Wow, it is no mystery why, we as a people, are so polarized in this country. I am deeply interested in politics and the psychology of both sides of the aisle. I mostly listen to conservative talk, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levine, Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino on a daily basis. I also consume some cable news in the evenings, mostly Fox News and sometimes I mix in some CNN and MSNBC in order to see what the tabloids are pushing.
One of my friends, a liberal, asked me if I ever watch Rachel Maddow on MSNBC or CNN. I explained that I do flip them on occasionally to see what narrative they are attempting to construct. This person suggested that I only watch these programs for a week and tell me what I think afterwards. He said, no Fox News, no talk radio or conservative podcast, just mainstream media CNN and MSNBC and print such as the New York Times. I accepted the challenge.
I set my DVR up for recording the morning programs, the higher rated mid day shows and the evening shows with the greatest viewership. I would record them and rip them to an audio track and put them into my iPhone for playback during the day while I was at work. After a full seven days of this madness I was astonished about a couple things.
I needed some corrective action to figure out how to undo some of the damage that was caused to my brains thought processes and electrical patterns. I am a full on conservative and I am socially liberal, a Libertarian by all definitions. After a week of listening to only CNN and MSNBC I was questioning everything, but I soon understood why I was questioning everything, which leads me to number two.
I don't care what anyone says, every single left-leaning media outlet gets a list of talking points and distributes said list to EVERY single show, anchor, producer and editor in the business. With outlets from Salon and VICE and newspapers from the NY Times and WaPo to the big cable outlets MSNBC and CNN, the repetition and complete lack of diversity in story writing is appalling. I would here the same storyline repeated over and over and over again on the same network, from show to show, with matching stories in the Times and reworked on Salon and Slate. I was absolutely dumbfounded at the lack of different stories and subject matter between all these sources.
The human mind gives in to what it hears on a regular basis. There is a psychological term called propinquity, and it states that when you spend a lot of time with someone you develop feeling for the person. This is the reason for so much inter-office adultery. I would suggest that the same is true for the news you watch and the main stream media knows this. Do you remember the main character from the movie A Clockwork Orange, remember when he was being subjected to forced television watching with the little metal things that forced his eyes open. They were attempting to imprint his psyche through visual stimulation. The main stream media have figured out that this works in regular life as well, as long as they all report the same thing, at the same time, and absolutely never let up.
After a week of getting steam rolled with anti-Trump news and generally anti-American views I was a pretty pissed off person, asking myself how things could get so bad. Then on Sunday morning I opened up my laptop and began catching up on the previous weeks news from conservative sources. By mid-day I was doing much better. I was reading stories written about the economy, the job market, and generally uplifting news. I was hesitant at first not to be duped by Trump's so-called propaganda, which had become instinct after a week of having it drilled in my head. I soon realized that Trump doesn't make the news, news outlets do, he may be a part of the story, but he doesn't print the news, nor does he report it. My anger toward the country in general began to subside as I realized I had legitimately been brainwashed to a small degree by accepting my friend's challenge.
Here is what I learned after one week of full immersion into liberal media, it is a very very scary place. Competing news agencies re-report their competitors stories, and they brow beat you with ludacris stories day in and day out. It is a media machine, it is well oiled and it is the only force propping up the Democratic Party these days. I question how the producers, editors and so-called journalists can work in an environment where they don't get to think outside the box, they must follow a script and there is no deviating from that script. There is no way to explain the fact that so many outlets are on the exact same page, day after day after day, unless they are fed a narrative to follow for the day's news. The next question is a simple one, where do these talking points come from? Is it Media Matters? An enemy country, you tell me....
In conclusion, I also want to cover the fact that this sort of coordination also exists in the conservative sphere, but it is nowhere near the same operation. I would say that the conservative side maybe has 15%-20% re-reporting and similar stories where I would say that the liberal outlets are somewhere in the 70%-80% range of regurgitated information. This is also where the moniker "Fake News" comes into play so much, because you have so many news outlets repeating something without proper vetting or research. In closing, I challenge all liberals out there to give this a try, except listen and watch only those outlets that report from the other side of the aisle and see how you feel about things after seven days. I bet a decent percentage of you won't return to the media sources you once coveted.