This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

So how did you spend YOUR weekend?

I decided it would be interesting to watch how the different cable news outlets — CNN, FOX, MSNBC, i.e. "the usual suspects" — covered the weekend's events. I spent the morning channel surfing like a boss.

Here's what I saw on CNN and MSNBC — crowds of women (and men, too) in the nation's capital, wearing pink hats and holding up signs that touched on subjects ranging from women's rights to civil rights to immigration to concerns about health care and the environment.

The crowds weren't limited to D.C., however. There were shots of people marching all over the USA — in cities like Chicago and New York, Denver and Los Angeles, Boston and Philadelphia. There were also images of marchers streaming in from around the world — in places like France and Germany, Mexico and South Africa and Australia. Later in the day I read about gatherings closer to home — in Park City, for example, and St. George, too.

When I flipped the channel to FOX, I watched images of Donald Trump looking busy on his first day in office. I did see one brief segment about the Women's Marches before I left for work at noon. But that was it. Which leads me to believe it's possible that a casual viewer of FOX last Saturday morning would have never known that millions of people around the globe were wearing pink hats. Similarly, a casual viewer of CNN might not realize Donald Trump actually showed up to work.

OK. You can make the case that each network was pushing its own agenda. Of course they were! And, depending on a viewer's agenda, she or he is going to naturally choose one network's take over the other. In the interest of full disclosure, I was way more interested in watching the women's marches than I was in watching Donald Trump signing documents while wearing an expensive suit. The sight of so many grandmothers, mothers, mothers-in-law, wives, aunts, nieces, sisters, best friends, daughters-in-law and daughters together around the world gave my own female heart a boost.

But that's not the point.

The point is this: Saturday's cable lineup speaks to the fact that as consumers of news these days, Americans inhabit vastly different realities.

It was not always thus. I am old enough to remember when pretty much everybody in America watched Walter Cronkite, who ended his broadcasts with the tagline, "And that's the way it is."

In retrospect, of course, that wasn't the only way it was. Americans have always inhabited separate worlds — sometimes as foreign to one another as different countries. There was clearly more to a story than we saw in Cronkite's evening broadcasts.

But here's the thing: We were looking at the same images. And while we may have formed different opinions about those images, we were at least talking about the same things. We shared a common platform for discussions, which (by the way) weren't always civil. Not by a long shot. I came of age while Richard Nixon was president, for example. Need I say more? Furthermore, I am not one of those people who thinks everything was better in the past.

(Except, of course, when it comes to cars, which required actual keys to start them.)

Having multiple news sources that emphasize different issues or frame the same issues differently isn't inherently a bad thing. But it IS in everyone's best interest, I think, to read and view widely and to step away from the comfort and false security of one's own echo chamber.

Ann Cannon can be reached at acannon@sltrib.com or facebook.com/anncannontrib.