The Gaps Between Media and Reality

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers what they experience or observe personally that is most at odds with what they see portrayed in the media.

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

G. is a 77-year-old woman:

I’m not seeing the real me. I wish the entertainment media would tell the truth about people like me who are my age. I don’t wear (or own) an apron. I’m perfectly comfortable with technology. I taught my 20-year-old granddaughter how to populate a website.

Don’t let looks fool you. I am a sexual person. I love my family but value my privacy and independence. Managing that space is harder than you think. The never-ending display of face lifts and rejuvenation products is a mean-spirited denial of the real beauty of age.

G.Y. offers an analogy:

I am a southerner—from the deepest of the deep South. We southerners don’t hear our own accent, just as my New England friends don’t hear their accents. It takes an outsider to hear and point out the sonic nuances that we never notice in ourselves. And if the accent is to be portrayed—by a stage actor, for example—it requires a farcical overexaggerated caricature to portray the accent in a universally recognizable way.

This is the problem with our political discourse and how it is reported on by perfectly good and conscientious journalists. None of us are capable of hearing our own ideological accents, but they are glaringly obvious to the rest of the