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Remember, your feed is a filter bubble. What you are seeing is not what your political opposites are seeing.
Headlines, Front Pages, and Articles from Across the News Landscape: Trump Disinfectant Edition. A thread:
Headlines, Front Pages, and Articles from Across the News Landscape: Trump Disinfectant Edition. A thread:
If you lean left politically, no doubt your Twitter and Facebook feed has informed you about/mocked Trump's UV/disinfectant/in the body/injection comments. Folks on the right aren't seeing the same thing, because neutral/left/right coverage differs greatly. Here's a tour: 2/
The least biased coverage listed the Trump comments as a second or third-tier story, behind more important COVID-19 headlines. These focused on the fact that Trump really did say this stuff, and that doctors and companies contradicted him. It wasn't high up on @nytimes front page
@BBCWorld had it below other coverage as well
Reuters and NBC headlines focused a bit more on how experts and doctors found the statements quite wrong-headed and alarming, which is fair in view of the facts. Remember, factual. "least biased" reporting can still make something look bad if it is indeed bad.
Moving just a bit to the left, BuzzFeed News emphasizes the story with two headlines on the front page, one talking about Dr. Birx's facial expressions on video. Also, the photo of Trump chosen almost looks like he is making the "I'm crazy" hand gesture.
A bit further left, Slate's headline "Supposing You Brought the Light *Inside* the Body," is mocking but understated; the article itself is quite a bit harsher: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/trump-sun-light-disinfectant-coronavirus-inject-scrub-clean-body-press-conference.html
Various other sources on the left dedicate more than one story to it, like Mother Jones and Wonkette and go to town on the President and his supporters in varying degrees
and others, like HuffPost, The Week, The Daily Beast, and Alternet lead with it. Alternet even attacks NYT for being too nice about their coverage!
But on the right, it's a whole different ballgame! Given the facts, outlets on the right didn't have a whole lot of favorable things to work with, so the coverage was a mixed bag of deflection (attacking the media), avoidance, and misleading denial. Here are examples of each:
In the deflection category, Fox's headlines (which ran below a much more positive lead story of Trump signing the stimulus bill) suggested Trump was being unfairly attacked. "Twisted Words?" and "White House accuses media of taking Trump 'out of context'..."
Daily Wire repeats a nearly identical headline "White House Slams Mediafor Taking Trump "Out of Context" on Disinfectant Comments." Meanwhile, Washington Examiner goes with a headline that seems to attack Trump, but the article attacks the bleach thing as a far-LEFT concept
In the avoidance category, The Blaze and National Review decide to just not cover the story on their front page at all. All of the screenshots in this thread were taken between 11 am-12 pm MST today. Plenty of other polarizing takes on coronavirus stories, though
Drudge Report, which typically has charged right-wing headlines that link to mostly center and right, but sometimes left articles, hasn't gone out of its way to be kind to Trump when it isn't warranted, so its headlines were quite mocking today. As I said, it was a mixed bag
But Breitbart got the most attention today for its very misleading denial that Trump even said what he said, in this "Fact Check." This was the easiest example for the left to pounce on. Egregious examples are the most common way the left is exposed to articles on the right.
So if you're wondering why we remain so polarized and why the other side never sees it the same way, just remember that they are literally not seeing it the same way!
