Structural Problems and Future Solutions

Pushkin Hi listeners, you know that Hero in Revision is history. We ask a lot of questions about the systems that have shaped our worldviews. While we're hard at work on our new season, we wanted to share another podcast that hits these points and asks big questions too . It's called Seenon Radio, and today I'm bringing you an episode from their aptly named news season the news Some have called the news media the oxygen of a functioning democracy, but if that's true, America's lungs are in rough shape. Many Americans say they don't trust the media. The business model for local journalism has all but collapsed. And we all know about the barrage of misinformation that flows from our splintered media scape , you can't separate the state of our news media from the other profound crises that America keeps on failing to solve. Hosted by John Bewen and now in its eighth season , the two time peabody award nominated show explores the roots of this crisis and asks what's really wrong with the news ? It's an eight part series so you'll want to check out the rest, but for now, here's episode one . Find seed on radio wherever you get podcasts . She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribes Zolar, omolism amb. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens. Zolar one hundred and fifty milligrams is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zoleair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use it if you are allergic to zole air. Zolaire may cause a severe, life threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zoolar should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions including an,aphy anlaxis while avo iding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or hearten circulation problems have been reported. Please see Zolar. com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolar. This is an advertisement for Solar paid for by Genentek and Novartis . We spend hours deciding what to buy, but there's a split second decision that can make or break a sale. Do you have the trust to hit buy now? Agent Agentic commerce is testing that moment more than ever , and that's where PayPal comes in. With twenty five years of checkouts, four hundred million consumer accounts globally, and the benefit of purchase and seller protection , all of which make sure wherever a purchase starts, it ends with trust . Build for payments, growth and agentic. PayPal open built for all business . Visit paypal open Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply . See paypal dot com slash risk dash management for details . Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project . One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales , and somehow none of them talk to each other. That's where Odu comes in. An all in one business management software that brings every part of your business together from sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform, no messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs. And best of all , no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odu. com slash iHart radio. That's ODO com dot slash iHart radio . All right, we're rolling through. Here we go Asian markets are mostly down today. That's dangerous flash fl ooding ripping through parts of Milwaukee. This is a box news alarm. This is our camera angle from our Americans, if we want to be, are inundated with news from countless sources. The New York Times. I'm Michael Law. Welcome back to One American News. Thanks so much for watching. And at the same time, we're stuck in a deep information crisis . It seems like we're helpless to solve our problems . It doesn't help that we have no shared narrative and few shared facts. What is happening right now in the world and what just happened to my friend, Charlie Kirk is a battle of sheer evil versus goodness. To me, Fox News just not they don't tell the whole story. I consider myself a centrist. I'm not particularly interested in the MSNBC. No, what I'm saying is don't do me. Don't try me today, Scotty. We put out a saying to the New York Post . Yo in worth of paper put it on. On big questions , a whole lot of us don't know it's true . Or we firmly believe and will fight you over that are not true. Let's get rid of these voting machines. There's a half a dozen people, whether it's the House or Senate Larry that are up here as we speak that did not get elected. It was all bogus. Just so people understand wind and solar only work when there's wind and sun. We don't have technology to store the energy from wind and solar. So if you make yourself I'm very disappointed in the mainstream media. That's all I'll say about that . It's hard to imagine putting the toothpaste back in the tube and maybe there's no golden age to return to anyway . So now what? Change your eye. Hey John , you know, our little montage could have just kept on going . I bet it stop now because I feel like you don't get us in trouble, man. You know what I mean? We got hundreds , thousands more news and news ish outlets to choose from. We are awash in media, at least some of us are , but we don't seem very happy about it. Yeah, man. Now everybody's mad at the news media . And if I'm being honest, yeah, like I get it, right? Because if you look around , so much of what passes for news out there is like not that good. In fact, a lot of it is trash. We could easily find people who would disagree with you or me about which acts of journalism are the trashy ones . But no question about it, people are not happy . According to a Gallup poll in twenty twenty five , only twenty eight percent of Americans had even a fair amount of confidence in the major media Seventy percent of us say we have not much or no confidence at all. That crisis of trust is a huge problem for American journalism , and it's not the only problem . A lot of people at first blush might not care about a media crisis , especially if they think the media suck s . But people need the media to live, right? They need to know what the status of their healthcare is. They need to know what the weather is. You know what I'm saying? And if there's going to be like an earthquake, they need to know if their rights are going to be violated, right? I mean, it's just like something that you need to live your everyday lives . And also , how are you gonna run a democracy where the people are supposed to govern ourselves if we don't have the information , if we don't have any shared sense of what's going on out there . That's more or less what Thomas Jefferson said, or good buddy . Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government. That's good because I only try to say things that Thomas Jefferson said, You know that about it . That's why I change the child. Every time before I say something, did Thomas Jefferson say this? Okay. Yeah, exactly, right. We've picked on him a number of times on this show. Yeah, but I mean, look, he was right, you know what I'm saying? Being a slaveholder and a racist, that don't mean you're not right about anything. Right . But yeah, does anybody here think that the fourth estate , the news media, as it's now constructed , is doing its job that Americans are well enough informed to be trusted with our own government From the Keenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, welcome to Seenon Radio Season eight . I'm John Buen, producer and host of the show. I'm Chinjira Kumenika. Excited to come back as the co host. Chenge, you are an award winning podcast maker , empire city, uncivil , unruly subjects . And seen on radio, you were my co host for seasons two and four , and you're a professor at New York University's journalism school with a PhD in mass communication and critical media studies . So you're officially an expert on the thing we're here to explore this time around . Finally, you know what I'm saying? We're in my lane now. You know what I mean? You got the paper credentials this time . We're calling this season the news. We're going to take a hard deep look at the troubled state of the news media in the US and how that crisis relates to the other profound problems we seem unable or unwilling to solve. Another key thing we're going to do is sort through the various crises in our news and information system and the most common reasons people say they're pissed about the media. And we're going to ask what's really wrong? Is it what we think it is? We will do some history along the way . We might challenge some mythology around journalistic tradition in America , and parts of U. S. history itself, for that matter , in ways that could also shed light on how our news media are failing us in this pivotal historical moment. And eventually, we're going to talk about solutions , what it might look like to unbreak the media , because the thing is , this stuff really matters. The stakes are about as high as they could be. Media are so much a part of our lives that in a real sense we're made of media . The media helps to shape a society but also act as a mirror , showing us who we are. And John, like I have a confession. We talk about people being angry at the news media. And of course, folks are angry for wildly different reasons , but when I'm looking at so called journalism that I see is completely false and dishonest , I find myself getting mad at the people who consume that news and believe it. Like why are y'all drinking a kool aid? I know what you mean . And let's put a pin in that thought , as they say. Right now, before we go further, just a quick note for the grammar purists. Yes, you will hear us do that thing that a whole lot of people do now where we say the media as if it's one thing. Right. But the word is plural , and we'll never lose sight of the fact that the media is a tangled web, not a monolith . Here in episode one , let's start with us , not Ginger Eye and Me, but us , everybody who consumes news media , whether you take in a ton of it or hardly any . What drives us as we try to inform ourselves ? That's the question. You know what I'm saying? We talk so much about whether we can trust our news sources , but can we trust ourselves? I've spent some time over the last year or so in a corner of North Carolina talking with folks about a lot of things their politics, what their lives are like , and about the news. And why'd you go to that particular place? It's a good question. In one sense , we could have gone almost anywhere , but as folks will hear throughout the season, this patch of North Carolina, which is not far from where I live, is a compelling place to see some of the most pressing problems with our news media , and some impressive efforts to respond and fill the gaping holes in the system . By the way, Cheng , you know, I think it's safe to say some of those news consumers you're frustrated with live in this place . All right, well, in that case, let me take a deep breath. Hi, I can't wait to hear what you found . All your favorite country play to back to back to today's country. ninety five seven KML We're going to refer to this part of North Carolina as the Border Belt. It's an old term used over the last century for a tobacco growing region that ran along both sides of the North and South Carolina bord er . A lot of the tobacco's gone, now the farms grow corn and soybeans and other crops . The radio signals in these rural counties come from a ways off, mainly the bigger cities of Wilmington and Fayetteville . And they sound like it. So get your Wednesday off to a good start with me, Gilbert Bayes on News Talk six forty WFNC . Turn left onto North Carolina forty one South. I spent time just on the North Carolina side in a cluster of counties, Scotland and Robinson to the west, Blayden and Columbus to the east . This place is racially diverse with large white, black, and indigenous populations , and long struggling . North Carolina ranks in the bottom half of states in per capita income. In the bordertb,el folks make twelve to twenty thousand dollars less than the state average . There are a lot of manufactured homes , trailer parks , single wides, double wides kind of dotted everywhere. Turning it up. Enview, surprised guests, music and more. It's all on the breakfast club, weekday mornings on Fayetteville, fisherman ation for hip hop and RMB, The Big Stick Foxy ninety nine . Most of these counties are also what are called news deserts . That means they have no more than one local news source . And often the surviving news papers have shriveled to a few pages of mostly sports and features. They don't print a whole lot of news. John, do you want to come in or you want to sit on the porch? I talked to a range of people in the Borderbel t about their media diets. I usually sit here and have my coffee and I'm sitting here on the couch and I'm watching the news . Local stations which are located in Wilmington, but they carry this area. I don't watch a lot of news, but what I watch, I watch newsmax or Fox . I try not to get my news from social media too much, but sometimes I'm scrolling through Twitter and I see something and it catches my eye. I would still think that a lot of our people get to get their information from their local radio station too . Whenever they play in between songs and stuff like that, whatever type of news update We're going to spend more time getting to know this guy, Ethan Jordan . I find him in Columbus County. He's driving a big John Deere tractor, pulling a planting rig down the road near his family's place. I can just leave it here . I climbed the ladder to his two person tractor cab. You got enough room to make it work. Oh yeah . How you doing? Good. Nice to meet you here, let me get that door a little bit better so it won't rattle . Ethan's in his late twenties. He has reddish brown hair and a round face. He and his family raise corn, soybeans, peanuts, and beef cattle . On this April day, he's planting corn. Right here, we farm total twenty two hundred acres between me and my dad and two employees . I believe if you go back I'm the eighth generation of Jordan farming on this land that we're on right now actually this is some of the original farm we're on . In front of Ethan in the cab are a half dozen screens. They monitor the seed and fertilizer he's dropping, the weather conditions , the technology that's doing the driving. Yeah, sir. That's my GPS which controls the a uto. st Youair sees I'm not t,ouching ing the steer wheel and it's steering. And for the long hours he spends in the tractor, he also has media handy. I know I have Fox News on this iPad and I will watch Fox News from time to time. And it's not news max , it's that ad has all the news in it. You see, I have Fox News here . But there's an app that I can't call the name of right now . He finds it his, go to news aggregator. Right here, it's this app right here. Matter of fact, newsbreak, newsbreak app. And it kind of, you know , I guess it goes to your algorithm of what you look up and stuff like that because if you look at mine talks about farmers react to Trump's tariffs , tells me about the local news and stuff like I have that pops up and it'll be anywhere from CNBC to W CT , D theaily Daily Beast. I don't know what anyway, it just shows, you know, local and national news. And if it's national news, it's more related to what I look up, which is obviously farmers, you know, agricult ural related topics . It's where I get a lot of my news from. To say I actually sit down and watch the news is kind of hard to say now I will watch it if something interesting is going on on the iPad if I'm in a track or running it . Ethan lives with his fiancee, who's a lawyer . There's a local newspaper, the news reporter out of nearby Whiteville that comes out twice a week. Ethan sometimes looks at its website, but he and his fiance don't subscribe. I've lived by myself. I lived out of my parents' house for now going on the fifth year, and I can say I've honestly never had a newspaper in my house or even picking one up. I know there's not one that's been in my house. My parents get one every week, but for local news, he relies on Facebook , which includes reports from nearby outlets and comments from the community . He mentions a recent criminal incident in a nearby town. We're sitting there talking with a group of friends and where did you read that? Oh, if you go on Facebook, look at WWAY post's about it, but look at the comments and you can see the video . So now you can kind of, you know , you look at Facebook calls Yeah, the papers and you know they'll tell you about it but a lot of times you can read through the comments and find somebody who actually lived it and see their opinion. And you know, sometimes opinions are biased , but you do get kind of see more of a real live feeling by reading the comments on. So a lot of my news not going to say I trust Facebook by no stretch of the matter because everybody has a different opinion, but you can kind of see the gist of what's going on . Ethan votes Republican, along with everybody in his family and their neighbors, he says. Historically, this region, white folks included, voted for Democrats until ten or twenty years ago. We were all Democrats, and then all of a sudden we wake up one day and we're Republicans . As much as we all rely on the media to get information and to decide how to vote , it's worth highlighting what Ethan says when I ask who he voted for in the North Carolina Governor's race in twenty twenty four? Mark Robinson. Yes, I did. You may remember hearing about Mark Robinson, no matter how far you are from North Carolina. He was the Republican nominee who lost to Democrat Josh Stein. Robinson made international news for inflammatory statements he apparently made, including on a porn website , maligning Martin Luther King, defending Hitler, questioning the Holocaust , and calling himself a black Nazi . Ethan tells me he had to choose between the two candidates , suggesting it was a vote for his preferred party between but he also says this about Robinson. I have met him personally . So I mean , you know, I look at politics different than some people. You know, you got die hard Republicans, you got die hard democrats, you got die hard liberals and there's other parties , you know, there's a whole list of them now . I look at the ones like that that I've personally has shook their hand or met him personally. And I have met Mark Robinson. He spent some time down in Colum s County and I had met him personally . So he probably didn't remember my name or know who I was, but he called my name one time and shook my hand. So I mean if you feel like you got a close personal connection with them, that's kind of why I look at whether you're Democrat or Republican. Maybe there's still special power in what comes to us not from a screen , but through in person experience. The way people used to learn most of what they knew about the world . Despite his conservative views, Ethan says he finds Fox news too far to the right at times when it harps too much on gun rights or undocumented immigrants , but then a network like the NBC will annoy him even more in the other direction. During the election it was always negative on Trump, negative on Trump , constantly, you know, this, that and the other. And you know, and I kind of look at it. I'm like, Well, everybody's not perfect. But the one y'all are pro for it is Kamala, you're pro Kamala, like I can find problems with her too , just as good as you can find with Trump. It's kind of, you know, if you want to tell the story, tell it on both sides . Tell the bad pros and cons of both, not just constantly over and over and over and over again . And that's where I'd get irritated and not want to listen to it Cost shouldn't keep you from getting the hepatitis C care you deserve. 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Purchase and seller protections on eligible transactions only. Terms apply . See paypal dot com slash risk dash management for details. This show is sponsored by Liquid IV. For those of you who are regular listeners to revisionist history, you know I'm a big runner. When I was just in Florida, the Gulf Coast with my family, that lovely, hot, humid Florida weather, and every day I go for a long run through the piney woods near our hotel, eight miles, nine miles, and come back delightfully and gloriously sweaty. But not just sweaty. Seriously dehydrated. You tried running in eighty five degree heat for over an hour , liquid IV . I put a little packet in my car. When I'm done, I just mix it up with some water, get a serious clinically researched infusion of all kinds of good stuff . And now my posts run gl ow is even better . Liquid IV, where have you been all my life ? Just one stick and sixteen ounces of water hydrates faster than water alone . Powered by liquid IV hydroscience , an optimized ratio of electrolytes, essential vitamins and clinically tested nutrients that turn ordinary water into extraordinary hydration . Get moving with superior hydration from liquid IV . Tear, pour, live more. Go to liquid IV. com and get twenty percent off your first purchase with code revisionist at checkout. That's twenty percent off your first purchase with code revisionist at liquid IV . com Hey Chenge , what are you thinking so far? Well I gotta say I really like listening to Ethan, you know? And I'm not mad at him . I mean, if you said to me, white North Carolina farmer who votes Republican , I feel like I was going to picture somebody very different, somebody who's maybe not as open or really just has their mind made up . Now, I would like to hear Ethan explain why he voted for Mark Robinson, who's a Holocaust denier who called himself a black Nazi for governor. So there is that part . Yeah. But putting that aside for a second. Just listening to him, I got a feel for where he's at, even though we only heard him for a few minutes. You wouldn't vote for the people he votes for, you're saying, but he comes across as a sincere person doing his best to make sense of things, right? Yeah , like based on the information he has. You know what I'm saying? When he talks about the news he pays attention to, he sounds real familiar to me. He wants the facts. He wants fairness . And when the news tells him something very different from what he and the people around him think is true , then it sounds unfair or oversimplified. That makes him want to change the channel or tap over to a different source. We said this episode was going to be about us , those of us on the receiving end of the news . I talked to an expert who has fascinating insights into our biases as news consumers , including how changes in our society have amplified those biases. Often when I'm talking about this to audiences, I'll say , you know, how many of you would say that your main goal as you're engaging with the world is to be accurate in what you perceive? And everyone raises their hand. And I'm like, Actually it's not . Actually, you're wrong. This is Dana Gal Young. I'm a professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware where I direct the Center for Political Communication . Young studies how people process information in connection with our pol itics . She wrote the recent book wrong how media politics and identity drive our appetite for misinformation . Dana says, When you turn on a cable, news, and opinion channel or go to a news website , you're bringing along deep desires, needs, really , that go well beyond wanting accurate information. Your goal is not to be accurate, because your goal really is survival and there are three areas that sort of speak to survival needs that serve as sort of the underbelly of human survival . They all facilitate action because in order to survive you, need to act in your own survival interests. So those three needs are comprehension, control, and community. As we go about our lives , we want to feel that we know basically what the hell is going on in our world , and we want to feel some ability to control what happens to us . But Dana says maybe even more important than comprehension and control is that third C word community . And this simply captures the notion that we are social animals who do not exist truly as individuals in a vacuum . We only exist embedded within a social context. And that has to do with how we were able to survive historically . Even here in the U. S. that notion even of rampant ardent individualism is itself , believe it or not, a group norm . We are individualists because everyone around us also prizes that value of individualism , which I think is kind of hilariously ironic. So Young says as we take in the news, we do so, consciously or not , as members of the social groups we identify with . And in a country that's bitterly divided politically , most Americans identify with a political team . We might as well be wearing our team's uniform as we go looking for news. That means that when we comprehend the world, we're going to comprehend the world the same way that our team does , and we're going to want to comprehend the world in ways that make our team look good. Dana is talking about general human tendencies in part , but it hasn't always been like this. She says historical trends in the U. S. in politics and the media have helped to intensify our divisions . These changes have made Americans less open to information we don't like and more vulnerable to miss and disinformation . To start with, she points to the sorting of the political parties starting in the middle of the twentieth century. Up until the fifties and sixties , our two major political parties were actually quite mixed in terms of policy positions, in terms of the kinds of people who identified with each , in terms of where those people lived, in terms of the religious identification of the people within the parties . And part of the reason that that was the case was because there was this great compromise that was made on the issue of race in the United States. That's a nice way of saying the two parties were pretty much in sync, white supremacy wise. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had members elite members within them who supported the idea of states rights, who supported the idea of the disempowerment of African Americ an people As millions of black people migrated out of the Jim Crow South, populating northern cities and turning into voters, that put pressure on the Democrats and gave them an opportunity. And we ended up with that sort of great racial realignment where the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights, and the Republican Party became the party in oppos ition to that movement . Most black people moved from the GOP, the Party of Lincoln, to the Democrats , most white southerners and other conservative white people, many of whom had been Democrats, joined the Republicans. Other kinds of sorting followed. Evangelical Christians and people in rural places turned mostly Republican , while secular and city people grew more overwhelmingly democratic. Such that the Republican party of today overwhelmingly white , rural , Christian , and culturally conservative . And the Democratic Party today is overwhelmingly racially and ethnically diverse, secular, agnostic, urban, suburban, and culturally and ideologically liberal . Research has found that increased homogeneity within a political party serves to crank up the emotional temperature for those on that side. There is something primal in us that happens when we look like our team, we live like our team, we live in the same places as our team, we worship like our team . There's something really primal that ignites in us because we have such good group fit. That is what has happened in American politics , and it's happened in a way that is not symmetrical because as you may have noticed, as I described it , in the Republic an Party, those identity categories are far more homogenous than they are within the Democratic Party . And so the engine runs fast and furiously on the right in the U. S. right now . That is the engine of visceral us against them sentiment . But that's not just a Republican thing . Political scientists have document ed an increase in what they call affective polarization. And that is simply the extent to which regular people, members of the public dislike members of the other political party. That does seem to be pretty equal across the parties. Democrats don't like Republicans and Republicans don't like Democrats. It's not necessarily that we've become more radical on our position on gun contro or abllorterion , it's more that I just hate people who feel opposite me more , which is interesting . So change . Yeah, I mean, what Danagal is really saying is that news consumers in the US are less open minded than ever, less willing to be persuaded by information that conflicts with what we already believe . Yes, now stir in the social media algorithms that feed us ragebait and in general are fragmented, often blatantly partisan, us against them media environment. I grabbed a couple clips. This is Sean Hannity of Fox News and Rachel Maddo of MS Now . Notice in each case the talk about them , they , the other side . They want you to feel pain. They want it. They want you to pay more at the pump. They want your energy bills to be higher. The chief threat among them now is not the rioters and the coops, but the slick political professionals who are turning their considerable talents to laundering violently revolutionary claims that America's elections aren't real. So when all the talk about so called political polarization in America there',s a tend ency to think that the fragmenting of the media into a thousand sources all saying different things , that's the problem. And if we could just go back to a time when everyone watched Walter Kronkite or Peter Jennings, we'd come together again as a nation . And I'm just going to guess partly for your tone of voice, but also knowing you that you're not really buying it, Professor Kuminika. For one thing, I know you well enough to know you don't believe there was once upon a time when the major media told the American people the unvarnished truth on all the important questions . Right. When was the media telling people the truth about white supremacy and how pervasive it is, the truth about US history and how brutal it is, or the truth about US behavior around the world, right? In the way America's economic system works , why folks are struggling to get by . And also this idea that Americans used to agree on things, that we really ever had this consensus as a society , no . I mean, that was more of a consensus maybe among white people , especially white men, middle class and above who held all the power in the country. Yeah, but lots of other people who didn't fit that description and saw a very different reality , we're just left out of the public conversation for the most part. Yeah, and if you kind of are sure or you want some receipts on that, I encourage you to go check the other seasons of this podcast . But there are other reasons to doubt that somehow reversing the splintering of the media, if that were possible , would help Americans to find common ground on what our problems are and how to solve them . First of all , it seems a lot of us have gotten this somewhat mistaken idea about just how siloed the news media are this whole idea of the echo chamber . Here's Danagal Young again. By and large , political scientist and communication scholars have come away from the empirical evidence with the conclusion that the echo chamber is largely a myth in that are not only seeing content that supports their side . So the usual idea of the echo chamber is that people on different sides of the political divide aren't even exposed to voices from the other side . Yeah, the idea that you only hear right wing voices on right wing media and likewise on the left. But Danagal is saying that's not how it works. If you watch MS Now, what used to be called MSNBC , you see a whole bunch of Donald Trump and his allies and what they have to say about things. And if you watch Fox News or look at his website, you'll see a ton of content about Democrats in the left. Like that's actually like the major thing that they're doing is getting people outraged about what the left is doing. So the question is not do opposing perspectives get covered , it's how are they presented? Here's what Dana said. You are seeing claims that are being made by the other side , but they're often presented to you, perhaps shared by someone who's on your side , right? Who says , look at how awful these people are. This is the kind of thing that they're saying over on that other network . Here is what they're saying, and it is a moral violation. It's a violation of our moral order. Dana brought up an example . Remember when Katanji Brown Jackson was being confirmed for the Supreme Court in twenty twenty two ? In your understanding, what does critical race theory mean? What is it ? Senator, my understanding is that critical. Oh, I remember, Republican senators on the committee asked her a bunch of questions about her views on CRT , which was like the, you know, conservative rage issue at the time. And Ted Cruz, the Senator from Texas, asked her about an anti racism book that suggested babies can be taught to be racist . Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist . Senator . So you had a black nominee for the court and lots of the questions were about our views on race. To Danagal's point about the echo chamber issue MS,NBC , as it was called at the time, the heavily pro democratic anti Republican cable channel gave these exchanges a lot of attention. I mean, there's no question that Ted Cruz figured prominently on the so called, you know, left leaning channel , along with analysis like this from a Democratic political strategist. This is about her being a black woman basically casting her as a radical, as a black radical who is out to get white people. I mean, quite frankly, it looked like I saw Ted Cruz commit a hate crime in that hearing room. Meanwhile, over on Fox News, Sean Hannity brought Cruz onto his show that evening. Ted Cruz was with a senator and invited him to talk some more about his grilling of the judge. And when it came to critical race theory, she didn't want to answer the questions. She claimed So it's an interesting clarification that Dana is making, right? She's saying, no matter how much you're in your news bubble, you're still hearing voices and ideas from the other side. Maybe a lot . But that doesn't really change the fact that people are getting wildly different views of the world if they're watching Fox News versus MS now, whether you call them echo chambers or not . Really, it just highlights how crucial framing and analysis are in presenting what's happening out there . There's another common idea that people are strongly influenced by the media they consume , especially if it's news that we think of as strongly biased . That whole my uncle Ned's right winger because he watches Fox News idea. But it's more complicated than that. Did Fox News turn your uncle into a right winger or did Uncle Ned turn to Fox because he already had right wing views? This whole discussion can almost make you wonder