The Importance of Tone in News Reporting

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The press is a business right and so they have structural biases where they're going to report on bad stuff. So you could see a story that well trump said this today and it's not true or you know obama's the health care plan first went online today and it was a disaster. People tend to interpret it if it's against your party they tend tointerpret it as a partisan bias when it's just sort of these other kinds of um biases but so it's also sort of weird too i talk about something called the hostile news um hostile media effect which this is also sort of strange too.

The democratic ideal demands that the citizenry think critically about matters of public import. Yet many Democrats and Republicans in the United States have fallen short of that standard because political tribalism motivates them to acquire, perceive and evaluate political information in a biased manner. The result is an electorate that is more extreme, hostile and willing to reject unfavorable democratic outcomes.

Shermer and Redmond discuss: why we have political duopoly (Duverger’s law) • parties vs. policies • Are we living in a post-truth, fake-news, alternative facts world? • How do we know political polarization is worse now than in the past? • acquiring, perceiving, and evaluating political information • evaluating: false political information, political numbers and arguments, claims of rigged election • whataboutism • cognitive responsibilities of citizenship • cognitive biases • political polarization • myside bias • numeracy vs. innumeracy • solutions to the polarization problem.

Timothy J. Redmond received his PhD in political science from the University at Buffalo. He is an award-winning educator and author of over one hundred articles on critical thinking and politics. He is a professor at Daemen University where he teaches a political science and history course for education students.