Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh Testimony Tells a Tale of Two Internets -- Wired

First and final paragraphs from a timely reality check

"AMERICA WATCHED CHRISTINE Blasey Ford and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testify before Congress today. The country listened as they relayed their accounts of what happened 35 years ago, when she says he sexually assaulted her at a house party, and he says neither the party nor the assault occurred. But while viewers may have watched the same hearing, they did not interpret it through a neutral conduit. Whether you followed along with a news outlet’s livestream or liveblog, watched the event on cable news, or relied on Twitter to curate a highlight reel, your experience was mediated and shaped by the filter bubbles that dictate whose opinions you see when you read things on the web. Where some see sober, science-backed credibility, other see a circus. It’s a story that’s all too typical in this period of political polarization.
[...]
These stances are wildly, maybe disastrously, different. Each side casts the other as inappropriate and lionizes their own entrants into the fray. And as these narratives grow, change, and refract their way across the internet—being discussed and rehashed by people in their own corners of the political spectrum as they go—the gap between them is likely to widen. Partisan narrative has come to trump attempted objectivity. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where that’s less appropriate than when trying to determine whether a man is fit to be an objective arbiter of truth and justice for an entire nation."

Blasey Ford–Kavanaugh Testimony Tells a Tale of Two Internets -- Wired