In a 2009 New York Times column Nicholas Kristof brought attention to The Daily Me. He wrote:
When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.
Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.
That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.
The right-wing news and commentary infrastructure is growing. Over at AXIOS, Sara Fischer and Dan Primack lists some of the outlets. They include the Daily Wire, MeWe Network, BlazeTV, Parler, Newsmax TV, OANN, CloutHub, Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, Winning Team Publishing, Right Forge, and Freedom Phone. Read their piece here.
And here is more Kristof:
The effect of The Daily Me would be to insulate us further in our own hermetically sealed political chambers. One of last year’s more fascinating books was Bill Bishop’s “The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.” He argues that Americans increasingly are segregating themselves into communities, clubs and churches where they are surrounded by people who think the way they do.
Almost half of Americans now live in counties that vote in landslides either for Democrats or for Republicans, he said. In the 1960s and 1970s, in similarly competitive national elections, only about one-third lived in landslide counties.
“The nation grows more politically segregated — and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups,” Mr. Bishop writes.
One 12-nation study found Americans the least likely to discuss politics with people of different views, and this was particularly true of the well educated. High school dropouts had the most diverse group of discussion-mates, while college graduates managed to shelter themselves from uncomfortable perspectives.
The result is polarization and intolerance. Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor now working for President Obama, has conducted research showing that when liberals or conservatives discuss issues such as affirmative action or climate change with like-minded people, their views quickly become more homogeneous and more extreme than before the discussion. For example, some liberals in one study initially worried that action on climate change might hurt the poor, while some conservatives were sympathetic to affirmative action. But after discussing the issue with like-minded people for only 15 minutes, liberals became more liberal and conservatives more conservative.
The decline of traditional news media will accelerate the rise of The Daily Me, and we’ll be irritated less by what we read and find our wisdom confirmed more often. The danger is that this self-selected “news” acts as a narcotic, lulling us into a self-confident stupor through which we will perceive in blacks and whites a world that typically unfolds in grays.
If you have read this far, I hope you might read the Current mission statement:
Current is an online journal of commentary and opinion that provides daily reflection on contemporary culture, politics, and ideas. We seek to ground ourselves in the broad tradition of American democracy—a tradition whose practices and institutions we believe are moving through a period of great stress and testing. We confess that we once took for granted many of the basic assumptions of our democracy, including a shared core of American values. We no longer do.
We are exhausted by the cultural warfare that now dominates our civic life, threatening to undermine bonds of family, friendship, and neighborhood. We are demoralized by the quasi-religious authoritarianism we see growing on both the right and the left. We endeavor here to provide commentary that clarifies and explains our political and cultural moment, summoning readers to intelligent, constructive responses.Â
Like American democracy at its best, we aspire for Current to be free, dynamic, divergent, and civil. If spirited, even profound disagreements arise on this platform, we hope they will always be bounded by common regard for liberty of conscience and free inquiry, and moderated by shared commitments to humility, charity, and mutual respect. (See Eric Miller’s opening essay, “In the Arena: It’s Time to Play”).
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