PERILS OF POLARIZATION
Omar Khadr settlement reveals two solitudes.
No one in Canada seemed to be neutral this week when reports emerged of a $10-million settlement for Omar Khadr. You were either fiercely against giving money to a man once imprisoned as a terrorist at Guantanamo Bay, or strongly in agreement that a former child soldier, a Canadian citizen, should be compensated for what he endured in prison and the courts.
That divide in itself isn’t a bad thing: strong opinions are the fuel of politics and passion is generally preferable to apathy.
But the widely different views on Khadr were also an apt illustration of something not so constructive in 21st-century politics: polarization and the increasing tendency of political partisans to divide the world into black-and-white, good-versus-evil teams.
For examples of why this isn’t such a wonderful development, take a look at what’s been going on in the United States the past few years, where Republicans and Democrats are so divided now that they are no longer even working, living or even socializing with those who don’t share their views.
The more that politics gets polarized, needless to say, the less we talk about finding middle ground or brokerage roles for political parties. We also don’t think much about changing minds or opinions.
Polarized political people don’t debate to persuade the other side; they argue to prove who’s louder or more right.
And by extension, political journalism works much differently in the polarized universe. Journalism’s duty to inform can get lost in the din of people yelling past each other: who needs information when you have passion and conviction?
So I was curious to see this week whether anyone did have a change of mind about Khadr after hearing the news of the potential $10-million payout. It seemed like a good case study for where journalism fits when political issues separate the public into sharply, passionately divided camps.
The good news, at least as I see it for my business, is that some journalism did make a difference this week amid the cacophony of opinion about Khadr.
I asked on my Facebook page whether anyone had changed his or her opinion about the settlement — for or against — because of something they’d read or seen in the media.
I got a lot of response: some of it privately, some of it posted on the Facebook page. Some people wanted to vent outrage; others told me that further information really had made a difference.
Generally, the extra information turned opponents of the Khadr settlement into supporters: maybe grudging supporters, but supporters nonetheless.
Some cited the work that’s been done by the Star’s own Michelle Shephard, author of the book on Khadr, Guantanamo’s Child, and part of the journalistic team behind the documentary of the same name.
People seemed especially open to persuasion when the source of the information was unexpected: conservative-leaning columnists such as Colby Cosh of the National Post, for instance.
One argument that had a lot of sway was the “could-have-been-worse” scenario; the idea that Canada could have ended up paying more than $10-million at the end of a protracted court battle. Legal opinions still matter too, by the way. More than a few people told me that they had been shocked at first to hear that Canada was giving money to Khadr, but when they read more about the Supreme Court of Canada rulings on his case, their opposition faded.
Interestingly, I’d also posed the changed-minds question on Twitter, but didn’t get much of a response — proving once again that the 140-character medium is less useful as a place to gather up political nuance or even find stories about political nuance.
Aaron Wudrick, director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, has been busy all week getting a petition up and running against the settlement. He says that the opposition isn’t all reflexive or knee-jerk; that people have been examining the Khadr story carefully. Wudrick told me that people’s views seemed to be influenced by which part of the story they were focused on: Khadr’s experience in Afghanistan or his life in prison and the courts afterward.
In all, this small glimpse into a highly polarized debate in Canada this week persuaded me that we political journalists may want to tell more stories about how and when people change their minds. Rather than seeing endless panels on TV, with people expressing their strong opinions on some political development or another, what about having people talking about how their opinions changed?
Polarized politics are definitely entertaining, but the grey, nuanced territory between two political sides actually may be more interesting. sdelacourt@bell.net
It’s a divisive case, but an experiment shows people can be persuaded to alter their positions