The Flawed Logic Behind Getting Your News From “Both Sides”
Photo by Lora Ohanessian on Unsplash
If you have followed the political discourse for the last couple of decades, you’ll have noticed an unending conversation around how you need to get your news from both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum. “Democrats must get out of their bubble,” writes Arlie Hochschild in the Berkeley Blog. “To Beat Trump, Democrats May Need to Break Out of the ‘Whole Foods’ Bubble,” David Wasserman laments in The New York Times. “Democrats And Republicans Should Argue More — Not Less,” suggests Daniel Cox in FiveThirtyEight.
This maxim has led to the creation of digital platforms such as OneSub and Nuzzera. These sites aim to burst your bubble so that you can get information from the other side. “Unbiased news does not exist; we provide balanced news and civil discourse,” declares AllSides, a news site that breaks its content into five categories — the far right, the right, the center, the left, and the far left.
For a variety of reasons, this advice couldn’t be farther from the truth. It not only reduces the many complexities within these two political coalitions into an unhelpful binary, but it also perpetuates misinformation in the process. Some information is incorrect, and we shouldn’t pretend that it’s true to satisfy some imagined doctrine of fairness. We need to build a world where people seek new information to expose themselves to different perspectives, not to assuage the hurt feelings of people who are misinformed or wrong.
The advice that you should get news from both the Left and the Right rhetorically seems sensible. We should be examining our biases constantly to see if they are accurate. We all have blind spots, and I encourage people to read all kinds of information from many different sources to verify if what they believe is true. However, part of that work means acknowledging both the reality of how politics works and how we process information as human beings.
Firstly, the idea that most users exist in echo chambers due to lack of exposure to other sources online is debatable. Many consumers use social media as their launch point for information, which exposes them to diverse perspectives. They aren’t always the most accurate voices (a whole other problem), but they are varied. A 2016 paper (using 2012 data from over 50,000 users in the US) found that many participants did visit sites with opposing viewpoints — with only 8% having low media diversity. A 2016 Pew Research report likewise found that the majority of people’s social media feeds are filled with an array of perspectives.
Yet even if media bubbles were caused by a lack of exposure, which doesn’t seem to be the case, this perspective would come with some issues. One of the main problems with getting a “balanced perspective” is that it flattens everything into a Left or Right when really we are talking about complex coalitions united temporarily to achieve policy objectives. The Right is composed of groups ranging from Christian fundamentalists to libertarians to white ethno-nationalists. The Left is likewise made up of everything from business-friendly moderates to progressives to communists. There may be arguably some similar psychological elements that unify these two camps, but really the only thing they can agree on is that the other side is mostly worse.
When we examine the Left more deeply, we see a lot of contradictions, which will inevitably lead to fracture once the coalition’s short-term goals have been met (i.e., the few things everyone can agree on). This is not me being pessimistic but merely acknowledging the reality of all these disparate worldviews. Economic liberals generally want to work within the confines of the markets to create reform. Progressives and social democrats want to use government tools to more strictly regulate that marketplace, tax the wealthy, and expand the social safety net. Communists and anarchists want to dismantle that marketplace entirely and place private property into collective hands. These ideologies cannot possibly lead to the same place.
The same logic applies to coalitions on the right too. The world that libertarians and religious fundamentalists want is not the same. One wants a world dictated by their interpretation of a religious text, and the other wants society to be governed completely by market forces. There is natural tension there, so the moment their short-term goals are met, assuming they are ever met at all, they will join groups that better advance their interests.
When people exclaim that we need news from both the Left and Right, the natural question becomes, where on the Left and the Right are you referring to? Do you want people to read The White Supremacy Times? Are you directing them to zines from anarchist collectives? Are you giving them the latest copy of the Communist Quarterly? Do you tell everyone to read the Pope’s sermons? When examining this suggestion literally, we begin to understand how absurd of a perspective it is. We cannot possibly devote our time to understanding all the Left and the Right's nuances. There is no uniformity among these two arbitrary sides in the political spectrum. It’s merely a useful shorthand meant to describe coalitions tied together by circumstance.
Not only is the suggestion of consuming news from “both sides” impractical and reductive, but it goes against how human beings process information. We are emotional beings driven by biases and blind spots that prevent us from weighing information objectively (see cognitive biases). In fact, some evidence suggests that exposure to the “other side” can worsen polarization because it causes people to double down on their stated positions. A paper published in 2018 asked participants to follow a bot that retweeted opinions on the opposite side of the political spectrum from themselves, and it had surprising results. Users reported being more confident in their initial viewpoints once the experiment concluded.
There is a high probability that you would have an opinion about being told to read The White Supremacy Times or the Communist Quarterly. That’s a reality we have to acknowledge when telling humans to consume information. We have frameworks we use to sort data. Our biases have us naturally discard certain information while spotlighting others. For example, a cognitive bias commonly referred to as “motivated reasoning” can be used to describe why some of us are so willing to dismiss information that conflicts with our worldviews. As explained in the BBC by David Robson: “Countless studies have shown that we are so attached to our political identities that we will devote extra cognitive resources to dismissing any evidence that disagrees with our initial point of view, so that we end up even more sure of our convictions.”
If I am somewhere on the Left, then chances are my tribe and I have categorically rejected the Right’s various ideologies. The Right coalition is advocating for policy objectives (e.g., things such as banning abortions, rolling back labor laws, repealing LGBTQIA+ protections, etc.) that are completely inimical to what I believe and know to be true. I am probably not going to objectively weigh the merits of the other side, even if I pretend to, because nobody’s brain works that way. It’s emotionally invested in a certain outcome, and it is going to filter out the stuff I disagree with and highlight the information that strengthens my preferred positions.
This filtering happens, and we need to build information systems rooted in real human psychology, not an imagined concept of objectivity. We do a lot of harm when we pretend otherwise. When we emphasize the merits of “both sides” (which, again, is reductive and limiting to our political discourse), this rhetoric hampers our ability to call out dangerous or problematic positions.
Because when “both sides” are considered valuable, how can one of them be wrong?
Let’s talk about climate change. It’s common knowledge that climate change is real, but infamously, one of the biggest debates waged over the past few decades in the political sphere has been over its existence and causes.
During the early 2000s and up to the 2010s (and now), we saw climate skeptics debate or downplay the “merits” of climate change. Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation released regular reports stressing that new information about climate change was “really nothing revelatory.” In another example, skeptic Bjorn Lomborg had a 2005 TED Talk (not a TEDX Talk, but a TED Talk) about how there were so many better problems to address other than climate change. And, of course, a member of Congress infamously brought a snowball into the House chamber to talk about how climate change wasn’t real.
Again, I want to stress that climate change is being worsened by human activity, and if unchecked, it will have catastrophic effects on societies across the globe. The majority of the academic consensus supports this position. We can see articles, videos, speeches, and reports during this period stressing how the warming of the planet is caused by human activity. Yet we spent the better half of four decades we can’t get back, arguing over the validity of this well-established fact. Skeptics were brought onto shows and into the halls of power to advocate for a position that was — not a difference of opinion, not a new perspective — but simply wrong.
This “bothsidesism” was not only reductive, but it was ultimately harmful because it framed an issue as having two sides when the science on the matter was settled. It made people not versed in the topic think that the issue was up for debate. When polled by Gallup in 2009, 41% of Americans claimed that concern with Global Warming was exaggerated, and you couldn’t really blame them because their leaders weren’t taking the issue seriously either. A major effort to introduce Cap & Trade legislation (i.e., regulating carbon emission through a market system) was killed off in 2010. We have not seen an earnest attempt to regulate carbon since. A recent study by Rachel Wetts concluded that the “both sides” narrative in the media was a major contributing factor to this atmosphere of skepticism and indifference. The Grist recapped some of her findings as follows:
“…one reason for the imbalance might be tied to journalistic norms of objectivity, which reporters and editors often interpret as a need to give at least two sides to every story, no matter the science. She called this “false balance,” because it can put unsubstantiated opinions on the same footing as well-established facts. In the case of climate change, she said that the practice has lent legitimacy to those who deny climate change, leading readers to believe that denial is “more than a fringe stance.”
So much of our time would have been saved if these positions were framed as false from the beginning or never given air time at all. We don’t need to validate the information of a group of people who are wrong by all conceivable metrics. It may be useful to read climate change arguments to know how to counter them rhetorically, but they are not valid sources of information. Many positions on the Right are not any more factually useful for getting your information than learning geometry from flat-earthers or biology from anti-vaxxers.
In fact, when we look at the people who insist on flattening perspectives to two sides, many of them have a material reason for doing so. We now know that a lot of climate change skepticism was funded by conservative actors such as David and Charles Koch, petroleum billionaires who had a financial interest in stopping our society’s switch from fossil fuels. The Koch brothers have given hundreds of millions of dollars in seeding think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. ExxonMobil not only has also given a hefty sum of money to similar think tanks and climate change-denying politicians, but purposefully buried the reality of climate change for over 40 years.
These actors were aware that climate change would be bad, and they used the “both sides” rhetoric to sow doubt and confusion among the public. A leaked presentation in a 1989 ExxonMobile report to the company’s board shows a possible beginning to this approach. The report argues for the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions regarding the potential enhanced greenhouse effect” and to “urge a balanced scientific approach.”
In truth, people who demand that we understand both sides of a polarizing issue sometimes have a vested interest in doing so, even if it’s merely a psychological one. Several of the pundits we mentioned at the beginning of this article, who urged Democrats to go outside their bubble, are either self-identified moderates or conservatives. Daniel Cox is a fellow for the Koch Brothers-funded American Enterprise Institute. David Wasserman works for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. They may pride themselves on being Moderate Democrats or Lincoln Republicans, but they generally support a liberal, economic worldview when you comb through their policies.
When they argue for a fair and balanced approach from sources “on the left and right,” what they really seem to be asking for is for people to affirm their worldview in “the center.” They are not telling people to consume the philosophies of anarchists, communists, or libertarians because these are philosophies that people “in the middle” — people who flatten all politics into Left and Right — have rejected. It’s always the Left that must understand their perspective, but the same luxury is never returned in practice.
Looping back to to the example of Allsides (the website that promises to “provide balanced news and civil discourse”), the fact that the site frames all news as either center, left, or right is a moral choice. This site is literally centering the center, and as a consequence, much gets left out. They are implicitly labeling all other points outside their preferred position as an Other — an item left or right of the idealized center.
As we can see, not only is this framing reductive and contrary to political reality, but, at its worst, it can be used as a tool to preserve unjust systems of oppression. The “both sides” rhetoric was employed by fossil fuel companies to prevent genuine reform from taking place. It allows people to believe that they are doing a civic good when they might actually be absorbing a downright toxic narrative.
As mentioned earlier, most people already get their news from various sources, and only a tiny portion of Americans have low media diversity overall. The problem of the media bubble appears to be one of hyper-engaged, very online users, which, if I had to guess, not only describes the people these writers are complaining about, but the writers themselves.
There are issues with digital spaces: misinformation spreads more quickly than accurate information; collective and individual harassment is rampant; polarization does not seem to be going away. We need to develop better ways to mitigate these problems; however, many are happening at a systems level. We get our information from deeply flawed social media platforms that need to be overhauled or set aside completely. There is not much to be done about that apart from divesting ourselves from them overall and lobbying for reform.
All this being said, seeking out new information is still a good thing. We should be challenging ourselves to acquire new knowledge and perspectives. There are enormous psychological and physiological benefits to doing so. We shouldn’t uphold erroneous and false information as part of that process. We need to be focused on the truth rather than hurt, conservative feelings.