A Tale of Two Countries
How the media gap between conservative voters and everyone else is creating fractured realities
Six months or so ago, I talked about Palestine in front of a family member. “What’s Palestine?” they said. I scoffed, thinking they were joking because they didn’t want me to talk about it.
The hurt look on their face made me immediately regret doing so. I quickly said something about thinking they were joking and then went on to explain the situation in Israel to the best of my ability.
That was one of the first times I realized that what I think are stories everyone knows about are usually just stories everyone in my circle knows about. I suddenly conceived of a Snapchat, Facebook, TikTok world where word of one of the greatest human tragedies of our generation never gets out to a user.
I grew up in a news desert myself. I never read the paper, never kept up with the news online (when it did show up online), I existed before social media became a pervasive part of our life. As a deeply religious family in the Baptist Church, we were essentially taught that the world was everyone else’s problem. Souls were our business. This was before the church became a political organization for the far right.
And then I went to college. I had an incredibly soothing job where I literally just used Gimp to trace each individual room in every individual floor of every individual building on my entire university campus. During that job I found NPR, which I previously didn’t even know existed. I would listen to every news show, every podcast for hours at a time while I traced little squares and kept track of them in the largest spreadsheet I’ve ever seen.
If I had never had that experience, I don’t know that I would be who I am today. I don’t know if I would know how to find information about the world, tell what’s fake and what’s not fake news, and maybe I would never have developed a knowledge about the world at large that eventually led to me leaving my church.
Our reality is shaped by what we hear about. One of the reasons that I named this newsletter Media Made Me is because the media I began inhaling when I left my bubble fundamentally changed my view of the world. I spent years of my twenties sick and watching TV shows and movies I missed, inhaling podcasts as they came along, and in general creating an understanding of the world I had disregarded for the first twenty years of my life. In that process I learned that what soaks through the layers of our media environment becomes our reality.
The way I grew up is the way that millions of Americans live their lives. In news deserts, with low media literacy, with a set of values that dismisses the need to obtain new viewpoints and ideas. This creates two parallel Americas that exist in constant tension with one another.
In one America, everyone knows that Donald Trump has been calling for indiscriminate mass deportations of immigrants. In the other, he will reign over the orderly ejection of gang members and criminals.
In one America, Kamala Harris is an eminently qualified candidate who led anticorruption efforts as the Attorney General for the most populous state and then went on to serve as Vice President (arguably the best training ground one could have for President) for four years. In the other, she is a laughing, ever-changing, unqualified woman who doesn’t take her job seriously and arguably slept her way to the top.
In one America, women are dying from denial of abortion as healthcare during complicated pregnancies and miscarriages. In the other, pro-life policies have saved millions of babies from being murdered in late term abortions (despite evidence that these are so rare as to not even merit a percentage of total performed procedures).
Facts are not relative, and yet the facts that get included in the media you inhale create the narrative that defines a person’s understanding of the world. If you believe RFK Jr. is a handsome rogue who wants to save America’s food supply, then you simply won’t accept any talk about him as a mentally unstable conspiracist whose anti-vax rhetoric is directly harming America.
It’s important for liberal voters to understand this divide. There is so much anger (justified anger) about the result of the election, and people are cutting off those in their life who lack compassion and empathy for the people who will suffer from Trump’s reign. They believe that voters chose the price of eggs over the suffering of millions.
And I will admit, I also believed this on day one. But having heard from Trump voters on programs like Sixty Minutes and PBS Newshour, as well as from a few close friends who I find to be deeply misguided in their beliefs, I can say affirmatively that we do not share reality with the majority of Trump voters.
They do not believe the stories about Trump sexually assaulting women; they do not believe in his felony conviction; they do not believe that he will deport dads and moms and grandmas; they do not believe he will roll back gay rights or women’s rights. They don’t believe these things because they have been lied to, and their reality is defined by those lies.
Only 38% of Americans pay attention to the news all or most of the time, according to the latest data we have for these trends. So many choose to opt out because real life is a bummer. We drastically overestimate the amount of information that gets to the average American. To do a quick thought experiment: how would you develop your current worldview if you never heard from trusted journalistic sources?
Would you rely on friends’ posts on Instagram, maybe see a TikTok video every once in awhile? Would you hear from some people on Twitter or Threads? Think about how those algorithms work. If you never read the news, then why would any social platform give you posts related to what’s happening in the world?
When you’re not exposed to fact-based stories, you’re not living in a vacuum. You’re getting personal stories about people struggling, you’re hearing thirdhand accounts about politics. You’re relying on the parasocial relationships with the people who see the world the same way you do.
If you think about voters in this way, suddenly you understand that they’re making decisions from a different reality than your own. They don’t know black people who are talking about racism in American politics and they don’t hear from them online. They don’t know trans people who are afraid for their lives and their wellbeing and they don’t hear from them online.
The empathy of millions of people is never stretched because they are never exposed to these perspectives whatsoever. Maybe they’re watching TV and getting some exposure, but statistics show that most people stick to brain candy like the various NCIS shows, FBIs, 911s, etc.
Call it low media literacy, call it low information voting, call it brainwashing. Call it whatever you want, but the outcome is the same: millions of voters are voting for the idea of a person they formed from secondhand, thirdhand, fourth-hand sources. Trump and his vitriol are watered down into someone who will help the economy because he’s a business guy.
So in one America, we have people who build their reality based on the information they get from firsthand sources, news outlets, social media circles, and even from their own jobs in the important creative spaces. On the other side, we get people who don’t watch the news, can’t afford to bust past paywalls on the newspapers liberals love, and who swim in an entirely different online sea. Both sides are looking at each other through a funhouse mirror and laughing in the face of the image they see.
To be clear, there are elites in the conservative movement who are completely, unequivocally aware of who Donald Trump is. These elites shape the conversation around his policies, his mental health, his plans for the future. They sweep what they can under the rug, they explain away and obfuscate whatever remains in the light. They are directly responsible for the media that makes its way into the hands of the majority of Americans who put Trump in office.
But if it was simply these elites voting in elections, there would be an overwhelming tide of pro-democracy feeling. Instead, policies are put in place to keep people from getting the information they need, from becoming educated and capable citizens, from finding out the truth about who is pulling the strings at the top of the totem pole. Billionaires pour their money into the process of putting lipstick on whichever pig is up for election at the time. They promise riches and stability to whosoever believes in them.
We will not outspend that group of people. We will not change their minds because the status quo benefits them greatly. We will only change the country when we change the reality created by our media ecosystem. We must figure out how to reach people who have for decades been unreachable through traditional news publications, or through the other liberal institutions we see as commonplace, but which are truly only reaching those whose minds are already made up.
Media makes us who we are, and democrats, antifascists, and liberals are losing the media game. We are trying to lead elephants to water and make them drink, and they are not interested in what we have to offer. If we want our two countries to become one again, we must build trust with people who live inside that ecosystem and help them to spread truth.
The next time you assume, like I did some months ago, that the person in front of you is armed with the same information and simply choosing not to care, drop that assumption and talk from a place of zero. We will not change people’s minds online. We will only build bridges through personal relationships. Our realities have to become one again, and this may be the toughest challenge any of us face in our lifetimes.