Saturday, October 1, 2022

Changing culture, one story at a time

No one news story, tweet, or Facebook post will change peoples' minds. For those on the right, each story of a unlawful police killing or unhinged shooter will be just an outlier that doesn't represented a contradiction to their underlying world view that the police a good and guns aren't the problem. For those on the left each story of Democrats involved in shady business enterprises is simply dismissed as right wing political propaganda.  

But sufficient exposure to one kind of narrative or another may begin to lend credibility to its underlying interpretive frame and undermine a previously held contradictory frame. Thus someone who predominantly watches Fox will likely absorb the set of fundamental premises and value ordering that support the interpretive frame of the extreme right while listeners to NPR or MSNBC will be more likely to use the empathetic lens of the far left in interpreting events.  

For this to happen does not require that the farmings are made explicit (though Fox' opinion show do) but simply that the stories chosen tend to support the central political narrative of that source. So Fox will under-report stories of gun violence while over-emphasizing those about crimes committed by immigrants while the NPR or MSNBC will stream stories of the misfortune or abuse of underrepresented minorities or the ease with which guns can be purchased in some states.   

As the two media camps try to differentiated themselves to appeal to their target demographic they also change that demographic. As each loses viewers and subscribers in the middle, their center of gravity shits away from the center and the two narrative drift apart to to the point where the value system that underlies the choice of story (and interpretation if given) of each is almost unrecognizable to the other.  That's the way America has arrived at "one system two countries".   

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