long read: "How America Fractured Into Four Parts"
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Free America celebrates the energy of the unencumbered individual. Smart America respects intelligence and welcomes change. Real America commits itself to a place and has a sense of limits. Just America demands a confrontation with what the others want to avoid. They rise from a single society, and even in one as polarized as ours they continually shape, absorb, and morph into one another. But their tendency is also to divide us, pitting tribe against tribe. These divisions impoverish each narrative into a cramped and ever more extreme version of itself.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-packer-four-americas/619012/
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@davesaddiction Which one is Track Day America
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Those are my people.
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@davesaddiction
Is it bad that I don't like any group?Free - libertarian Ayn Rand devotees, TEM syndrome
Smart - limousine liberals (or Seattle progressives, and I don't mean that in a nice way) who underestimate their privilege
Just - means well in theory but sometimes exists just to make a scene, no strategy
Real - DJT will be back in the oval office by August -
@davesaddiction It's interesting that he gives an example of uniformity in the past of everybody watching Bullitt.
I've seen a bit of each. I lived on the north side of the city of St. Louis when I was first married, and I was among the "Just". After a few years, I got a job in St. Charles Missouri, the land of the "Real" with a few "Free" thrown in. I now live in an affluent neighborhood of Seattle among the "Smart".
I wonder how much of the split is due to the rise of new media. The split coincides with the spread of cable TV. We started to get more channels to get our information from. It only accelerated with the spread of the World Wide Web and then social media. It's hard to agree on basic ideas when everybody gets a different set of facts from different sources. Have only three major news networks wasn't optimal, but it was a time when news was a loss leader, not entertainment.
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In the last few years, I’ve taken to recording and watching the nightly news (NBC, fwiw) and 60 Minutes, and pretty much abstaining from any of the 24-hour “news” channels. Trying to fill airtime is not conducive to good reporting. I also try to read from a wide variety of viewpoints to get the full perspective of a story or issue. It’s very, very easy to end up in your own personal echo chamber if you’re not intentional about not letting that happen.
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@davesaddiction I fully agree. I moved from St. Louis to Seattle 13 years ago, and I never plugged in the TV after the move. I mostly read from various news sources online. I occasionally look at the websites for the local television stations, but they concentrate on the sensational stories.
I do subscribe to the news services that I like to try to keep them financially solvent. The Seattle Times is not too bad. It has reasonable coverage of local stories, but it's often just a good starting point, letting me know when to look for other viewpoints. They mostly get wire service stories for national and international news.
I subscribe to The Atlantic and I think they have a better range of views. They don't have any Trump Republicans on staff, but I won't fault them for that. David Frum is one of their leading writers, and as a speech writer for George W. Bush, I'll take him as a late 20th century conservative. I'll read the print edition cover to cover just to force myself to get all of the viewpoints in the magazine. (The book reviews are far from my favorite part, but I sometimes learn something.)
I also like looking at international newspapers for different viewpoints. It was interesting following the recent events in Gaza through the Israeli papers.
I get a lot of my news analysis from podcasts. My commute is 30 minutes each way, and I jog for 6 - 7 hours each week, giving me plenty of time to listen. I have a lot of podcasts that cover different views on history. That has helped me put a lot of modern events in perspective. I have friends who like to argue different views on immigration, yet they know nothing of the Chinese Exclusion Act or the Bracero Program.
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I also regularly listen to podcasts (but once again, one can easy pigeonhole themselves if they aren't willing to listen to differing viewpoints - plenty out there will just tell people what they want to hear).
Good on you for supporting real news - I really need to start doing the same...
It will be interesting if a new guest worker program will be needed here in the States after everything normalizes following the pandemic. So many businesses are having a hard time finding employees. Wages are increasing at the low end, but I'm not convinced that will solve it.
Are you seeing the issue in Seattle as much as we're seeing it in the lower Midwest?
Are you still a Cards fan?
Brutal slide they've been on... -
@roadkilled said in long read: "How America Fractured Into Four Parts":
but it was a time when news was a loss leader, not entertainment.
Yes, but this was an extremely short period of time, and hasn’t been the case for a while. For most of our nation’s history newspapers were just propaganda and advertising tools for the ultra rich.
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Clearly, there's always been corruption that's made its way into news reporting, but there have also always been principled reporters whose mission is to get the truth out (one way or another). The hope is that our collective news organizations will do more good than harm...
Sadly, too often, they've been on the wrong side of this equation.
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@dipodomysdeserti I'm not sure that the period of unified national news was all that short. It started with the radio news networks in the 1920s and 1930s and it didn't end until the 1980s or 1990s with the rise of cable television. Sure, 50 years is only a short period overall, but it represents a large part of the living memory of many adults. We are only now seeing the rise of elected officials in congress who don't know of that period. AOC and MTG never lived through that era, so they may not think that there are other views that may be right. Mitt Romney and Joe Biden had their formative years during the era of national news and it shows in how they act.
Unfortunately, this doesn't bode well for the future.
I listen to the podcast "History that Doesn't Suck" and it's up to the 1880s now. Having made it through the Civil War episodes, it's clear that the United States has had many periods where there were different realities for different groups in the country.
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@davesaddiction I'll see your Cronkite and raise you a Murrow.
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@roadkilled In the early twentieth century you still had newspapers shilling out for whoever owned them, and there was still plenty of sensationalist entertainment being sold as news well before the ‘80s. News during WWII was significantly propaganda based.
Read some of Thompson’s pre ‘80s work. He spends just as much time shitting on inaccurate, sensationalists reporters as he does on his actual subject, and that was during the hey day of American journalism.
The Fox News inspired stuff we see today is nothing new.
Local, independent news has generally been pretty good, but few people consume this media, and the reporters are often limited by publishers to a pretty specific scope.
FWIW my brother is a local news journalist, so I get a bit of a peak into what goes on in his realm.
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@dipodomysdeserti In the PNW anyway, indie TV stations effectively don't exist - everyone has a corporate master. Some are more neutral than others. I am far more concerned with Sinclair than Fox, as at least the latter doesn't try to hide its motives. Sinclair is a clear danger to actual reporting. However, more independent print/online material does exist.
Funny, I also have a brother who is a local newscaster. Not an industry I think I'd want to deal with, lots of turnover and constant seeking of greener pastures.
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Giants.
Very thankful that the local news station we favor is independent.
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@davesaddiction I read his biography a few years ago, it is a good story and great recap of the middle of the 20th Century. Cronkite and his lot were seen as too flamboyant and opinionated by the radio bigwigs of the prior era. But yeah, was really a different world when most of us got all our news from the same sources.
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@fintail Yeah, I was thinking more written news. My brother is an editor and reporter for a small local paper in a rich, republican city. He was called out by a bunch of soccer moms at a school board meeting a few weeks ago. They accused a board member of paying off his student loans (he had a full ride scholarship). The papers are still usually owned by shitheads, but as long as the salespeople can sell ads he’s left alone as far as what to report.
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@dipodomysdeserti Ugh, Karens, unearned wealth, and sports parents, not a goodmix. There'd be little holding me back from calling one/them out about where they get their meal ticket. Most of that entire demographic is endlessly entitled while having done absolutely nothing to deserve their luxuries.
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My cousin's wife Karen is decidedly not a "Karen".
Wonder if she's taken to using a nickname...
manual . RWD . LS3 . MagneRide . Brembos ... 4 doors + 5 seatbelts
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@davesaddiction Yeah, I am sure most Karens aren't "Karens", but it's a thing now. Just like "Chads" (but I bet more of them meet the stereotype).
Family friend when I was a kid was named "Karen", very nice older woman, definitely not the type who lives life harassing service workers and living on merits built by someone else.
