On Friday nights or Saturday mornings, after the hustle of junior year, I like to take a break by flipping to Home Box Office Max (HBO) and turning on Real Time with Bill Maher. The show is a political talk show with a special guest and guest panel followed by an editorial. Several weeks ago, the guest section of the show featured Joe Scarborough and former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. This week, Democratic candidate for Senate, James Talarico and Republican Representative Lauren Boebert sat down with Maher to discuss religion in public life, the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down tariffs and other topics.
Shows like this are especially important in an era when Americans increasingly determine credibility not by truthfulness, but by how that particular source views the issue at hand. When people mostly or only consume news sources with their political bias, they tend to move to the political extremes, which doesn’t promote the compromise that makes democracy run.
Maher’s show is almost unique, as every week of the show, Maher consistently gives airtime to other viewpoints while not being afraid to disagree. In just his last two seasons, on the conservative side, Maher had Steve Bannon, Bill O’Reilly, Nancy Mace, Andrew Sulivian and others. On the left side of the political spectrum, he has had governors Josh Shapiro and Gavin Newsom. He has also had Ezra Klein, Senator John Fetterman, and Fareed Zakaria.
It also tamps down on so-called “straw man arguments.” Straw man arguments are when, in a debate, one person misrepresents the other’s position to make it seem weaker and less defensible. By doing this, an argument can seem less credible even when nobody believes what you’re actually attacking. Maher addressed this in an editorial made on Aug. 26, 2022,. Maher discussed how straw man arguments were being applied to that discussion and slowing down debate on the issue of extremist violence.
This is only compounded by the issue of social media. According to the Pew Research Center, 53% of U.S. adults get their information from social media. An experiment done by Nature Communications used a series of bots and sent them onto social media platforms. It found that the bots who initially liked right-leaning content were pushed towards right-wing channels, while, with exceptions like Elon Musk’s platform X, the left was also channeled likewise.
On top of the news coverage we see, the people around us at any point most likely share many of our views. In a study done by the Pew Research Center, 52% of consistent liberals said that most of their friends shared their views of government and politics, as did 66% of consistent conservatives. This can make it even harder to consider the other perspective if nobody around us, whom we see and talk with every day, shares those beliefs.
This is actually good news; no evil or nefarious algorithm is determining where on the political spectrum you land. Rather, it’s the decisions that you make early on in your search history that determine what you see. Nothing is stopping a liberal from watching Ben Shapiro, and nothing is stopping a conservative from watching every episode of The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight. I think that if that happens the conservative or liberal
This does not mean that people cannot or indeed should not have strong convictions about what is happening in our world. I have many issues that I care deeply about and have strong opinions on. But stopping and considering someone else’s opinion doesn’t mean throwing out your own beliefs but rather understanding what the other side believes and the opposite understanding of any particular issue.
Watching Maher’s show, as well as other voices that you disagree with, is an incredibly important and worthwhile practice. We should be listening to shows, media, or social media accounts that on the face of it, we might hate and never usually go to, because it will broaden our perspectives. Truly listening to another with different perspectives, especially politics, is the only way to understand what a person believes, and where you actually disagree. Which in turn will help us understand our own views and help us make sense of our world today.
