I want to make a distinction between headlines and articles. Headlines can be more misleading than the articles; unfortunately, many will only read the headlines. Some years ago, the Washington Post had the headline “Trump applauds the Nazi takeover of Poland” It was the anniversary of this event. The article had a video of a reporter asking Trump what he thought of the Nazi invasion of Poland on this anniversary date. Trump ( who I doubt even knew about this fact of history) said something along the lines of “Polish people. I like them. Lots of them voted for me.” That was about it.
Yes very good point. And I think journalists, knowing that many people don't read past headlines, take advantage of their potential to be extremely misleading.
Another issue in politics, and a reason why I think Trump is so valuable (though the net risk is....risky! But then, this is true (but invisible, so *not true*) of all politicians): on one hand, people will point out that Trump is a compulsive liar, and often engages in deception. But then on the other hand, they will often criticize specific things he said *as if he is necessarily speaking truthfully*.
Which cognitive path is chosen is typically that which the mind of the speaker finds most pleasing. The mind tends to seek pleasure any way it can find it, and in so doing tends to disable the functionality that may (or may not) exist to detect the phenomenon. On top of it: our culture teaches us to think this way (as just one example: *journalism*).
Trump is a huge opportunity for humanity, but we will piss it away like most other opportunities.
"[O]bjective media should not just inform audiences about how things are. It should lead audiences to form accurate beliefs about things that in some sense really “matter”, and those beliefs should not be weirdly focused on certain segments of reality in ways that obscure a more balanced picture of things."
As you know, there's a growing literature in social epistemology on the role of salience and attention in knowledge and belief, and related bias or prejudice (Ella Whiteley, Jessie Munton). It would be great to see a future post devoted to that topic. One recurrent theme is the fragile balance between properly emphasizing what is important or relevant, and not placing too much weight on what one personally deems "important" or "relevant." In that sense it's not only a question of true vs false or more vs less bias - or even the motivated reasoning at work - but what (and how) we notice, and what gets left out.
One other quick thought is that it can be tempting to focus only on supply side (media, sources of info), or demand side (person interpreting the information and updating beliefs). When in reality it takes two to party. I could imagine problems arising either from the source and recipient not being well-aligned (information gets distorted, misinterpreted or ignored), or from them being *too* well-aligned such that they mutually reinforce and amplify any bias.
Both good points. I know Munton's stuff on salience structures well, and I think you're right that supply-side and demand-side forces must interact in complex ways to produce biased media.
> "[O]bjective media should not just inform audiences about how things are. It should lead audiences to form accurate beliefs about things that in some sense really “matter”, and those beliefs should not be weirdly focused on certain segments of reality in ways that obscure a more balanced picture of things."
Assuming a perfect media outlet: to what degree is the general public even capable? Rarely considered: the quality and curriculum of our base education.
Speaking of epistemology: in the age of endless calls (when it's convenient, at least) for "we need more critical thinking", why do none of the highly skilled people running our "democracy" ("It's the best! And that's why it is *our most sacred institution*....as seen on TV, radio, internet, movies, etc) ever suggest it be added to standard K-12 curriculum?
I think one missing explanation for why the media rarely makes things up is because it’s sometimes illegal. Alex Jones specifically got sued for making things up about the school shooting in Newton and lost (he lost because his lawyers were incompetent but he probably would have lost anyway). Jones also tried the legal defense that he was only playing a character and his audience gets that, which to me doesn’t sound like poor but well-intentioned epistemics. Choosing to focus on Alex Jones instead of something like Breitbart hurt Alexanders original post, in my opinion, even though I agree with the general point. This reads like a more thought through version of it.
Yes very good point. I really should have mentioned the legal point. It's an interesting question how much additional force that exerts over and above ordinary reputational ones - I think you're right that it's a big one.
It’s In America the education system is acutely extractive for example, ruinously so to many students who become debt slaves.
Our country and elites are an extraction of wealth machine, the media are there per George Bernays to shape public opinion , and the media will do what they are hired to do or be fired. They are fired and canceled daily, surprisingly this isn’t covered here….
The media has no tenure and hawk their masters wares, or go hungry…
What has happened in this article is to confuse and conflate a replication crisis - bad lying- with acceptable and understandable even approved mendacity such as occurs in sales or sexual pickup lines. This is rather like a gynecologist trying to and failing to seduce a patient and claiming he was just taking it in a different direction. People don’t like being lied to, as far as the similarities between media lying and the replication crisis- yes… in both cases before people didn’t notice, now it seems they do.
Is culture not a beautiful thing....so invisible, and so insidious. Makes leading the public around by their noses as easy as taking candy from babies. And once the memes are firmly planted into people's minds, getting them out is nearly impossible.
Science isn't the only modern ideology that stole from religion's strategy book!
Despite your protestation, your case is post-modernist.
(a) You posit that no one is objective.
(b) You argue that selection mechanisms in media markets do not (and cannot) mimic or reasonably approximate objectivity, i.e., yield accuracy plus no major sins of omission.
(a) + (b) is post-modernist, no?
Maybe you mean something different by "post-modernist," a term of art.
PS: Please spare readers broadside denigration of people you dislike. We come here for your fresh, thoughtful analyses of social-science issues, not bien-pensant bona fides.
It depends what's meant by postmodernist. I don't think it's relativist but yes, it does suggest that bias and subjectivity are unavoidable. And fair point about avoiding denigrating people - in general I try to but will try harder.
> PS: Please spare readers broadside denigration of people you dislike. We come here for your fresh, thoughtful analyses of social-science issues, not bien-pensant bona fides.
Oh come on, let your hair down and have a little fun!
The media doesn't need to make things up in order to tell its tendentious story. It just needs to pick out from the events minestrone which bits it 'likes' and which bits it suits the Narrative to leave untouched.....which murders matter and which ones don't etc etc.
The science of misinformation may not be perfect, but there are certainly best practices for evaluating information (mis- or otherwise). And it seems we could classify things by their adoption of those practices, right?
It's a good question - I agree there are these best practices, although I think there's still ultimately no way of escaping a heavy dose of subjectivity that influences assessments of media bias.
I guess sometimes I feel like the free speech crowd (I don't mean that disparagingly, it's a pretty good crowd to be in, But it is a crowd with its own bias) focuses too much on what we can't do about misinformation.
So, two issues with this that don't seem to get addressed.
(1) It's true that all media lies, in the sense of editorializing, etc. It's not true, however, that all media holds itself out as officialdom or unbiased or "the 4th Estate." That's the lie. If they were lawyers writing an opposing brief, lie-but-don't-lie is part of the job description . . . but these folks claim to be something other than lawyers engaged in an adversarial process. They say, "we're special and better and truthier." The most prestigious offenders are far worse than say, Jacobin or Daily Caller, both of which wear their priors on their sleeves. The NYT etc has the priors, but they just lie and say they don't. It's like all financial advisers have conflicts of interest, which is why you disclose them, and let clients decide. It's only fraud if you say "not us, no conflicts here."
That brings me to (2): technically true statements with omissions intended to mislead are legally false statements in the context of fraud. That isn't to say the media ought to be covered by Section 20 or sued for fraud, but it is to say that the media (and everyone else) does understand that being technically correct, while nonetheless intending to mislead your audience via omission or artful pleading, is still a "false statement." They get why it's wrong. If the goal is to give the reader an impression that is the opposite of what the "facts" would otherwise show (through editorial sleight of hand), it's still lying by a standard that the NYT etc. upholds in every other context, except with respect to its own newsroom.
To bring it all home, if "the media" just wants to cop to their role as varying degrees of zealous advocates, then no harm, no foul. Where it's problematic is when they claim to be something other than that--and demand special treatment and status as a result--that's a lie, and some offenders are surely worse than others.
How do you synthesize the fact that orthodoxy is one of the strongest drivers yet folks like DeBoer are zealous fantasists some of whose points are excellent and need zealous advocates?
In general I agree with your points, there's no objective baseline by which to judge what the coverage should be, so the meta-debate about whether any particular thing is skewed ends up being another instance of democratic debate in general. But one thought I have going in the other direction is that the replication crisis in psychology has led to things like funnel plots that let people infer that there are biases in certain areas of published research without needing to know what an authoritative "true result" should have been. I think that's similar to what happens when people notice a valence to the corrections needed in particular news stories -- you would think that honest mistakes would be randomly distributed, so if the set of mistakes on a particular story were systematically leaning in one direction then that's a plausible signal there was bias in the original story. So even if there's no way to access an outside view, it may not be a completely intractable problem to try to get better views even though things are mediated through multiple layers.
Hmm that's a good point. I didn't go into it in this essay because it was already too long, but there is an empirical literature that tries to explores media bias more objectively by developing methods to overcome subjectivity. I think it is valuable but limited. I'm not familiar with any work using this kind of method you suggest, though. I think it could be very valuable and illuminating.
Sir had COVID, Russiagate, WMD, Wag the Dog coming to life in the Balkans, the Spanish American war and many other episodes not happened, and if the media were doing actual research as opposed what THEY DO, DO, this would perhaps have some utility.
As it happens and as it has happened since the Assyrians began to impress Akkadian cuneiform on clay science and basic research are absolutely NOT what happened. What happens is what happens in every advertisement and political campaign and car sales pitch in human history.
What has happened in this article is to confuse and conflate a replication crisis - bad lying- with acceptable and understandable even approved mendacity such as occurs in sales or sexual pickup lines. This is rather like a gynecologist trying to and failing to seduce a patient and claiming he was just taking it in a different direction. People don’t like being lied to, as far as the similarities between media lying and the replication crisis- yes… in both cases before people didn’t notice, now it seems they do.
There may be some crossover with the replication crisis:
The crisis is people are saying aloud we’re being lied to, as opposed nodding politely.
There is a large quantity of non-visible flaws in this analysis.
“Even if I'm alone with one other person, culture is the third guest at the table.” - Terence McKenna
To be clear, so this doesn't come off as mean: one part of the meaning contained within Terence's quote is that *it isn't possible* for people to do better....if one is unaware that culture is a crucially important component of reality (or, layer of the cognitive stack, which is where reality originates), *of course* they won't notice anything...it is analogous to how we don't notice that we don't see the entire spectrum of light (but other forms of life do, while being oblivious to our experience), don't notice breathing, etc.
I propose that this is a crucially important component of why it is so, so easy to keep this corrupt, illusory system running, with essentially no oversight or competition. And if anyone has the intuition that this is "no big deal, conspiratorial thinking", etc - consider how many lives have been lost in the various wars in the last year, both the famous wars and not so famous.
"In deciding what to report on and how to report on it, journalists draw on worldviews and values that are just as partial, fallible, and biased as those of the audiences they seek to inform. Given this, even if journalists were exclusively concerned with informing audiences of important facts, there is no reason to expect them to be particularly successful in this task."
Note the "just as". Most reporters are specialists, and if there is any such thing as facts, they are much more likely to understand them in the area they are reporting on than their audience. This extends to the worldview and values that are relevant for understanding their domain. He is very much making a biased, new media worldview claim: Having a background in traditional journalism is meaningless. We might as well just go whole hog and say that we should never trust any experts about anything, cuz I'm just as smart as those fuckers, and I trust my motives :)
I want to make a distinction between headlines and articles. Headlines can be more misleading than the articles; unfortunately, many will only read the headlines. Some years ago, the Washington Post had the headline “Trump applauds the Nazi takeover of Poland” It was the anniversary of this event. The article had a video of a reporter asking Trump what he thought of the Nazi invasion of Poland on this anniversary date. Trump ( who I doubt even knew about this fact of history) said something along the lines of “Polish people. I like them. Lots of them voted for me.” That was about it.
Yes very good point. And I think journalists, knowing that many people don't read past headlines, take advantage of their potential to be extremely misleading.
Another issue in politics, and a reason why I think Trump is so valuable (though the net risk is....risky! But then, this is true (but invisible, so *not true*) of all politicians): on one hand, people will point out that Trump is a compulsive liar, and often engages in deception. But then on the other hand, they will often criticize specific things he said *as if he is necessarily speaking truthfully*.
Which cognitive path is chosen is typically that which the mind of the speaker finds most pleasing. The mind tends to seek pleasure any way it can find it, and in so doing tends to disable the functionality that may (or may not) exist to detect the phenomenon. On top of it: our culture teaches us to think this way (as just one example: *journalism*).
Trump is a huge opportunity for humanity, but we will piss it away like most other opportunities.
"[O]bjective media should not just inform audiences about how things are. It should lead audiences to form accurate beliefs about things that in some sense really “matter”, and those beliefs should not be weirdly focused on certain segments of reality in ways that obscure a more balanced picture of things."
As you know, there's a growing literature in social epistemology on the role of salience and attention in knowledge and belief, and related bias or prejudice (Ella Whiteley, Jessie Munton). It would be great to see a future post devoted to that topic. One recurrent theme is the fragile balance between properly emphasizing what is important or relevant, and not placing too much weight on what one personally deems "important" or "relevant." In that sense it's not only a question of true vs false or more vs less bias - or even the motivated reasoning at work - but what (and how) we notice, and what gets left out.
One other quick thought is that it can be tempting to focus only on supply side (media, sources of info), or demand side (person interpreting the information and updating beliefs). When in reality it takes two to party. I could imagine problems arising either from the source and recipient not being well-aligned (information gets distorted, misinterpreted or ignored), or from them being *too* well-aligned such that they mutually reinforce and amplify any bias.
Both good points. I know Munton's stuff on salience structures well, and I think you're right that supply-side and demand-side forces must interact in complex ways to produce biased media.
> "[O]bjective media should not just inform audiences about how things are. It should lead audiences to form accurate beliefs about things that in some sense really “matter”, and those beliefs should not be weirdly focused on certain segments of reality in ways that obscure a more balanced picture of things."
Assuming a perfect media outlet: to what degree is the general public even capable? Rarely considered: the quality and curriculum of our base education.
Speaking of epistemology: in the age of endless calls (when it's convenient, at least) for "we need more critical thinking", why do none of the highly skilled people running our "democracy" ("It's the best! And that's why it is *our most sacred institution*....as seen on TV, radio, internet, movies, etc) ever suggest it be added to standard K-12 curriculum?
I think one missing explanation for why the media rarely makes things up is because it’s sometimes illegal. Alex Jones specifically got sued for making things up about the school shooting in Newton and lost (he lost because his lawyers were incompetent but he probably would have lost anyway). Jones also tried the legal defense that he was only playing a character and his audience gets that, which to me doesn’t sound like poor but well-intentioned epistemics. Choosing to focus on Alex Jones instead of something like Breitbart hurt Alexanders original post, in my opinion, even though I agree with the general point. This reads like a more thought through version of it.
Yes very good point. I really should have mentioned the legal point. It's an interesting question how much additional force that exerts over and above ordinary reputational ones - I think you're right that it's a big one.
Assuming the legal system (or any component of this complex machine we exist within) is without major bias in this regard may not be optimal gameplay.
You may be confusing academia- and a rather idealized academy at that - with the media.
The news media are usually businesses that reflect the interests and beliefs of the editors and owners.
The key part is interest, interest drives all.
Dylan Ratigan covers this nicely, just before he retired. An integrated system of extraction in every arena of life.
https://youtu.be/9l7oj-rPGjM?si=Iv8JmYX_kp_Kb4Tl
It’s In America the education system is acutely extractive for example, ruinously so to many students who become debt slaves.
Our country and elites are an extraction of wealth machine, the media are there per George Bernays to shape public opinion , and the media will do what they are hired to do or be fired. They are fired and canceled daily, surprisingly this isn’t covered here….
The media has no tenure and hawk their masters wares, or go hungry…
> surprisingly this isn’t covered here….
New to Planet Earth?
What has happened in this article is to confuse and conflate a replication crisis - bad lying- with acceptable and understandable even approved mendacity such as occurs in sales or sexual pickup lines. This is rather like a gynecologist trying to and failing to seduce a patient and claiming he was just taking it in a different direction. People don’t like being lied to, as far as the similarities between media lying and the replication crisis- yes… in both cases before people didn’t notice, now it seems they do.
Is culture not a beautiful thing....so invisible, and so insidious. Makes leading the public around by their noses as easy as taking candy from babies. And once the memes are firmly planted into people's minds, getting them out is nearly impossible.
Science isn't the only modern ideology that stole from religion's strategy book!
Religion can appeal to the Great Inquisitor with vindication now.
Yes for all their faults.
What can “culture” say?
Culture can say all sorts of crazy things! Take for example this very popular meme:
"Rules-based international order!"
or
"Democracy is *our most sacred institution!" (remember when this got very heavy air play after the "coup" on Jan 6 lol?).
This place is a laugh riot if you ask me.
It is.
Despite your protestation, your case is post-modernist.
(a) You posit that no one is objective.
(b) You argue that selection mechanisms in media markets do not (and cannot) mimic or reasonably approximate objectivity, i.e., yield accuracy plus no major sins of omission.
(a) + (b) is post-modernist, no?
Maybe you mean something different by "post-modernist," a term of art.
PS: Please spare readers broadside denigration of people you dislike. We come here for your fresh, thoughtful analyses of social-science issues, not bien-pensant bona fides.
It depends what's meant by postmodernist. I don't think it's relativist but yes, it does suggest that bias and subjectivity are unavoidable. And fair point about avoiding denigrating people - in general I try to but will try harder.
> (a) + (b) is post-modernist, no?
No.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/
Possibly related:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/psychology-normative-cognition/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/
> PS: Please spare readers broadside denigration of people you dislike. We come here for your fresh, thoughtful analyses of social-science issues, not bien-pensant bona fides.
Oh come on, let your hair down and have a little fun!
The media doesn't need to make things up in order to tell its tendentious story. It just needs to pick out from the events minestrone which bits it 'likes' and which bits it suits the Narrative to leave untouched.....which murders matter and which ones don't etc etc.
Dan
Always enjoy your work.
This essay recalls the Proverb -
“Buy truth and never sell it,
Also wisdom and discipline and understanding.’’
Solomon knows we can ‘sell’ truth for some benefit, emotional, social , etc..
And desire to ‘sell’ wise decisions, mental discipline, or deep understanding can provide benefits that seem better than the alternative.
Written thousands of years ago.
Still insightful.
Thanks
Clay
That's great - thanks for sharing Clay
The science of misinformation may not be perfect, but there are certainly best practices for evaluating information (mis- or otherwise). And it seems we could classify things by their adoption of those practices, right?
It's a good question - I agree there are these best practices, although I think there's still ultimately no way of escaping a heavy dose of subjectivity that influences assessments of media bias.
I guess sometimes I feel like the free speech crowd (I don't mean that disparagingly, it's a pretty good crowd to be in, But it is a crowd with its own bias) focuses too much on what we can't do about misinformation.
Fair point - I agree that's a bias, and probably one I'm guilty of
So, two issues with this that don't seem to get addressed.
(1) It's true that all media lies, in the sense of editorializing, etc. It's not true, however, that all media holds itself out as officialdom or unbiased or "the 4th Estate." That's the lie. If they were lawyers writing an opposing brief, lie-but-don't-lie is part of the job description . . . but these folks claim to be something other than lawyers engaged in an adversarial process. They say, "we're special and better and truthier." The most prestigious offenders are far worse than say, Jacobin or Daily Caller, both of which wear their priors on their sleeves. The NYT etc has the priors, but they just lie and say they don't. It's like all financial advisers have conflicts of interest, which is why you disclose them, and let clients decide. It's only fraud if you say "not us, no conflicts here."
That brings me to (2): technically true statements with omissions intended to mislead are legally false statements in the context of fraud. That isn't to say the media ought to be covered by Section 20 or sued for fraud, but it is to say that the media (and everyone else) does understand that being technically correct, while nonetheless intending to mislead your audience via omission or artful pleading, is still a "false statement." They get why it's wrong. If the goal is to give the reader an impression that is the opposite of what the "facts" would otherwise show (through editorial sleight of hand), it's still lying by a standard that the NYT etc. upholds in every other context, except with respect to its own newsroom.
To bring it all home, if "the media" just wants to cop to their role as varying degrees of zealous advocates, then no harm, no foul. Where it's problematic is when they claim to be something other than that--and demand special treatment and status as a result--that's a lie, and some offenders are surely worse than others.
Also found you through this essay. Def recommend 😁
How do you synthesize the fact that orthodoxy is one of the strongest drivers yet folks like DeBoer are zealous fantasists some of whose points are excellent and need zealous advocates?
Hmm good question
Consciousness + culture.
In general I agree with your points, there's no objective baseline by which to judge what the coverage should be, so the meta-debate about whether any particular thing is skewed ends up being another instance of democratic debate in general. But one thought I have going in the other direction is that the replication crisis in psychology has led to things like funnel plots that let people infer that there are biases in certain areas of published research without needing to know what an authoritative "true result" should have been. I think that's similar to what happens when people notice a valence to the corrections needed in particular news stories -- you would think that honest mistakes would be randomly distributed, so if the set of mistakes on a particular story were systematically leaning in one direction then that's a plausible signal there was bias in the original story. So even if there's no way to access an outside view, it may not be a completely intractable problem to try to get better views even though things are mediated through multiple layers.
Hmm that's a good point. I didn't go into it in this essay because it was already too long, but there is an empirical literature that tries to explores media bias more objectively by developing methods to overcome subjectivity. I think it is valuable but limited. I'm not familiar with any work using this kind of method you suggest, though. I think it could be very valuable and illuminating.
Sir had COVID, Russiagate, WMD, Wag the Dog coming to life in the Balkans, the Spanish American war and many other episodes not happened, and if the media were doing actual research as opposed what THEY DO, DO, this would perhaps have some utility.
As it happens and as it has happened since the Assyrians began to impress Akkadian cuneiform on clay science and basic research are absolutely NOT what happened. What happens is what happens in every advertisement and political campaign and car sales pitch in human history.
What has happened in this article is to confuse and conflate a replication crisis - bad lying- with acceptable and understandable even approved mendacity such as occurs in sales or sexual pickup lines. This is rather like a gynecologist trying to and failing to seduce a patient and claiming he was just taking it in a different direction. People don’t like being lied to, as far as the similarities between media lying and the replication crisis- yes… in both cases before people didn’t notice, now it seems they do.
There may be some crossover with the replication crisis:
The crisis is people are saying aloud we’re being lied to, as opposed nodding politely.
> In general I agree with your points, there's no objective baseline by which to judge what the coverage should be...
This is analogous to how there were no airplanes (or pretty much anything else) until someone decided to invent one.
There is a large quantity of non-visible flaws in this analysis.
“Even if I'm alone with one other person, culture is the third guest at the table.” - Terence McKenna
To be clear, so this doesn't come off as mean: one part of the meaning contained within Terence's quote is that *it isn't possible* for people to do better....if one is unaware that culture is a crucially important component of reality (or, layer of the cognitive stack, which is where reality originates), *of course* they won't notice anything...it is analogous to how we don't notice that we don't see the entire spectrum of light (but other forms of life do, while being oblivious to our experience), don't notice breathing, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze
I propose that this is a crucially important component of why it is so, so easy to keep this corrupt, illusory system running, with essentially no oversight or competition. And if anyone has the intuition that this is "no big deal, conspiratorial thinking", etc - consider how many lives have been lost in the various wars in the last year, both the famous wars and not so famous.
"In deciding what to report on and how to report on it, journalists draw on worldviews and values that are just as partial, fallible, and biased as those of the audiences they seek to inform. Given this, even if journalists were exclusively concerned with informing audiences of important facts, there is no reason to expect them to be particularly successful in this task."
Note the "just as". Most reporters are specialists, and if there is any such thing as facts, they are much more likely to understand them in the area they are reporting on than their audience. This extends to the worldview and values that are relevant for understanding their domain. He is very much making a biased, new media worldview claim: Having a background in traditional journalism is meaningless. We might as well just go whole hog and say that we should never trust any experts about anything, cuz I'm just as smart as those fuckers, and I trust my motives :)