If you’ve been paying attention to the news during this presidential election cycle, you’ve probably noticed the wide variance among different polls.
Over at Fox News or drudgereport.com, you might find polls that indicate one thing. Watch network TV, and you’ll see different numbers. Read The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Wall Street Journal, and the figures might be different still. At times, it feels as if everyone has their own proprietary take on reality, which makes it difficult to have any meaningful sense of what’s actually happening with regard to people’s real political preferences.
This weekend, I stumbled across a short article from Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi addressing this very subject. In a nutshell, Taibbi says that no matter where you are on the political spectrum, there’s someone catering to your perspective—so much so that objective truth has become a casualty of our personal preferences. Taibbi begins:
The famous quote by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York—"You're entitled to your own opinions. You're not entitled to your own facts"—has been cited so many times this election season, it's close to becoming the official slogan of the campaign trail. … But Moynihan's line is out of date. The truth is, we now get to have our own opinions and our own facts. Moynihan came from an age before the TV market fractured into thousands of channels and the Internet created millions of new voices—a time, in other words, when Americans were still emotionally capable of facing the occasional five or six consecutive seconds of bad news. Today, the marketplace for reality-shoppers has expanded far beyond the already quaint innovation of conservatives and progressives each having their own news channels that spew their own custom-tailored "facts."
He goes on to observe how this trend has even influenced polling.
The newest phenomenon [is] competing sets of "scientific" opinion polls. … Polls, loathsome as they are, were until recently a last bastion of objective reality. Now, thanks to America's increasingly massive complex of dueling partisan think tanks, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, the informational infrastructure exists for you to build a completely tailored media universe where you won't ever hear anything—not even a poll—that contradicts your point of view.
In the end, he concludes, “America is becoming like an untreatable paranoic narcissist—you can’t tell us anything, because we only hear the parts we like.”
Though Taibbi never uses the word postmodern in his article, I think the trends he points out here offer further evidence of our culture’s growing inability to deal with an absolute, objective truth—especially when it’s hard truth. If we struggle to accept a difficult assessment of the way things really are, it’s so easy to turn the channel or surf to another website to find someone delivering a more palatable message, or a kinder, gentler spin on things.
I don’t know if that tendency qualifies as narcissism or not. I’d suggest it sounds more like a kind of society-wide drift toward denial that predisposes us to believing sunnier messages.
In the end, retreating to our own private media universe might seem like a good idea when there are so many voices competing for our attention. But I have to wonder if it’s actually riskier than it seems—and not just when it comes to politics, but in other areas of our lives as well. I wonder whether that tendency, as natural as it seems, might actually make it harder for us to recognize and accept reality … especially when it’s a not a reality that we want to recognize and accept.
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