Are You Willing to Walk a Mile in Their Media Shoes?

Vanessa Otero is the founder of Ad Fontes Media, a non-profit that analyzes bias in news (you may have seen their media bias charts). Vanessa has a great view of the media landscape, including its polarizing aspects. 

After such divergent responses to Trump’s verdict, Vanessa posted a message on LinkedIn, asking people if they’d be willing to try an experiment:

I invite you to do an exercise this evening: watch a TV news program from the side of the political spectrum you most disagree with. Everyone is covering the same story tonight. 

If you feel a visceral disgust, especially, I invite you to push past that. That feeling of disgust is a protection mechanism for your identity — it’s primal and you don’t need to heed it, because you are an evolved human capable of critical thinking.

Watch for half an hour, at least. Try to imagine what it would be like if you liked this content and agreed with it. Try to imagine if all the news/news-like opinion and analysis you consumed sounded just like this. How do you think that would affect your perception of the world?

Most people resist this sort of exercise, but it is essential to understanding why we are so deeply divided in what we believe. We inhabit bespoke realities crafted by our information sources […]

Understanding someone else’s world is key to overcoming stubborn intransigence, and is necessary if we hope to overcome our entrenched polarization.

One of Vanessa’s LinkedIn followers voiced an understandable objection: 

Let me argue here that “watch a wider spectrum of fear-mongering and entertainment – masquerading as ‘news’ – on TV” is … not good advice.

People should be called out, and likewise we all might remind ourselves that we’re all fallible. We’ve all been wrong before. 

Vanessa responded, with an emphasis on the importance of understanding — which can coexist with disagreement and criticism: 

I’m not advocating to watch it to be informed about the subject matter. I’m advocating watching it to understand that others live in different informational spheres than you do. 

And I’d argue that we collectively do not suffer from a lack of “calling out,” which takes the form of telling others they are wrong. On the contrary, we have more than enough people fully engaged in doing that, and after a certain amount, it ceases to be effective.

To that we’d add that distorted views of our political opponents often lead us to interpret their news and their positions in the worst possible way. We’ll often see malicious intent where it doesn’t exist. 

For example, we’ll sometimes think our adversaries are being deceptive and manipulative when they’re not. Our divergent realities can make it hard for us to understand our adversaries’ views, leading us to think, “They can’t possibly believe these things they claim to believe; they must be lying.” This isn’t to say all political opinion shapers and leaders are always truthful — clearly some are not — but just to say that we’re prone to seeing things as much worse than they are. When you watch the news from the “other side,” try to interpret it as generously as you can; that will help you better understand what your political opponents are seeing.

If you’d like to share Vanessa’s original LinkedIn message, it’s here. If you try her experiment, let us know how it goes.

Want to stay in the loop for news and takes on our toxic divides? Sign up for our newsletter.