https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14741/us-politics-britain
My friends assured me there were terrible, terrible things that would become apparent in the ensuing months.
Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.
The only thing that has not changed is the Democrats’ make-believe view that President Trump and the Russians were somehow trying to rig the election, when it was, in fact, they themselves who were doing that.
Before the advent of online news, residents of the UK had to rely on the British press to report on the minutiae of the American political system — something that didn’t happen all that often. In politics what went on in the USA, stayed in the USA, most of it at least. Beyond a major political upheaval, or the swearing in of a new president, news reportage was more concerned with the cut and thrust of our own routine domestic politics.
Only the bickering between the Democrats and Republicans rang a familiar note, mirroring as it did, our British Punch and Judy stereotype, with the stuffy old Tories on one side, and the loony-left Labour on the other.
By 2008, along with the advent of social media, and a growing awareness of international affairs, it became increasingly impossible not to notice the apparently out of proportion intensity driving the Democrat-Republican voter divide. Heralded in by the arrival of the US’s first president “of colour”, Barack Obama, and coinciding with the rising usage of Twitter and Facebook, the “Left” seemed to jump at the chance of embracing the one-dimensional limitations of an “echo chamber”. The “echo-chamber” served not only to widen the chasm between left and right, but — even to the outsider — noticeably amplified the animosity between the two sides. Compared to the almost polite political rivalry between voters and parties in Britain, the political division in the US began looking distinctly engineered.
My American friends, in an effort to help me try and understand their conclusions, sent a raft of articles from the US mainstream media, which, in their bias, displayed the same lack of integrity as my friends’. Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.