

[RoseMorninStar]

The posture of independence is not about being a blank slate. It’s not about having no life experience, no personal perspectives. That is an impossible ask. That’s a parody of the long debate over objectivity. The idea of objectivity, as it was originally formulated, wasn’t about the person’s innate characteristics. It was about the process that helped address the inherent biases that all of us carry in our lives. So the question isn’t “Do you have any view?” The question is “Are you animated by an open mind, a skeptical mind, and a commitment to following the facts wherever they lead?”

Love this.

I also think at issue is too many consider offering up 'both sides' as equal (for the sake of 'fairness') even if one is batshit crazy, as in the case of lies and conspiracy theories.

[N.E. Brigand]

A new study in Nature perhaps suggests that getting people out of their information bubbles doesn't actually lead to them changing their minds.