May 15, 2025
To: Mainstream Media Outlets based in Utah
From: Mrs. Smith’s 8th Grade US History class at Springville Junior High School
We, the Youth of Utah, in order to form a more perfect state, wish to ask the mainstream media to help us. We are grateful for mainstream media's efforts to show stories from both sides and we ask you to further your example of an honest media and to help unify Utah by just asking the people you interview to explain their why. We believe that when we go online we should be able to see the news, see opinions from both sides of the story, and we should be able to learn to understand the reasons behind people's actions. Understanding the reasons will help our society overcome polarization.
Currently, society is very polarized. Polarization refers to two sharply contrasting groups with separate opinions or beliefs which lead to conflict within both groups and have a negative result. Some examples are: division in the country, tension between different groups, and distrust of the news outlets.
Polarization has a football effect, with issues being tossed back and forth, depending on the political party in office. Extreme media, including TV news and newspapers, are getting more and more biased and associated with political sides. This is then causing people to side strongly with one political party, depending on which extreme media source they are using. “The fact that there are so many sources means we cannot consume them all. And so we become selective in our ways, which results in polarization.”(Vanshadi) So we are asking for you, the mainstream media, to try and help undo the effects of extreme media.
People sometimes care more about confirming what they already think then finding out what is real and truthful. To further this idea, Shankar Vedantam, a Journalist, once stated, “Implicit bias is like the smog that hangs over a community. It becomes the air people breathe.” (Vedantam) It is really important to be able to overcome our bias so we can make factual opinions. If we believe ourselves and our viewpoint to be superior, we often spread false information that is biased and one-sided.
Exposure to varied perspectives can expand the developing mind. We can become more open-minded and unbiased when we gain knowledge from both sides. Most of us do prefer going into separate opinions or areas in which we feel the most comfortable, but we can still avoid the hatred of the other side by knowing and respecting the other perspective, even if we don’t agree with it. Looking at more and more perspectives could help us figure out what is right and what is wrong together as a community.
We believe Utahns, like everyone else, have tunnel vision where we only see our own opinions and usually block out any other opinion without really trying to understand it. We need to hear from people with different opinions that we would likely not encounter in our own lives. If, when you present facts, you also let the people involved or who you are interviewing share why they feel the way they do, you give the people reading, listening, or watching a chance to learn the perspective of someone who might think differently than they do. This will let all of us recognize and correct thinking errors about the other side.
Throughout our project and our mission of changing how news is presented to the public, we have theorized that there is also a bubble surrounding Utah and its exposure to significant topics. While some stories may make headlines in other states, Utah neglects some issues because of bias within the community. One of these issues is substance abuse.
To prove Utah's isolation, we surveyed Utah citizens and citizens of other states. We asked participants the following questions:
On a scale from zero to ten (zero being not at all, and ten being the number one priority), how bad do you think the substance abuse crisis is in your state?
On a scale from zero to ten (zero being not at all, and ten being the number one priority), how bad do you think the substance abuse crisis is across the United States?
On a scale from zero to ten (zero being not at all, and ten being every day), how often do you see news outlets report on substance abuse in your state?
All respondents (both in Utah and outside) agree that substance abuse is an issue in America today. Notably, respondents in Utah showed average percentages for questions one and three to be nearly a percent below the results from other states. The most influential factor was that respondents from Utah shared that, on average, they see news on substance abuse only 32.2% of the time. As a gatekeeper, mainstream media has an important responsibility to help us become aware of all the issues that are important in Utah and in the nation as a whole. When we give the people exactly what they say they want, and only that, the people don’t gain perspective and polarization becomes much worse. Of course, after learning why people on both sides feel the way they do, readers should be allowed to make our own conclusions on the media and current events. We are the next generation, we will be your employees and consumers and we deserve and need to see the whole picture. In case you are interested, we have summarized our class project below.
Our Class Project plan:
We looked at some different solutions to people not knowing the whole story, or not understanding a perspective because they have no opportunity to. Solutions included things like Public Service Announcements and ice-breakers to help bring together opposed political parties and other diverse groups, among other things.
We voted as a class on which solution we thought would help the most, which happened to be showing contrasting perspectives and reasons of a person’s opinions or actions, if they are shown to the public through television or newspapers.
We came up with different subjects to research that would help support our argument, such as polarization, the history of bias in media, and something we called “Looking Outside the Bubble”, a project that would reveal issues in Utah that people don’t tend to think about when Utah is brought up (that are still very important problems).
We all split into groups to start our research. We put together a large document full of every group’s research and individual ideas.
Each group began to write a paragraph about their research. The paragraphs were then put together and edited, to be emailed to different media sources and used to bring about the solutions for the issue of understanding different people’s perspectives.
We hope you will help us by asking those you interview for stories, and about what their reasoning is so we can all better learn to understand the perspectives of one another and decrease the polarization and animosity in America today.
Sincerely,
Mrs. Smith’s 3rd period 8th Grade US History Class at Springville Junior High.
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WORKS CITED
“Bias LIves Inside All of Us” Smithsonian, https://biasinsideus.si.edu/online-exhibition/bias-lives-inside-all-of-us
Chancellor, Robert “A Perspective on Credibility in American Journalism” UC Berkeley, 8 October 1998 https://chancellor.berkeley.edu/chancellors/berdahl/speeches/perspective-on-credibility-in-american-journalism
Moss, Walter “Historians’ Perspective on Media Bias: Where it Came from, and What Can be Done? History News Network, 16 May 2021 https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/historians-perspective-on-media-bias-where-it-came
Roscini, Flavia. “How The American Media Landscape is Polarizing the Country” MAIA candidate at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/historians-perspective-on-media-bias-where-it-came
“The Science of Bias” Smithsonian https://biasinsideus.si.edu/online-exhibition/the-science-of-bias
Thornton, Bruce “A Brief History of Media Bias,” Hoover Institution, 12 June 2013, https://www.hoover.org/research/brief-history-media-bias
Vedantam, Shankar “<The ‘Thumbprint Of The Culture’: Implicit Bias And Police Shootings” Hidden Brain 5 June 2017, https://www.npr.org/transcripts/531578107?storyId=531578107