It is apparent now more than ever that the political divide in America is quite significant. Gone are the days where we have a common set of values and push for the same goal of making America better, but just disagree on the best way to attain that goal.
Many conservatives will tell you that it is the left that has moved from the mainstream, and a leftist will tell you the same thing about the right. Based on the eye test it does seem as if the mainstream Democratic Party has moved further to the left while the mainstream Republican Party has actually moved to the left as well, particularly on social issues.
That’s just my perspective, so I tried to find if the statistics actually supported my conclusion. The truth is that I could not find any reliable sources that took an honest look at this issue by Googling around for about an hour or so.
I found a wide variety of sources on both sides of the aisle claiming that the other side had become wildly extreme, but I could NOT find any bipartisan reporting. A good source may exist, but it was not easily found, or my search terms were not adequate, which is entirely possible.
A realization hit me hard: we have lost all meaning of objective facts and instead have fallen into the dangerous waters of subjectivity peddled as objectivity. This problem manifests itself particularly in young people, who have grown up being coddled and told that their feelings matter more than anything else in the world. Nothing evidences that claim more than an interaction I had in college.
As a freshman I took a class called Media, Culture, and Society, in which our final project was to pick a topic relating to one of those things and do a presentation on it in front of the class. I decided to explain the malfeasance of the media in relation to Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman.
Careful to simply state the facts as found in: the police report, 9-1-1 call audio, and trial compared to the lies and half-truths that the media pushed, I gave a quite unbiased, fact-oriented presentation with some notable exceptions including the title, “Media Race Baiting in the Case of Trayvon Martin,” and conclusion, which explained why it was a problem for the country at large.
My presentation was met with much yelling and outrage by my classmates as expected, but after class my professor, a young, soft-spoken lady in her mid-twenties, had a pointed conversation with me about spreading lies and misinformation. I explained to her that I had shown my sources on the screen with screenshots and cited my sources at the end (which no one else had done at all).
She insisted that it did not matter that I used primary sources, because Zimmerman was guilty even though he was found innocent at trial.
For a while, I was really confused. How could she call me liar when all available information and facts supported my statement? What I realized is that she either did not care or was unable to accept that the facts supported a different conclusion than her personal feelings and beliefs.
Here is the crux of the issue: people seem to think that their subjective feelings and beliefs on a topic have an effect on objective truths, but they don’t.
As a society, if we do not return to a time where facts are objective, then we have no hope of repairing the wide political polarization plaguing our nation. Worse yet, the two sides will continue to sit in an echo chamber refusing to listen to facts that aren’t true “for them.”
It’s not only individuals, because you see this with people in the “health at any size movement,” who refuse to accept the health risks of being obese and instead say that it is society putting unreasonable expectations on them.
It isn’t that living a certain lifestyle incurs certain risks associated with it. It’s that the facts don’t make you feel good about yourself, so they must be wrong. “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” and neither should we. What we should care about are facts and keeping them objective.
Unfortunately, those who share this belief seem to be a dying breed, and the rise of activism under the guise of journalism continues to polarize issues like President Trump’s attacks on the press.
A quick objective look at the situation would tell anyone that the President has an unfortunate habit of lying, and wildly exaggerating, but that the mainstream press has done a huge disservice to the American people by printing incredibly biased and sometimes flat-out wrong reports in an attempt to paint Trump in the worst possible light.
Rather than simply state this factual, objective read of the situation, the media, respond by saying that Trump’s attacks on the press “echo totalitarian regimes of the past,” “are dangerous,” and “an effort to discredit, marginalize, and even dehumanize them.”
According to this Atlantic article “the press have produced exceptional in-depth reporting that has been integral to the constitutional checks on the presidency,” but in the very next paragraph admits that coverage during Trump’s first 100 days “set a new standard for negativity,” with a four-to-one ratio of negative to positive.
The media response is ridiculous, but Trump’s response is equally unreasonable, because instead of simply calling out the media when they lie, Trump calls the entire media the “enemy of the people” all the time.
Everything could be solved by just reporting the news and only calling out the media when they lie, but objective truth and facts are dead, and until they are revived we will continue down this dark path.
Zachary Vinson
Fayetteville, Ga.
