We Need to Stop Photoshopping the News
We cannot stand for any program that promotes the efforts of anyone seeking to dehumanize someone just because they hold different opinions. And before you say "my side would never", your side is and will continue to do this if left unchecked.
Real Beauty.
In 2012, amidst protests, petitions and general backlash, there was a push to stop altering model's appearance so heavily in certain magazines and advertisements. Specifically there were pushes to maintain the accurate size and face shape of the models and to minimize cover-up of natural features. The unrealistic portrayal of a model's beauty was damaging to not just the body image of people everywhere, but also to society itself. More recently, there has been a push to show models of all shapes, sizes, skin types and tones and hair colors. This stemmed from feelings that certain groups were drastically under-represented in these magazines and advertisements. This was more than a push for racial equality (although that was part of it), this was about representing a variety of people as opposed to the slim, fair, well-proportioned models that had dominated the industry for so long. While much progress has been made, there is certainly a tendency still to over-represent groups deemed more traditionally attractive, even though the demographics of a population are still under-represented.
When consuming news from the most popular news outlets in the United States, political bias is very easy to find, but not always easy to detect. Purveyors of such material often pivot between reporting and biased opinion in the same paragraph, even the same sentence sometimes. This is true regardless of the medium through which the media is show, whether national televised outlets, print sources, or digital video or print sources. Media has gotten more polarized over the past 30 years or so, with fringe theories now portrayed alongside regular news articles in many outlets.
There are a number of reasons this has happened over the past 30 years or so, some of them malicious and others much more benign. First, I believe that trusted reporting is to blame. People came to respect news anchors, Chronkite, Rather, Chung, Wallace, Shaw, Donaldson, I could go on became trusted, reliable sources of fact. We came to rely on these, as well as examples in print media for trusted, reliable, factual reporting, usually with little or no slant in either direction. After this period, reporting eventually became more about ratings, news stories got dramatized and pieces were chosen, not for their relevance, but for the attention that they could garner. Eventually this led to programs and articles to expand into channels and publications devoted to a particular set of interests. These outlets tended to side with a party, either republican or democrat. By catering to a particular audience, the outlet could swing even further, criticizing opponents and giving "friends" a pass for poor policy decisions or bad personal behavior.
The consumers of this media then began to experience cognitive dissonance, where a voice outside your head disagrees with the one in it, where perception doesn't appear to match reality. Simplified of course, but this means the brain (or the person holding the brain) has to make a choice, either revise perceptions or turn off the dissenting voice. Many people chose the latter, it is easier after all to change the channel or change magazines than it is to re-evaluate our position in life, especially when values and beliefs are challenged using strong emotions. All these things grew together to polarize the US electorate, creating an echo chamber of opinions based on ratings, not on facts. This in turn (in coordination with some economic factors) created super-sized media companies further reducing unbiased media choices. Today, almost all of the print and visual news-type media only comes from a few very large companies. They appear to be different, but in fact are sister or parent-child companies of these super media companies.
This polarization then found it's way into our social circles, we repeated the opinions we'd heard (without doing independent research (because who has time for that)) and our friend either agreed with us, reinforcing our choice of opinion (which only served to further polarize us, or left to find people they agreed with. A more recent iteration of this phenomenon has happened with social media and the internet. Opinions similar to those we have agreed with are "recommended" to us to generate more clicks and therefore more ad revenue for internet companies. All of these combine to deepen the echo chamber and further separate us from those we disagree with. Disagreement in this case would be healthy, even critical in maintaining a more objective view of the world and seeking a collaborative solution. Often, people have been polarized further than the values they truly hold by having their allegiance questioned. the phase "if you were a true <insert group name here> then "you would always" or "you would never" do or say this, because that is what our enemies (who we try to make almost not humans anymore) believe." This line of thinking is so dangerous, I would call it the cause of our eventual fall as a country. This is what civil wars are made of.
So what then if anything is to be done in all this?
It has become clear we can't just hope people will educate themselves and open their minds, we have to change the incentives to keep people informed where the facts stop and the opinions begin. We must choose to return to real journalism rather than clickbait and ratings-jockeying. We must color our reporting with opposition built into the same story and entertain the idea that we could be wrong. We must be more moderate in our choices of candidates and reject extremism even when it's extremism on the side closest to our views. In short, we must demand that the media companies stop photoshopping the news to fit the view they get the best ratings on. We must demand that they give us truth and tell us when they are sharing opinion or conjecture. We must decry conspiracy theories in any form and not lend credence to those who tout them. We must find reporters willing to give us "real beauty" in our news instead of "fake story" models with a virtual nose job, an extra cup size or two and a blemish-free face that is not a reality for anyone. Opinion pieces or programs should be labelled as such and thoroughly packed with source material. We must make our voices heard be not patronizing programs or channels that tout opinion over fact, ratings over reality, or fanaticism over real substance.
Extremists have risen to power, not by capturing minds first, but by capturing hearts, using charismatic rhetoric designed to elicit an emotional response and by degrading others, rather than standing for true values meant to help all persons. They pitted us against each other, asking us to say in so many words that their opponent was not worthy of consideration because they were truly less than human. We cannot stand for any program that promotes the efforts of anyone seeking to dehumanize someone just because they hold different opinions. And before you say "my side would never", your side is and will continue to do this if left unchecked. The only way to fix these media outlets is not using criticism from their critics, but by either voting with our wallet and not supporting them or criticizing them as a supporter. Supporting candidates for office that espouse extremist views is saying that extremism is acceptable. Extremism is no way to maintain the values we hold so dearly as a nation.