this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2024
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Having two different realities is not good. I'm not sure what is to be done about it though. Some people will always choose to believe the easy lie over the difficult truth.
Ignoring Fox and the crazies for a moment, how often have mainstream networks given equal time to climate change deniers and actual scientists, pretending there was a debate where there wasn't one.
I want to push back a little on "we all agreed on what was and what was not reality." When there were three TV stations, did any of them highlight police brutality? Overincarceration? The military industrial complex? Anything that would hurt their sponsor's bottom lines?
The news networks we have today are all owned by large media conglomerates. They range from pro-corporate to pro-fascist. I'm glad that there are enough independent voices that we can hear from people who don't profit off of the status quo. It's unfortunate that right wing media is so prevalent and well funded, but if there is an answer to that, it's not going back to the days when Walter Cronkite, CBS, and Gulf+Western would tell us "That's the way it is".
This is a very fair point. True, having very limited news options didn't allow for a lot of deviation in agreement on observable reality, but to your point, it could also easily paper over a lot of very ugly parts of the actual reality. Chomsky writes quite a lot about this in his book "Manufacturing Consent", which basically is a dive into how media organizations can be used as the propaganda arm of the government. Everything from choosing what you show to choosing how you talk about things goes towards bolstering an underlying narrative that you want to project.
I'm not sure what a solution would look like, if one is even possible. But solution or no, the narrative divergence in this country has primed us to detest each other, which is the first crucial step towards mass violence.