Somewhat related to my last article, another thing that I've noticed about this political season is that I almost always see people post articles and information from extremely biased sources. Granted, almost all media is extremely biased, one way or the other, so it is hard not to post or read biased information. However, it is part of our responsibility as citizens of this country to enlighten ourselves on what is actually happening, not on what the media says is happening based on the slant of that particular source. In other words, if our alliance to our party is stronger than our willingness to try to discern the truth, then our country is doomed. And if that is hyperbole, then, at the very least, it intensifies polarization, and that will eventually cause our country to collapse on itself.
While it is particularly apparent now, just because of the election, this problem has been on the rise for quite a while, to the detriment of American citizens. When I was in high school, my teacher gave us the assignment to do a rhetorical analysis of the 1978 Harvard Commencement speech "A World Split Apart" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (you should read it), and it took me ten pages of writing to memorize the spelling of his name. He says this about the media in the West:
"Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic disease of the 20th century and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press. Such as it is, however, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislative power, the executive, and the judiciary. And one would then like to ask: By what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?" ("A World Split Apart")
The media is one of the most influential things in our country. And how awful to think that it is because of the media, not justice, law, compassion, or all those other right, true, good things, that this election is as it is. We, by our desire for immediate information, by our desire for superficial information that feeds our own false opinions, have elected it, and it is responsible to nobody. It thrives on driving us apart, because the media is not primarily concerned with the welfare of our country, it is primarily concerned with its viewership (the extreme stories are so much more interesting).
We cannot change this, but we can mitigate its effects by actively trying to discern the truth of what is happening. This means reading all kinds of sources with all kinds of different slants. It means reading liberal sources, conservative sources, and sources in between, because the likelihood is that some combination of what they all say is the closest to what is actually happening.
We consistently let the media feed us our opinions and we go on thinking that we're exercising our freedom by spouting the opinions that have been fed to us because we chose to listen to that particular source of extremist media. That is not exercising freedom. Exercising freedom is making the choice to inform yourself of the truth. It is making the choice to develop your own opinions instead of readily accepting and propagating an extreme view of your own party and, simultaneously, an extreme view of the opposing party.
I am not saying that you are automatically in the wrong if you tend toward conservative or liberal media. Part of developing a personal opinion means you will likely be on one side or the other. What I am saying is that it is absolutely necessary to recognize that media is almost inherently slanted, and while you are informing yourself, and while you are developing your personal opinions, you must be careful not to let that slant blind you to the truth. If your personal opinion is never challenged, then you are not reading enough. The media is extremely powerful; we ought not let it divide us and play us for fools.
