[thebspatrol]

I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric.

I easily spend far more time listening to and reading right-leaning rhetoric, despite being left leaning. I already know "my side". Why would I want to live in an echo chamber?

[davidf18]

I have to read NYT, WaPo, WSJ, Economist, The Guardian, Breitbart, TimesofIsrael to get full information. NYT does a lot of censoring/under emphasizing of critical information. Of course there is also general reading that is important.

[Bakary]

Interestingly, this is still a significantly limited echo chamber because these sources are all Anglo-centric, perhaps even the Times of Israel despite its location.

Of course, this number of publications is already a large investment of time so I don't think it's reasonable to expect anyone to do more.

[eeZah7Ux]

> because these sources are all Anglo-centric

They are also mainstream media. They provide a very narrow set of viewpoints.

One example? No newspaper publish material as significant as wikileaks.

[Animats]

The South China Morning Post, even though more under mainland control than it was a year ago, is worth reading. For a while, they had a paywall, but it seems now to be inoperative for the "international edition".

The CIA used to have the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service, later the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, now the Open Source Center. During the Cold War, they had people listening to most of the national radio stations of the Communist countries and taking notes. Most of this was utter drivel; Radio Albania was mostly long speeches by their dictator. Sometimes something important would be announced, and it was the CIA's job to notice, so somebody had to listen. Must have been an awful job before it was computerized.

[wu-ikkyu]

Have you ever considered that maybe both the big "left" and "right" media is itself an echo chamber?

[emodendroket]

Indeed, the points on which mainstream American "right" and "left" media agree with each other are more numerous than the points on which they disagree.

[losteric]

Well I should hope so. A nation cannot exist without some social cohesion, Americans need to (and do) agree on most issues.

[emodendroket]

In a lot of the bipartisan Washington consensus stuff Beltway opinion is in lockstep with itself but not with average Americans.

[wu-ikkyu]

>The pretense in disputed elections is that the great conflict is between the two major parties. The reality is that there is a much bigger conflict that the two parties jointly wage against large numbers of Americans who are represented by neither party and against powerless millions around the world.

-Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

[thebspatrol]

I find that hard to believe. The American right wing and the general western left wing are MILES apart. I think the fact that there are people who unironically think that center-right Hillary Clinton is a "communist" is evidence enough of that.

I mean I still live within the constraints of reality, and generally only read politics which are widely accepted. I think I'm getting a fairly broad spread by reading opinions that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country".

[justin66]

> I'd actually be really interested in knowing what percentage of people read opposing rhetoric.

It depends what you mean by "opposing" - different sides in a power struggle or genuinely different ideas? I think the number of people who read both WAPO, NY Times and WSJ (even National Review and Reason) is probably quite high, now more than ever thanks to the internet. They'll be familiar with the different sides in the nation's power struggle. And after a while, they'll probably know roughly what those papers' editorials will say before they even read them. It's vanity to think that those readers are often engaging in a some kind of big struggle of ideas, I think, although there's a lot of value in just knowing what is going on.

The number of people who seek out outlets like newspapers representing the views of the Communists, Green Party, Syndicalists, Illinois Nazis, Anarchists or whatever is probably vanishingly small.

[thebspatrol]

Is understanding views that range from "deconstruction of class" to "this is a Christian country" not enough?

The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE, to the extent that you will have american right wingers calling Hillary Clinton a communist, despite her being by all measures right leaning in any other western country. I don't feel like I'd be doing myself any value in reading extreme fringe politics, since I can read widely applicable politics that are so eclectic. And I do read green and libertarian rhetoric.

I think reading global rhetoric is really useful, especially if you live in a country that positions itself as the center of the universe, but I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.

[justin66]

I don't hugely disagree, but the person you were responding to was holding up his daily reading of WAPO and Fox News as being representative of real "critical thinking," hence my wanting you to define your terms.

> The void between the american right and the general western left is HUGE

Of course, there's a gap between the American left and the "general western left" as well. In many ways in America we effectively have a center-right party and a far-right party which harbors substantial fringe elements. There is not really much of an American left by any conventional measure. (America's left wing party just ran a hawkish supporter of the death penalty whose husband "reformed" welfare)

> I just don't see the use in digging up hyper-extreme ideology that no one participates in and will literally never see the light of day in my lifetime.

If you don't think the ideas have intrinsic importance that's fair. On the other hand, it appears to go hand in hand with an American culture wherein people don't even realize that Communism and Socialism both used to be a living, active thing in their country. I don't think you can be a "critical thinker" and just ignore all that history and context, but at the same time... yeah, I'm not seeking out the Socialist's newspapers, or whatever.

[pmarreck]

agree 100%. How do you know you're really right unless you read opposing viewpoints?

I've noticed that there's a herd mentality going on as well... People would rather "belong" than "be right", as it were

[arethuza]

I've started doing that far more over the last year or so - I'm definitely "left leaning" but it's good to try and understand the viewpoint of others even if you don't agree with their conclusions.

Echo chambers are boring.

[emodendroket]

I mean I don't feel like I get much out of listening to the same talking points trotted out over and over again, personally.

[ergothus]

I'm solidly on the liberal side of most issues, and I definitely try to remain informed, which includes exploring conservative viewpoints and media.

The problem is that MOST media (of any focus) is shallow. Reading the "opposing" side is just as tiresome as reading points I already know if obvious information is skipped over or not explored (actually, more tiresome). I end up chasing down lots of details myself, which is time-consuming and frankly, not really my primary skillset. It theoretically is the skillset of, um, journalists.

So when on the left I see "Immigrants on average commit less crime than native-born in the US" and on the right I see "3% of the population (immigrants) commit over 50% of the crime", I'm not finding any media exploring both sides. I can spend a few hours chasing down this one fact (a pretty important one, but still just one), which leads me to find vague references to a DOJ report on reported crimes supporting the conservative view, and surveys of self-reported crimes supporting the liberal view. So neither position is without basis, but I really have no better info on which is more true, and if I spend all this time chasing down evidence myself, the media is serving zero purpose.

Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.

Thirdly, when you're reading two sides: One side says things that you mostly know and agree with. The other side says things that are often ridiculous and false on their face (as far as you are concerned). Why would you want to frustrate yourself with the state of humanity all the time? I read enough (I think) to get an idea of the zeitgeist of others, I read enough to understand what the basis of their arguments are, but any reading past that tends to be far more frustrating than enlightening. (I assume this is something true for both sides).

Lastly, left and right may both have reasonable people, but the right seems to have a lot more [carefully edits this description several times] general disdain for science and more embracing of hypocrisy. The Left has baseless GMO fears, anti-vaxers, and sometimes more optimism than might be best, but in general I can expect less denial of well-demonstrated concepts and science. (I'm sure this is slanted by bias, but I'm happy to go point by point offline if anyone wants). This means that while I "check-in" with sources espousing opinions I don't agree with, I have no more desire to spend a lot of time there than I do on a site informing me that eating GMO corn will cause me to mutate.

Off topic side note: I really hate how the useful GMO discussions (monocultures, sustainability, environmental impact, prions, etc) can't really get any progress because everyone spends all their time rebuffing ridiculous accusations. Just like "what do we do about climate change" doesn't get as much discussion as "is there actually human-caused climate change".

[emodendroket]

There is something to that. I agree with a lot of what Glenn Greenwald writes, but I rarely read him because he can get so repetitive.

> Secondly, I've found left-leaning sites that do more factual digging (at least it seems that way) and will cover and attempt to disprove some of the opposing arguments. (Both sides have vapid overly dramatic coverage offered by many sources - I'm referring to the better sources on both sides). The closest I've found on the right is the National Review. I'm all ears if someone has better suggestions, but as it is I tend to read more within my "echo chamber" because it's actually the best source of nuanced information I've found so far.

I think the American Conservative can be good, especially Daniel Larison. But then again, they also run pieces with bizarre claims like "Uber is an example of distributism."

[cryoshon]

echo chambers are boring, but so is ruining terrible malformed arguments.

neither side has a monopoly on those, to be sure.

[pmezard]

As a French, I read HN in part for this, to be reminded there are educated people out there with vastly different ideas about the world (I just hope they do the same...).

[matwood]

I lean left and right depending on the topic. I have a hard time listening/reading either the far right or left because spouting extremes just seems counterproductive.