Feeling a combination of outrage and certainty? Oriented to think the other person is your enemy but can’t explain why? You’ve been captured by narrative warfare. You probably believe it’s your own thinking. But is it?
In my last essay, I talked about sensemaking and how there are forces in our society that are deliberately trying to mislead us with narrative warfare. The issue here is that we believe we’re thinking for ourselves, and opinions we believe are our own may not be. Narrative warfare is a divisive strategy, and it’s one we need to be aware of if we’re ever going to solve the problems in our society.
There’s a great video from Rebel Wisdom called War on Sensemaking, and it’s part five with Daniel Schmachtenberger. I’m going to summarize what he says about narrative warfare, and you can check out the full video here.
If you look down on whole parts of the population and can’t explain why they think the way they do without making them seem dumb or bad, you should be dubious of your modeling. If you’re outraged and think they’re your enemy but can’t explain why outside of snappy media soundbites, you’ve probably been taken in by narrative warfare.
How can I counter narrative warfare?
Try harder to take in the news and information the “other side” is consuming. If they read Breitbart, check it out for a week. Mother Jones? Read that for a week. Even if you look at it and don’t feel like it makes sense, there’s probably something useful there.
Why is this important? Because even if you can win an argument with narrative warfare techniques and selective information, it’s only furthering the divide. And the person you’re arguing with will rely on those techniques too. You’re just escalating an arm’s race if you’re both picking and choosing information to stoke fear and anger.
You can’t move towards shared sensemaking when you’re fighting with strawman arguments. We need to know each other because we need to work together. It’s up to us, and it’s up to you, to elevate the whole space and work on understanding.
So what are we going to do about this?
Take in different media
Let’s think about diversifying your media diet. If you’re getting your information from one source, it’s probably time to mix it up. Listening to news from media on the opposite “side” can be beneficial. Maybe that’s Fox News if you’re a progressive or Vox if you’re on the right. If you’re only listening to media in the margins, it’s interesting to take in mainstream media and watch TV a little.
We need a balanced diet with protein, carbohydrates, and fat in our everyday lives. And that can only come from various sources. This also applies to our media intake. We need a balanced perspective of any news story to understand how other people think and to ensure we’re getting the truth. If you want to do this regularly, there are some excellent resources for balancing your media diet:
All Sides Media is a great, easy-to-access resource that takes different topics in the news and shows articles about them from the left, right, and center. If you click on any of the issues, you get a nice little summary where they explain how the different sides are generally treating it. They also give you an overview of different opinions. Plus, you can read any of the articles and deep dive into the headlines from partisan sources.
Another site I’ve just learned about is News Compare. They share screenshots of the homepages of various news sources on the left, right, and center every hour. It’s a great way to understand what people are paying attention to and different perspectives. Again, you can click through and check the articles if you’re curious.
Rebel Wisdom introduced me to a new one recently called Ground News. They treat an issue similarly, but they also talk about how much it is (or isn’t) covered by each side, which they call the Blind Spot. Another cool feature is the factuality rating.
They take things in the news that only the left, right, or center seem to be covering. You can find news you might not have even heard about if you’re on the other side or follow only one news source. If you go in more, you can see the news sources covering the issue on a spectrum, so you can get a sense of how factual or biased they are.
If you like getting emails, The Flip Side will send you an email with a couple of daily headlines.
How can I tell if media is biased?
If you want a big-picture view of what’s going on in the news, two places track factuality and media bias with a greater methodology. Their information is often how other sites know if things are factual and where they fall on the political spectrum.
Ad Fontes Media has a cool interactive chart where you can look at all the different news sources. You can see how factual things are on the y-axis and how biased they are on the x-axis. Each little grey dot is an article that you can check out and see where they fall on the spectrum. They also have a list of all the different sources with a deep dive into how they’re performing. So you can search for any news source.
The other site is mediabiasfactcheck.com, which is interesting. They have a pretty comprehensive list of all the media sources. You can go in and see what they have to say about any of those news sources and why they’ve rated them in certain ways. On this one, you can throw in your opinion and say, “No, I think this is more left or right.”
Both of these websites have a really detailed explanation of their methodology. If you’re wondering, “Hm, how can I trust them?” They explain why you can trust them by describing how they make their decisions, what all the different language means, and the variables they’re using.
So, there are many ways to take in different media and diversify your media diet.
Why should I read different media?
To understand where people are coming from.
To stretch your mind.
Discover what’s actually true.
We’re in this together.
We’re being sucked into little silos and bubbles, and it’s constructive to get a sense of where people are coming from. People regularly say to me, “Well, what about this or that?” And I’ve never heard that before. Then I say something, and they’ve never heard about it before. That’s what happens when we fall into echo chambers. It’s so important to stretch our minds. We take in more factual information that we might not have learned otherwise.
I try to listen to different news sources to triangulate what is actually true about any given news story. All humans are biased, so everyone will focus on certain aspects. If we get a whole bunch of varied perspectives, we can get a sense of what might actually be true, especially if it’s something that’s repeated across the spectrum.
This is also helpful because we’re in a democracy, and we’re all in this together. So it’s vital to understand the full fabric of all the different perspectives and why people make the decisions they do.
It might seem counterintuitive to deal with overwhelming amounts of information by taking in more information. That points to a fair question:
How can we process all this information?
One of the ways we can deal with information overload is by developing our capacity to think better. In the next part, I will share a model from Tim Urban called the Thinking Ladder. I found it really useful in improving how I think about thinking.
If you’re wondering what thinking better means, Tim Urban describes it as the difference between using clear eyes that see a foggy and complex world versus foggy eyes that see a clear and simple world. So stay tuned for some exciting stuff with funny and adorable comics from Tim Urban.
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