Comfort Zones and News Consumption
While I enjoy the online presences of newspapers like the Zeit or the Guardian and try to read their articles regularly, I have to admit that I my favourite way to get in touch with what is happening in the world (or rather what has been happening) is via satire programmes such as ZDF’s heute show, HBO’s Last Week Tonight, or Comedy Central’s Daily Show. There’s just something about the ironic approach to news, which calls out the many ridiculous practices of day to day politics which would otherwise go unnoticed because they are not really news worthy. Additionally, the world does not seem as dire when you have the possibility to get a laugh out now and then.
Of course, these programmes belong in the “opinion” section if you are thinking in traditional news paper terms and one should keep that in mind while watching, but — let’s be honest — there is no completely neutral way to report the news anyway. The choice which news stories are selected alone constitutes a certain subjectivity, as journalists decide which events receive coverage and which do not. So checking different news providers to form an opinion is always useful. But do we really do that? I have to admit, I don’t do it as often as I should. And it seems to me, like I’m not the only one who has been lazy getting different opinions.
Take the US presidential election, for example. Not only were the pollsters way off in their prediction for the outcome of the election, but the coverage of Trump as a potential president was skewed as well. Although — as we now know — a little less than half of the population want Donald Trump as their president, the media seems to have missed (or dismissed) this current in public opinion. Of course, there were articles that mentioned the groups of voters to which Trump most appealed to and that they were not insignificant in numbers. Yet the articles I’ve come across were always from a perspective supporting Hillary Clinton and not really taking the possibility of Trump having a chance at the presidency seriously. In the news prior to the election, Trump was portrayed as a danger that was warned against and his supporters were something to be wondered at, instead of Trump as a presidential candidate with a significant base of voters. And I read it and agreed. So I did not want to believe the results when they came in. The danger of Trump gaining the votes of Americans who feel left behind by the system was a constantly looming in the background, but ultimately the news had me convinced that Hillary Clinton would pull through and reason would prevail. Well, I should not have been so surprised. Brexit had virtually been the same thing. I did not think it possible because I believed it to be unreasonable, but yet it still happened.
Both instances indicate that people (and I’m not excluding myself here) seem to be overwhelmed by the sheer mass of news and information that is available to them and thus they stick to what they know. But in doing so, we are falling short of our possibilities. And one day, we might regret that.
