People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds.
The real issue is integrating opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that's where actual understanding takes place.
But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.
The only exception I can think of is The Economist, whose articles often follow exactly the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which of course is why they're known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present "both sides" in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.
> Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time.
I think it's actually very rare that the audience get to listen to these people unfiltered. Instead the audience will have chosen their preferred channels and these channels will have pre-digested, edited and analysed any speeches. Any nuance will have been stripped away to match a simplified narrative.
> Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time.
Except, largely, they didn't/won't. Democrats listened to what their preferred news outlets were saying about George W. Bush-as-President for 8 years, and Republicans will no doubt listen to what their preferred news outlets say about Barack Obama-as-President for a similar length of time, but that's very different from actually listening to opposing viewpoints.
But for the most part they aren't even passively listening to the other side, much less actively listening to the other side and engaging with the positions presented.
> But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.
Major media "news" sources are almost completely dominated by opinion/commentary, so that's not why they leave off synthesis. They leave off synthesis because the narrative they are generally trying to sell is about the conflict not the underlying reality, and when they are trying to sell a narrative about the underlying reality it is the black and white story that one side is good and right and the other side is bad and wrong, not some fuzzy gray synthesis.
Are alternative news sites better? If so, how? If not, why not?
Discounting the questionable journalistic ethics of the 24-hr news cycle media, I am hard pressed to consider the other major news outlets to be as equally questionable.
CBS screwed up recently with the embassy bombing recently. That in of itself is bad. But the fact they admitted fault I think speaks volumes for their efforts.
Mostly, IME, alternative news outlets are as focussed on easy narratives as major news outlets, though they often have different preferred narratives. They also, IME, tend to be more overtly partisan in their narrative preferences than most major outlets. (Fox is somewhat of an outlier among major news networks in the consistency of the partisan slant of its presentations.)
If you are passively accepting any news outlets (or any narrow set of news outlets) presentation, your getting spoonfed someone else's preferred narratives. To get beyond that, you have to actively engage by seeking out multiple sources with different biases and, where possible, reaching past them directly to the original sources of information, and critically engaging with the information.
But that's work, and even most of the people with the skills to do it aren't going to bother wtih that for most issues.
What about the role of discourse in achieving integration? You mention news organizations and political speech, but those are one-way processes where they talk and you listen. What about discussions and debates between people with opposing views? That's the kind of interaction I'm interested in seeing. Reddit's r/ChangeMyView subreddit comes kind of close, but it's more about switching between binaries than creating some kind of synthesis.
One might think online communities like Reddit would be perfect for hosting these kinds of debates, but sadly people tend to downvote opinions they disagree with, effectively silencing them and limiting the range of acceptable viewpoints. It would be great if there was a solid, popular platform for rational debate between people with opposing views... keeping it rational seems like the hardest part.
.) isn't there even a whole research area dedicated to all biases and other effects which make persuasion and arguing a quite hard problem? (not only in public politics, btw)
.)"People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them" ... and that tends to be the output of that research, btw ;)
I personally wonder if it wouldn't be time to accept that nobody on earth actually can gather all insights, all arguments and for sure not all facts on any given topic and if instead of arguing against each other we should change the prevalent culture to arguing with each other (that's not a new idea ofc ;) and accept that every single argument even if provided by the utter worst "enemy" provides some additional information about the world which we should accept and incorporate into our ideas about the way to move forward... I think most of the time this valuable objective is not reached bcos of unwillingness to accept and understand diverging language and a tended culture (even official) of hyperbolic conflict.
So even if it seams to me the Reps. are talking nonsense at first, I'd rather try to find out what they really mean and what information drives them... nope, it does not make arguments and discussion any easier ;)
they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.
It also requires more work on the part of the writer, and introduces risk of turning out to be objectively wrong, so I'm not surprised they skip that part. It's the "safe" choice. :(
People hear opposing views all the time -- they just ignore/hate them. Democrats listened to George Bush talking for eight years. The Republicans are going to be listening to Obama's pronouncements for an equal length of time. None of this is changing any of their minds.
The real issue is integrating opposing views -- the Hegelian dialectic where people take a thesis, antithesis, and turn it into a synthesis -- that's where actual understanding takes place.
But this is very difficult, and while news organizations often pride themselves on presenting "both sides", they generally neglect the synthesis step, because that moves from the realm of supposed impartiality to opinion.
The only exception I can think of is The Economist, whose articles often follow exactly the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, which of course is why they're known (correctly) for being a heavily opinionated publication. But to their credit, they do generally present "both sides" in most articles, which distinguishes them from traditional opinion writers like columnists, editorial boards, and explicitly partisan media outlets.