White & Free, Left Unchecked, Can Be A Deadly Combo

Not good - when the more you talk to your friend, the darker his mind grows:

I think conservative media creates an echo chamber, which allows a lot of these elected officials to believe incorrectly that they have majority support behind them, and that strategies like defunding are going to work.

Because of the media bubble, they didn’t realize it wasn’t true. Some of them still don’t understand.

After the 2012 election, I thought it was going to teach them a lesson: that when you close yourselves out from the outside world, you start distrusting all outside sources, you can get misled. You had a little bit of soul-searching … That seems to have lasted a couple of months. [Recently] you had Ted Cruz on TV saying about the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, “There were too many government employees in the sample, I don’t believe the poll.” So there is still interest in staying in the bubble.

But I think it’s simplistic to blame specific media figures for keeping them within the bubble. And the reason for that is this: There’s always somebody out there who’s going to write whatever stupid shit. And so if you don’t indulge the conservative bubble, you’re going to lose the audience and they’re going to go to somebody else. So it’s structurally inevitable that this happens on the right. The only way that it can stop is if the audience stops demanding it, because they realize they’ve been misleading them. But I don’t know how long it’s going to take to beat that into their heads. Loss of the House in 2014, which I think is a very real possibility now – if that happens, I think that might beat some sense into the party. Maybe. But you know, 2012 losses didn’t do it. So I don’t know how many times they need to get burned before they realize the stove is hot.

"So if you don’t indulge the conservative bubble, you’re going to lose the audience and they’re going to go to somebody else," huh? Story of my blogging life. Which makes the problem easy to dissect:

First, we have to calibrate if anyone really cares,..