I am a registered independent who was raised by a conservative family and goes to a liberal arts school. For somebody like me who doesn’t really know much about politics, an election—especially one as important as this one—is extremely stressful.
Sure, I have opinions on a lot of the topics that are being pressed, but I don’t agree with everything that Donald Trump says or everything that Hillary Clinton says. I am not particularly drawn to either candidate, and a vote for a third party candidate seems like a waste, so I am completely torn on where my vote will go on November 8th in this struggle to find the apparent lesser of two evils.
In life, a sure fire way to clear up confusion and help be led in the right direction is to go to your parents, teachers and friends for advice, but I’m finding that in this particular instance, it is really hard to find an unbiased opinion when it comes to politics no matter who you ask.
The other thing that is super stressful about the Presidential Race is that when you do feel a certain way about a topic, you can’t even come out and express it without a whole bunch of people berating you for your opinion.
Take social media, for instance. If you go on Facebook nowadays, it is like a cesspool of political feud. According to a Pew Internet Survey from January to February of 2012, 30% of people said they saw their friends posting mostly about politics. While 30% isn’t a huge number, it is still a huge chunk of people.
That number would probably be a little bit higher if there was not a huge portion of people who felt like they would get harassed for their personal beliefs on Facebook or any other form of social media. Take this post, for instance:
Even the New York Times, a website that a lot of people, including myself, trusted for political analysis had been making me question where their loyalties lied after I suspected they were bashing Trump a little more than someone without an agenda–one way or another–would.
Wednesday. October 12th in the New York Post, writer Michael Goodwin confirmed those beliefs, citing multiple instances where Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times acknowledged letting his writers’ biases go in their articles, which goes against the most basic journalism principles.
Banquet basically said that the struggle for fairness is over when he told Ken Doctor of NiemanLab.org that, “I think that Trump has ended that struggle. I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.”
If one of the most respected papers in the country can’t keep their bias out of their articles then who can we really trust?
What I have found is there are very few sites that you can trust to fact check. Trust me, the fact check on Hillary Clinton’s website that she alluded to very often during their first debate probably is only fact checking Trumps quotes, and Trump’s website is probably doing the reverse.
The one tiny bit of hope I had for finding an accurate fact checker is one I found on NPR.com (National Public Radio) from the first debate. The site quoted everything that was said during the debate and fact checked it live by having experts on the particular subjects chime in and tell let the facts be known.
Hopefully, more places can be found like this around the web where the facts can be left to speak for themselves. If you know who you are voting for, please be courteous to people like me who don’t have the answers yet. Respect the process to seek knowledge, because, at the end of the day, healthy discussion on these controversial topics is what will help this nation grow. Only then can we get to where we want to be.
