In yet another election postmortem, the New York Times team tried a novel idea -- a street-level view of the thoughts and fears that drove Red and Blue America. The simple goal was to report what ordinary people said.
Or at least readers got to hear what the Times people heard. Some of the 2,600-word piece reveals a viewpoint as skewed as some of those it reports.
The article is broken into segments, each by a different writer, and they vary widely in tone and balance. Some are genuinely sensitive.
There's an almost palpable anguish in Julie Turkewitz' section, on how many people isolate themselves from those who differ with their worldviews:
In some ways, the echo chamber was the winner of this election. Here we are, deeply connected. And yet red America is typing away to red America, and blue America is typing away to blue America. The day after the election, some people said the echo chamber had begun to feel like a prison.
Turkewitz notes that one of her two main sources truly wants to escape her bubble. The woman, who voted for Hillary Clinton for president, has only two or three friends -- both on Facebook -- who supported Trump. The other woman, a fellow Clinton supporter, seems happy to stay in her echo chamber.
Religion is seeded throughout the article, but only one section deals directly with it. Times veteran Laurie Goodstein draws from interviews on the Godbeat this year.
She sounds sympathetic to people on the Right, at first:
