Thread by @jeffjarvis

This "nation deeply divided" narrative is itself part of the problem. Politics is all about mediating disagreement. Nations are *always* divided, but with more nuance than media allow. This presumes normal is universal harmony: utopia. 1/

nytimes.com/2020/08/21/bus…

Part of the problem is media's myth of objectivity and objective truth, which they believe the nation should rally 'round and affirm, when media's real job is to listen to and inform the public debate that exists in divisions. 2/

And so the bad guys get to exploit media's catastrophizing of the public conversation, sewing division so media will panic and report that -- rather than the incompetence, corruption, and fraud of one "side" or the other. 3/

That MSNBC viewership is marked as a symptom of some pathology of division is offensive, wrong, and idiotic. Finally we have choice in media after a half-century of near-monopolies and old media doesn't understand how to analyze that. So: division! 4/

The related media problem is treating communities' voices joining in a public conversation as "identity politics" -- that people choose to identify themselves rather than be identified by media as a mass (which is, in media's view, pathologically divided). 5/

I argue in this paper that society is relearning how to hold a conversation with itself. Media are not helping; they are hurting by pathologizing choice, conversation, community. Again the problem is they then ignore the real story: Fox propagandizing. 6/

dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.114…

If we are "deeply divided" what are we deeply divided about? Pollsters think they know and so they set the agenda of division in their surveys, preempting the public conversation they are meant to measure, as James Carey said. 7/

Journalists -- who supposedly have investigation and holding power to account as their highest values -- miss the real story of covering Trump's corruption by concentrating on our "division" over him. They treat corruption as a debate. No, it's a crime to cover. 8/

Some people in this nation accept Trump's crimes because of what he can accomplish for them as they see their power deflating. They want him to burn the fields so as not to share crops with the "others." They want him to enable their racism. Those are the pathologies. 9/

Media should be covering Trump's crimes and white Americans' racism and the nation's systemic inequity. Instead they see all this in the context of "division." That makes everything relative. Crimes and racism become just something to be divided over. 10/