This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap?

A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. How’s the country doing, overall? Is the economy booming or busting? Is crime climbing or dropping?

Anyone can, of course, reach their own conclusions on those questions, independent of the news they consume. But their views will necessarily be influenced by their own individual circumstances. Did they just get a promotion — or laid off? Do they feel safe sleeping with their front door unlocked — or did they just get mugged? Their own personal data points might align with a larger trend — or they might not. And news stories have traditionally been a big part of how people figured out which was which.

But we’ve just concluded an election cycle that suggests something important has broken in that feedback loop. How people perceive the economy and crime are major factors in whether they reward or punish incumbents with their vote. And decades-old patterns in that process seem to have gone a little haywire.

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  • So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?

    I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.