I listened to the episode titled “A Different Kind of Political Divide”.
In this episode, Chris Beem (at McCartney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University) leads with an interesting analogy about being a Bears fan and having an opinion on the team’s quarterback. He shares an experience in which he felt inferior to another person because he did not know as much about the Bears as he did. I related to this analogy because I often feel as though I do not know much about politics, and it can be uncomfortable to have a political conversation with someone who knows more about it than I do.
Candis Watts Smith then discussed the idea that many people get their political knowledge from unreliable sources such as TikTok, and that many people post their opinions with the intention of sharing that their way of thinking about politics is the “right way” to think about politics. Yanna Krupinov, a political science professor, follows politics very regularly and states that politics is central to her life. This statement is not something that everyone could agree with though (around 10-15% of people would agree). This creates a divide in the nation between people who follow politics and form their opinion off of reliable sources, and those that do not.
Something that John Barry Ryan mentioned in the episode is that “in a lot of cases, being deeply involved is a tremendous amount of time. And it’s not just a tremendous amount of time, it’s a tremendous amount of flexible time, not everybody has the type of flexible time where they can actually check in what’s happening” (Ryan). I am not sure I completely agree with this. I think some people may choose this mindset as their excuse for not being up-to-date with the world politically. For me, as someone who is not updated regularly with politics, it is not as much time as it is a lack of interest as the issue. I genuinely just do not finding reading politics interesting, so it deters me from reading or watching the news.
One topic that was brought up during the episode was the conflict that journalists face where they need to find a balance with reporting the information that is important, but sometimes people do not read it because they either do not find it interesting or they have already heard it. I liked Krupinov’s analogy to this where she compared it to a reporter who writes about all of the planes that did not experience turbulence. Obviously that is something that no one wants to read about. She also says that the people who are so into politics are the ones that “often want to cause turbulence on the flight” (Krupinov). She says that the whole purpose of journalism is to bring politics into a story where politics does not seem to actually belong in.
Overall, this was an interesting episode about the divide between people who are invested in politics and stay up to date with their information from sources that are trustworthy, and the people that either do not read at all or those that base their opinions off of unreliable sources.