The Washington Post (11/25/19) presents the holiday dinner table as ” a minefield — just waiting to be detonated by political opinions.”
As the holidays approach, corporate media issue a spirited message to readers: Pipe down about politics. Major outlets repeatedly warn that family gatherings are potential hotbeds of political contention, and readers must be strategic with discordant relatives in order to prevent heated debate.
In November, the Washington Post’s “Have Different Politics From Your Family? Here’s How to Survive the Holidays” (11/25/19) offered strategies on how to “avoid detonating the room” with opinions. Last year, the New York Times (11/20/18) instructed readers on “surviving” Thanksgiving, with tips including “don’t mention President Trump” and “find the cutest thing in the room and home in.” The year before, PBS NewsHour (11/22/17) even produced a printable placemat with prescriptions for “civil” holiday conduct, with advice on questions like “how to end a conversation that gets heated or politically charged,” and “should we be having these conversations at all?”
Holiday civility guides might seem innocuous; after all, they ostensibly seek to foster relationships, encouraging people to enjoy food and play with babies in the process. Yet in so doing, they dismiss and stigmatize political dissent.
“Just watch how Judy [Woodruff] asks questions on the NewsHour every night, and do it that way.” (PBS NewsHour, 11/22/17)
These claims offer a glimpse into corporate media’s technocratic, right-skewing political conceptions. Preaching “politics isn’t that important,” for example, is a luxury only the most protected classes can afford—it’s not an option for those facing threats of deportation or SNAP cuts. In a particularly on-the-nose piece, the New York Times (11/26/19) designed a chatbot to coach readers on conversations with an imagined cantankerous uncle of a different political inclination from their own. Users can choose between “liberal” or “conservative”—which, judging by the article, are the only political alignments that exist among families in the US.
These appeals to “civility” evoke a common trope in corporate media. Outlets, including those mentioned above, routinely chastise anyone who would dare to condemn powerful figures without politely asking permission to do so. Several analysts have expounded (Citations Needed Podcast, 6/13/18; FAIR.org, 6/27/18, 10/31/18) upon this topic in recent years, observing how the media castigates those who defy elites—critics of the late wealth-hoarding warmonger John McCain, restaurant workers who refused to serve Trump’s former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders—for their perceived boorishness. It’s no wonder, then, that holiday gatherings are used as yet another opportunity to stifle discourse that might challenge the political establishment.
Vox (11/26/19) urges progressives to frame their arguments in terms of “in-group loyalty, moral purity and respect for authority.”
Still, in the interest of appearing objective, holiday civility entreaties often include some sort of scientific citation. On November 27, Barack Obama tweeted, “Before arguing with friends or family around the Thanksgiving table, take a look at the science behind arguing better.” Obama posted a link to a corresponding Vox article (11/26/19) that provided psychological “techniques” for political discussion, including finding an argument that “resonates” with someone of another political tendency, and making one’s ideological opponents “feel like they’ve been heard.” This, the story argued, would lead interlocutors to find their “common humanity.”
The article treated “liberals” and “conservatives” as opponents of equal moral validity, even including a tip on how conservatives could convince liberals to support an increase in military spending. (Say something like: “Through the military, the disadvantaged can achieve equal standing and overcome the challenges of poverty and inequality.”) The day after the article was published, Vox (11/27/19) ran an interview with psychology professor Joshua Grubbs admonishing readers not to engage in “moral grandstanding.” The piece touted centrists as model arguers: “People that are more toward the middle grandstand less so,” said Grubbs.
In its aforementioned holiday “survival” guide, the Washington Post (11/25/19) claimed that “science has determined that both incivility and kindness are contagious.” The article linked to another Post story (6/26/18) calling “rudeness” “as contagious as the common cold” and lamenting the fact that protesters would dare to “heckle” former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen at a Washington, DC, restaurant. The protesters, of course, weren’t “heckling” Nielsen; they were confronting her about deportation and family separation at the US/Mexico border. Still, the story implied they were infected by a general climate of incivility, and not acting out of outrage at the brutality—the unkindness, in Washington Post–speak—of US immigration policy. But the “kindness” corporate media are most concerned about is the kind deserved by the powerful.
For all this talk of empathizing with one’s conversational counterpart, corporate media never mentions one approach that might actually work: establishing a shared distrust of elites. A 2014 survey found that 82% of people felt the country’s wealthiest people wielded too much political influence, and 69% felt “working people” had too little (Associated Press, 7/13/17). But this runs counter to the establishment-boosting agenda of corporate media, which consistently encourages progressives not to find common ground on economic issues (FAIR.org, 6/20/17).
This shows no signs of changing. Just in time for the December holidays, Facebook developed a chatbot to control how its employees discuss issues like privacy and content moderation with their relatives. The New York Times’ coverage (12/2/19) could have decried the company’s attempts to convert its employees into 24-hour PR representatives during their holiday vacations. Instead, the Times toed the pro-business line, praising the bot for providing “answers to difficult questions” and for being “practical with personal technology advice.”
Feed your face
Starve your conscience
David Brooks on PBS has turned me off more than anyone else. For whom is he working? David Brooks seems very detached from the pain and suffering of millions of people.He is busy working for the Republican party in a most negative way. Recently he said that Biden is still the top runner in the primaries. Where does he come up with that Garbage? Politics is the air we breath, the water we drink and the food we eat. Isn’t it nice to be so insulated to from real suffering that vast numbers of Americans . The so called Middle class is really the Poor class. Let’s call it like it is
Possibly the worst article I have read on FAIR.
The author picks the low-hanging fruit criticising the MSM for pushing apolitical family meetings. It’s an obvious point, easily made, but not particularly well made here.
But then the article turns to Moral Foundations Theory. MCT is peer-reviewed, factor analysis-based science.
People do
Possibly the worst article I have read on FAIR.
The author picks the low-hanging fruit criticising the MSM for pushing apolitical family meetings. It’s an obvious point, easily made, but not particularly well made here.
But then the article turns to Moral Foundations Theory. MCT is peer-reviewed, factor analysis-based science.
People do have legitimate differences in their moral frameworks and their perceptions of the world. Denying this scientifically-proven fact is ignorance.
What’s particularly disappointing is the author’s comment about “equal validity.” This s not the article’s bias . . . this is an accurate reflection of the science, which is supposed to be *purely descriptive*, and *not normative*.
I actually wrote a thesis in MFT, specifically in relation to persuasion. Unsurprisingly, there is a statistically significant effect of you frame your arguments in your opponent’s values.
Winning an argument last’s a night. Winning an argument on your opponent’s ground lasts a lifetime.
Basically, the author has shown a fundamental misunderstanding of Haidt et al.’s research. More than that: a lack of effort to achieve the basic understanding necessary to write this piece.
It’s not about empathising, it is about persuading.
And I promise you, if you bothered to come down from your ivory tower, and looked up instead, you’d realize your ivory tower is just one in a million in the topography of human morality. And I promise you, you are not more progressive than me, unless you’re an anarcho-geoist.
How did you like that moral grandstanding? I’m guessing you didn’t, which is exactly the point.
I’d delete this piece for the sake of your rep to be honest.
Oh, by the way, the research you’re knocking . . . people in this field were discussing using online personality tests to target persuasive political messaging over social media . . . in 2013. We saw Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and election interference coming years in advance thanks precisely to the science you are disparaging here. Nice one.
Excellent article. I always get a kick out msm’s yearly advice on how to not discuss political issues. I put this advice on the same level as the right’s advice to the entertainment industry: shut yer ‘ yap; and play your guitar.
Although I know that the author is trying to encourage political dialogue (even if it’s heated at times) on a personal & familial level, I’m not at-all convinced that —- even IF that is done — it will make virtually ANY difference in creating meaningful political change.
First of all, after observing politics for 50+ years and reading some history, it’s clear to me that very VERY few people change MAJOR beliefs (political and/or religious) on the basis of debates/arguments/discussions, rational or otherwise. IF people could be swayed by rational, humane arguments, does anyone believe that we’d have even 1/4 of the problems we have in the world today? (Ie; think global warming, militarism, gun control [USA], over-population, etc, etc — these problems are self-inflicted by human cultures, they’re not caused by uncontrollable external forces, like an asteroid impact, earthquake, or similar natural disaster.) Also, ‘truth’ is largely irrelevant to many people’s basic beliefs which are typically passed down from parents/siblings and learned from peers and one’s childhood environment — the old quip about “If you want to make someone mad, lie to them, but if you want to make them livid, tell them the truth” is too apropos. You can spend an hour debating/arguing something with someone and often they’ll stop the discussion with ‘well, that’s what I believe’ and change the subject.
Secondly, an individual’s psychological self-defense mechanisms are ALWAYS in-play during conversations/dialogues (even on-line ones like these, though to a lesser extent than face-to-face situations) and will always be protective of existing beliefs. Why do you think people often get angry quickly even when discussing abstract political/religious issues? Ultimately it’s because their self-concept, core self-image is entwined with these beliefs.
While some people might eventually change some of their political views, IMHO it almost-always takes a relatively dramatic personal event — a son killed in Vietnam, losing a job/home/marriage due to a major recession/depression— for that to occur.
So sure, go ahead and argue with that right-wing relative at Christmas or Thanksgiving if you want to, but don’t expect it to have any positive transformative effect — he’ll just want to argue again at the next family gathering.
So cute how the NYT imagines that its readership consisits of young people with “cantankerous uncles”!