Thursday, March 28, 2024

Escaping the Echo Chamber

As a journalist, I’m biased. But not in the way some might think.

I’m biased in my belief that if more people spent more time consuming news from a wide variety of sources, our nation wouldn’t be as divided as it is.

I believe in the old adage of sunshine being the best disinfectant.

One of the most concerning things about this extraordinary time in our nation’s history, in which rioters breached the Capitol, is that many can’t even agree on what’s true.

For most of the past 245 or so years, we’ve had vigorous debates on what our priorities should be, and the best ways to address them. Those debates – framed by our own life experiences – often got heated and messy, but we worked our way through them. Never perfectly – and certainly never to the satisfaction of all – but at least we were operating mostly with the same set of facts.

These days, facts too often seem to depend on who is doing the telling – and the listening.

It’s ironic that at a time when we have more information at our fingertips than we could have imagined even 20 years ago, truth seems more elusive than ever.

It doesn’t have to be that way. But it means escaping the news and social media echo chambers in which only those who share our viewpoint are deemed worth hearing.

There is general distrust of “the news media” as a whole, a perception among many that reporters and editors have political agendas. But in a career that spans four decades in four states, I’ve hardly ever seen that on the local level. The most common agenda is to find interesting stories while procrastinating on deadline as long as possible. On a typical election night in a typical newsroom, the only cheering comes when the pizza arrives.

I believe this to be mostly true on the national level as well, particularly of the journalists in the trenches, covering news on the streets and in the halls of government.

Of course journalists hold political views, like everyone else. Most that I have known do, in fact, lean to the left of center. But those same folks, no matter their personal leaning, generally bend over backward to be fair. And while their personal worldview inevitably may color the way in which a story is approached at times, only those destined to be fired ever let it color the facts.

Complicating matters, however, many cable news hosts have erased the line between news and opinion; and there are a number of news websites with a clear partisan agenda. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we know where that information is coming from. At least those sources give us insight into how others think.

Through the noise, facts are still facts. And it’s easy to find them by surfing around and doing a little comparison shopping.

I love looking at a broad spectrum of local and national sources on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and flipping among the various cable talking heads at night – even the ones who make me want to throw the remote at the screen.

Sure enough, truth emerges.

Mark Brackenbury

Editorial Director

[email protected]