Nothing wrong with reading biased news sources. I think the difference is one should read sources that: 1) are upfront with their bias and 2) argue from a more neutral perspective.
You’ll learn something reading a liberal or conservative argue why their position is correct versus then other side. You can usually distinguish these article because they fairly state the other side’s position.
You won’t learn much reading something whose basic premise is “of course our side is right, let me tell you about all the bad things the other side is up to”.
It's not just how biased they are, I'm having issues with how little they're about news and how much about pure clickbait. I used to think up until recently, that CNN was a legitimate (left leaning) news source but it's all "watch this person react to that person saying something" and amazon product recommendations for stuff no one needs.
It has been going on for a while. Many of them have gone to the hot take reaction style opinion pieces. CNN copied the Fox 'formula' to try to get ratings. The 3 panel yell at each other format with maybe some news possibly scrolling at the bottom. It is not news. It is opinions presented as 'facts' when they are usually curated opinions to hit market share. The stuff before about 2010 was better disguised but it was still very similar to what you observe. Little news, lots of opinions. After that point I think they just stopped bothering to disguise it much.
It is kind of 'interesting' to watch but you are not going to get much out of it. I cut a bunch of that sort of 'news' out of my life. It was not giving me news but curated opinions to have. I found my stress levels were so much nicer.
TBH I am over political news and over biased sites on both spectrums. Too much information and too much making hay. Soo much of it isn't news - and it hamstrings any politicians able to talk to the other side when they report on the minutiae.
I sometimes think American politics has been reduced to a census ... whether people claim blue or red are strongly correlated to income, age, urban/rural and other factors.
Political divides are pretty demographic in most places (in particular, urban vs rural is a big one). It does seem particularly extreme in the US, but that may be partially down to the two party system, which encourages tribalism.
In Ireland, say, there's a pretty sharp divide on the issues (Dublin was Yes+50 in the same-sex marriage referendum, most rural constituencies were more like Yes+5-10; similar though not quite as extreme split on the abortion referendum), but there isn't even remotely as large a divide on the _parties_.
I identify pretty closely with one side. But certainly there are Outrage Machines on both sides, a network of media and personalities hyping up the latest calumny that the other side committed, for views and clicks. These machines can't slow down -- even if the other side has been quiet lately, all those people need something to do and talk about. They'll find something.
One thing a lot of people miss is that there is a profit motive here. You can make money, sometimes a lot of money, by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. You can find examples of people doing this on all sides, especially at the extremes where outrage and other powerful negative emotions can most easily be stirred up.
All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorship. Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. What the outrage is about is money. While you can still speak elsewhere or on your own web site, being kicked off the majors makes it hard to monetize that speech.
Deplatforming really knocked the wind out of a burgeoning outrage-for-profit industry that had some influencers making millions by being controversy and outrage trolls on social media.
No need for the hypothetical — that happens regularly, and people on the left criticize them for it. They just don't often describe it as "censorship".
Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
It happens in a token way in infrequent and extreme circumstances. But there's nothing even remotely comparable to the fact that Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter, that numerous internet powers worked together to shut down Parler, that the NY Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, etc.
the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery
Popularity despite censorship just goes to show how the operators of Facebook are in a different narrative bubble than a sizable portion of their users. The notion that Ben Shapiro is far-right is just demagoguery of your own. Shapiro is a pretty benign and centrist-sympathetic conservative.
I couldn't fully see what was posted in the article since it was wanting me to sign in or something, but I will assume that it was showing Fox had a larger market share than the alternatives.
The reason why is NBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc are far more in competition with each other than Fox is with them. There are no major right of center competitors to Fox. This results in most right of center tv news watchers going with Fox. If there was only one left of center news channel Fox would closer to even with it.
Not really. Like a recent cancel attempt was Scott Cawthon, creator of the game series Five Nights at Freddy's. His crime? Voting for trump.
No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked.
I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought.
You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever.
You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.
> But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so
The LGBT community was [1] and still are violently attacked for the mere act of existing. The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane.
Voting is a political act which affects others. If someone votes for a politician who gives cover and support to a group which - as an example - believes atheists are unfit to have the right to vote - then they are voting to strip the right to vote from me and I do not and will not support them or their personal enterprises.
Homosexual behavior was branded disorderly conduct and liquor licenses were revoked as a consequence. So yes, it was effectively illegal if you didn’t bribe the cops. People were arrested because the police didn’t consider their genitals to match their clothes.
Drug deals and transactions for sex occurred at Stonewall just as they have occurred on Discord, but I’ve not seen any credible evidence that it was a primary function of the place.
It seems somewhat a habit of yours to find something bad about victims and then use that to dismiss any wrong done to them. Someone subjected to police abuse? Oh they had a criminal record, so it’s ok. Indigenous people being tortured, enslaved and slaughtered by Spain? Oh, it’s ok because some of them practiced human sacrifice. There’s no going the extra step and recognizing Spain was in the middle of the Inquisition and creating their own murderous horror, or that the Spanish allied with the Aztecs to eliminate groups that didn’t have human sacrifice, or that the Spanish cruelty was applied to the people in the Caribbean as sport from Columbus. It reads like intellectual laziness.
> Spanish allied with the Aztecs to eliminate groups that didn’t have human sacrifice
As far as I can recall the Spanish did not ally with the Aztecs but conquered the leading faction of the Aztecs through an alliance with rival factions and effects of smallpox.
> The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane.
Yes, that is insane, but I don't think the person you're replying to or the FNAF guy believe that. It sounds like Mr. FNAF might actually be opposed to Trump to some extent on LGBT issues. However, he feels more strongly about other things (USA-China relations, abortion), and he, like all of us, only gets two choices. So he chose the mix of good and bad stuff that he thought was better than the other mix of good and bad stuff. I disagree with him so I voted the other way, but I'm not going to hold him accountable for everything Trump says or does, and I hope I am not held accountable for everything Biden says or does.
Presidents cause unnecessary death and suffering without exception. That's not to say that "everything's a gray area so nothing matters", rather it means that you can't just take one issue and be like "I can't imagine how you would vote for somebody who believes this". Maybe the other option was somebody who is ~3% more likely to start a bad war, for example. Or 3% more likely to lose an inevitable war. I might take a bible-thumping evangelical with a slightly higher chance of winning WWII over somebody with exactly my ethics in office with less strategic acumen. It depends on the actual degree of difference. I'd have to assign weights to things and sum them up, because it's democracy and that's what you do.
Reading about Trump on this, he seems to flipflop more than be hateful or anything; in one breath he supports same sex marriage, in another he restricts certain federal aspects like gender dysphoric individuals being allowed in the military. The actual content of what he did for LGBT seems to be a minor negative mostly surrounding limiting federal power over employment; he refused to put up any fight against same sex marriage and there's a lot of "well it could LEAD to this" going on.
I don't think this is a cancellable offense. I think if you are going to sanction someone for voting, it has to be real and clear danger of present harm, not "they are republicans, you know they hate us."
Like, if that's the case, why not just sanction everyone who voted for him?
> in one breath he supports same sex marriage, in another he restricts certain federal aspects like gender dysphoric individuals being allowed in the military
These are incredibly different issues. For me personally, given that we ought to only have a small peace time army and we currently have lots of volunteers I support only accepting the strongest, buffets, most agile soldiers which 99/100 times will be a mostly male force.
When we have a war, then we can talk about adding more people, but fighting a war or being in the army is not a right and frankly the army is too big.
Now whether those men are homosexual or not is immaterial, but trans soldiers would require higher costs and more lifetime healthcare costs.
It's irrelevant whether this is a Trump thing, a Biden thing or a Bernie Sanders thing. Politics effects people's lives. This attitude that you can vote for candidates or policies which would destroy other people's lives and not be criticized is some entitled privilege.
Being "cancelled" isn't some autonomous process, it's not a button that gets pushed it's people reading about an issue and making a personal decision they're entitled to make. What I do with my free time and money, and who I choose to support is my decision to make. Not yours.
Regardless of one’s personal beliefs, it’s indisputable that President Trump is the single most polarizing figure in American politics at the moment. He is radioactive for a large proportion of our fellow citizens.
Ballots are secret in the Unites States. Therefore this person must have vocally supported Trump. Therefore you are being misleading about what incited his former fans.
yeah, well he gave money to him rather. My mistake. About the same difference imo, contributions are limited to the point that at best you can say its a vote +1.
My point remains. You are deliberately minimizing his support for Trump, his support for other anti-gay politicians and his political statements to make it seem like people were against him over his quiet political preferences. If you try to influence politics and use your platform/money to do so then you absolutely should expect some sort of response, if only from your partisan opposition.
But what exactly is this "cancel" attempt? Is he legally prohibited from expressing his views somewhere? It seems more like his former fans deciding they don't want to support him and "voting with their feet".
This guy can still produce whatever games he wants, say whatever he wants in a public forum, make his own websites declaring whatever he wants to declare, probably get on TV and talk about it, get licensure to establish a talk radio station and talk about it all day, ... He isn't legally muzzled, and he's hardly reached a point where he has no audience in society. This is the balance of free speech. You are allowed to hold and express an opinion and everyone else is too.
Basically it’s just like calling for a boycott and removal of apps and removal from social media platforms.
It’s not calling for execution, just for reducing the person’s ability to communicate and/or make a living.
This seems like a basic understanding of what “cancelling” is although it gets spun up quite a bit because lots of people like arguing about it.
But I think it’s a “bad thing” TM to call for boycott and removal from social media. Not that it’s illegal or shouldn’t be allowed, just that it’s dumb and people who do it are dumb.
Similar to how Tipper Gore was dumb in the 80s/90s for calling for the “cancelling” of rappers and whatnot.
Trump’s positions included his belief that people should be able to be fired solely for being LGBT+. You know, like cancelled.
So, people who are or care about LGBT+ share the information that Cawthon voted in a way that could harm them. That’s not ‘siccing a tiger’ for any disagreement whatsoever.
Trump was cancelled by the election, so that makes sense. People vote for lots of reasons so assuming that a voter supports every single issue is simplistic.
Imagine people not being impressed with arguments like “I don’t agree with his attempted oppression of a vulnerable group of citizens, but I sure do like his position on immigration/tariffs/capital gains tax.”
I’m not sure your point as that’s exactly what people do. I have a neighbor who is gay and voted for Trump because of gun rights. People are really diverse and it takes lots of particulars to find out why people do stuff.
It’s not a good idea to “cancel” people based on a single characteristic.
If that characteristic were bad enough (a genocidaire as an extreme example) and your potential survival and wellbeing hinged upon it, I think you'd change your mind about how good of an idea it was.
No, that's really not it. Cawthon contributed thousands of dollars to multiple Republican campaigns in 2020, including some noted hate magnets (e.g. Devin Nunes and Mitch McConnell). This naturally sparked discussion of boycotting his products, some of which was level-headed and some of which wasn't. As has happened countless times for many other vendors and issues across the political spectrum.
Yep. Look at it this way: the same Republicans who whine about cancel culture went ahead and stripped one of their own, Liz Cheney, of her committee positions merely for the crime of daring to oppose Trump. That should tell you all you need to know about their hypocrisy.
Liz Cheney was in party leadership. She was unable to lead since she couldn't stop attacking her own party members. That is no different than firing somebody for failing to do their job which nobody would consider the same thing as canceling.
Trying to end a career of people because they donated to some politician or said some inappropriate years ago (that very often was accepted back then) is completely different.
I think that two things can be true at the same time: there are people piling on rage about “cancel culture” to gain following/money; cancel culture is real and a bad thing.
Similar to how I think that racism is bad and systemic and must be eliminated and there are people who make a good living on raging about stuff. People building on a cause doesnt mean that the cause is bad.
Deplatforming targeted one side of the political tribal war much more than the other, it was not just some politically neutral phenomenon that only targeted grifters.
>Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much.
>cen·sor (sĕn′sər)
>1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and *to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.*
That makes censorship a basically meaningless concept, since any exercise of one's property rights to deny a soap box to anyone now counts as censorship. It makes access to privately owned media an entitlement.
Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state (in the form of bans, fines, arrests, etc.) to suppress speech. There's very little of that in the USA outside certain well known areas like child porn or explicit personal threats of violence.
> Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state
No, it doesn't, it historically means action by any locus of institutional power to control speech (and, before and directly inspiring that, specifically the review by particular officials of the Roman Catholic Church in the process of pre-publication review of material to assure it was free of doctrinal error.)
Have you considered not “identifying”? Just choose your opinions on issues a la carte. Or even don’t have an opinion on a bunch of issues.
I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.
It's challenging to not identify with one "side" when the other side loudly and proudly support policies that directly harm (or would harm) many people you care about. It's natural to band together when under attack, and in fact it's really difficult not to.
It's fine to feel this way while acknowledging that the "other team" has gotten at least one or two issues right.
For example, lots of left-leaning Asian Americans agree that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, which puts them at odds with many of the people they'll likely vote for.
Sure, but I don't see a ton of legislation being passed by Republicans about affirmative action or other areas where there may be some agreement across the political spectrum. I do see dozens of bills being voted on to limit trans rights, to reduce voting access to marginalized groups, to restrict access to reproductive medical care. Their priorities are being shown very clearly by the laws they prioritize. It doesn't help much if we agree on a few things but they have no interest in pursuing policies in those areas of agreement and instead keep focusing on divisive issues over and over and over.
I can totally see that. I think the portrayal of the other side by the media is more of a parody of them than what they actually are.
As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that.
The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.
Laws being passed at the state level that limit trans rights, or restrict access to reproductive medical care, or erect barriers to voting that disproportionately impact people of color are not parody, they are very real and binding.
IMHO, the most inflammatory and dangerous things in our political discourse nowadays are the "we're under an existential attack (by our domestic political opponents)" narratives. Shit stirrers in both camps are enthusiastically engaging in them, and in the short term that keeps their bases enthusiastic and committed, but it leads to a vicious cycle that might actually bring about one of the feared scenarios in the medium/long term. Power play responses to the "existential threat" posed by the other side are likely to themselves be interpreted as "existential threats" by that side.
Deescalation is needed, and that's going to look like compromise that the activists/partisans are going to be really unhappy with.
I went the other way: I started by outright refusing to label or identify myself politically and picking opinions a la carte, and over time most of my opinions on the things I care most about tended to converge on one political ideology, so I've started to generally identify with that ideology as a result. There's notable exceptions, which I do keep in mind, but they tend to be just exceptions.
(Of course, even then it's not simple. There's also party infighting, subparties, etc, so even if my opinion on "what the issue is" lines up, my opinion on "what the solution is" might not.)
Edit: another complication is strength of conviction. For example, standard American left/right dichotomy comes with very strong conviction about guns. I have very very weak conviction about guns. Even though I tend to agree with my ideologies' opinion on what should be done about gun control, I don't really care that much either way whether there's no gun control or super strict gun control. So while I do "identify" as my ideology here, there's clearly a disconnect from the mainstream form of it.
I think the really frustrating thing is that these side issues for some of us (like gun control) take center stage so much and so loudly that we're effectively forced into listening to and arguing about things that are low on our personal considerations.
Speaking personally... I did this until a good friend pointed out that while I identified as independent, I basically agreed with most conservative view points. I come by my views honestly. My typical response goes like this .. I hear about something presented on the local news in a very fact based way. I form an opinion. Then I read others opinions and 9/10 times I match with the conservatives.
I mean sometimes I fit with the far left (for example, mother Jones had a great article on private prisons a while ago), but for the most part I'm a conservative.
Anyway, my friend pointed out it's disingenuous to basically always end up with conservative views and claim to be independent because you want the brownie points. And he's right.
Part of the problem with this is "what is a conservative?". Democrats and Republicans are both economically right wing, pro imperialism, anti workers rights, pro the wealthy. There is no left wing major political party in the united states. The difference between the two parties is on cultural values, cultural progressives vs social conservatives. It is possible to be economically left wing, and socially conservative (roughly 25% of people fall into that group).
Well, I think I'm like most people in that I think one side is okay, but the other is absolutely evil. Definitely don't agree with my side on everything, and they're far from perfect, but I feel I have to support them because the alternative would be a genuine threat to the country.
I don't think that makes sense unless you are particularly apathetic.
Like sure, neither of the major parties in America matches all of my opinions exactly but I still have strong opinions on a number of things, and they tend to align with a particular party.
I imagine this is the position most Americans find themselves in.
I didn't know about https://www.theflipside.io/latest-issue which compares news coverage of left and right leaning sources. Anyone know more sites like that they can recommend?
If you skip the opinion section, reporting from business news operations like Reuters or Bloomberg is basically as objective as it gets while still not being a plain recitation of facts.
I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues:
They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across.
In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not mention the other side or present a very simplified or exaggerated view and provide an opposing viewpoint.
They cover the same thing differently depending on which party is in power. The border crisis is a good example of this.
All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment. Eventually I just gave up and read Politico, Bloomberg and FiveThrityEight now. They seem to be used by pros from both sides and mostly report on what's "happening" rather than provide opinion. I can then form my own opinions.
I used to do what you did(just read a bunch of major publications from differing political orientations) but also found issue with not being able to compare different perspectives easily.
I'm a bit disappointed that outlets like NTY, or Associated Press for cryin out loud, are branded as "Left". Disappointing that actual Left-wing discourse is so outside currently acceptable Overton window.
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things,
This is a big issue. But at the same time - it's not clear to me what the solution when every side is pushing hype rather than news. How do you publish an "opposing take" on something the other side is publishing that isn't real in the first place? It's not ideal to even acknowledge lies.
I do the same thing, and I've noticed that this "they don't present the other side" thing is getting worse with time. I recently read [this HuffPo article][0] about how only 1% of American film characters are identifiably Muslim; however, nowhere in the article does it even mention the share of Americans who are Muslim, nor the share of movie characters that are of other religions. These things are certainly obvious and important points of context, but the article doesn't even broach them.
(According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2])
Worse, this seems to be increasingly prevalent in the academy as well. Indeed, the study cited in the article (from University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative) also doesn't mention these points of context and the paper is pretty overtly propagandist.
"(According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2])"
Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them.
It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
for me, personally, absolutely not. I want thoughtful portrayal of character in media that I consume, but am in no way desiring yet more religious representation.
The parent seems to be suggesting that he doesn't want the emphasis to be on diversity, but rather on quality of characters. This doesn't imply that the characters have to be homogeneous.
Having "diverse" characters does not automatically make a movie more interesting. In fact, if you are relying on demographics (religion, race, sexuality) alone to make a character interesting, there is a very good chance the characters are flat, boring, and lazily written.
Of course having diverse characters does not automatically make a movie more interesting.
But interesting movies can be made about diverse characters as they can about homogeneous characters.
Only depicting homogeneous societies furthers ignorance and demonization of people who are different.
Showing more diversity, in interesting, authentic, and deep ways is one an important way we have of striving towards a society where we better understand and value one another, and get along.
> Only depicting homogeneous societies furthers ignorance and demonization of people who are different.
I think you're arguing against a straw man. It seems pretty clear that no one is arguing for less diversity, but rather against diversity for its own sake or prioritizing it above all other concerns.
I haven’t seen a realistic Hollywood portrayal of an average American family in the last 20 years because the secular corporate culture is so willfully ignorant. This is argued as being a feature of interesting content though since ‘nothing average is interesting’.
It has skewed perception, but whether that matters is up for debate.
>> It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes
Yes and no. First, so much media has fallen down when it comes to character development. Then there's the problem of big companies like Disney that are deliberately secular in their content.
> First, so much media has fallen down when it comes to character development.
That's the handy thing about essentialism, you don't need an individual character when you have pre-packaged narratives about their race, gender, etc. Rather than a complex character, we get a canned Black character or a canned White character or a canned Female character or a canned Male character. What do you need to know about a person that you can't infer from their immutable characteristics? (:
I recently read that the main character in "They Live" had an entire backstory that was never told in the movie. Someone (producer, director, ???) Told Roddy Piper to create a backstory for his character and he did, and he played that part even though it was never shared with anyone. I'd thought about that myself for writing - if you define each character ahead of time and keep their character in mind it will aid writing their parts so they are seamless and self-consistent.
> Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them.
I'm not sure what your point is? That Muslims and Christians should be grateful that the news media talks about them a bit more than the entertainment media? To be clear, I'm not arguing that any particular group should have more representation; I'm criticizing the media for its increasingly propagandist angles.
> It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
In general, yes, but that doesn't justify misleading or agenda-driven news media. And in any case, every time people try to "fix" the entertainment media, we end up with awful content (e.g., the GhostBusters reboot) and frankly I don't want to sacrifice that much quality for sake of representation. My wife and I were just talking about how many really good pre-2015 films wouldn't be made today because they don't thrust the characters' race, gender, etc into the foreground.
My point is that religious people, whether Christian, Muslim, or whatever, have a serious impact on our lives, and it would benefit everyone if we engaged with them as real people rather than fantasy stereotypes.
Fictional media can help with this by giving us insight in to what people are really like. My contention is that this is more desirable than merely leaving them as faceless talking points in the news.
IMO it takes serious anthropological commitment to have a non-idiot understanding of a people. I feel this shouldn't be an individual job. Either your entire community has deep, embedded relations with another community or it doesn't.
Otherwise it's like asking for better sources to read about Chinese culture, or like visiting China once a year for vacation. You can't read your way into being culturally competent. You might even move your entire family to China, but it may only be your children who truly begin the road to integration. Anyone who is part of an immigrant community will have a story of the trajectory of cultural competency. It is an optimism which must be fulfilled by your next generation.
You can, however, follow generic protocols of kindness whilst in ignorance.
The standard here is being barely adequate, not perfect. Anyone who is part of an immigrant community knows how hard it is to be adequate. That's why you pass on this optimism to the next generation while you blindly chase cultural fads, hoping your kids will fit in.
You smile and nod your way through.
Anyways, the call here is for community integration, not for individual action.
Are you integrated into an immigrant community? Are you part of a church that deals with immigration? Or an ethnic business community that is part of the immigration chain? Or is your community well integrated with those you seek to understand?
Why go it alone?
Is one's clarity on community affairs the difference between choosing WION and India Times? Or The World Journal?
The problem is that movies influence what we think the truth is. Is Tokyo like the Godzilla movies? I would hope that everything not obviously related to the fictional attack is realistic to how the people actually live, because like it or not movies influence us.
If your only view of Tokyo is what you get through Godzilla movies then you definitely have a problem.
The solution is better movies on Tokyo, not no movies on Tokyo.
You're in luck, though, because there are plenty of great movies on Tokyo -- movies that even people living in Tokyo find give great insights in to their own society.
Isn't fictional media rather enforcing the stereotypes? And by saying there is a certain way in which media could portray, say, Muslims, are you not implying that there are certain stereotypes that apply? Without stereotypes, how do decide what group certain people belong to?
True, but they're making most of their money from western whiter countries. Which is reflected in their actors/stars. However this is already changing and will get better as the global market continues to expand.
As a non-american, it's not getting better, it's just getting weird. Like this parallel fantasy reality that americans have come up with and convinced themselves that it's what the world outside looks like, that actually has nothing to do with anywhere on earth.
not sure this is correct. We may need to get actual numbers or divide up 'film / media' into different segments..
I recall seeing news about big movies, eg transformers and others where in order to satisfy the global market, ie China, decisions needed to be made.. and given that many of those markets appear to be more racist/anti-muslim, (obv not 100, but majority I believe)
and your comment seems to be suggesting [hope] that things above "will get better as the global market continues to expand." -
I'm not chiming in to say this or that is a good or bad thing, just trying to clarify that some things may make one think catering to broader global markets may not make "western whiter countries" more anti-racist or whatever is being suggested as 'changing and will get better' - if that is the perspective being considered for 'get better'.
There are studies showing "diversity" on movie posters hurt sales abroad - and of course there has been local pushback for whitewashing things for increased sales -
Unless we are talking about gov funded wokeness spreading where making money is not a goal. But I did not get that impression from the thread here.
As a non-american, american media does a terrible job of representing anything outside america, so if that's the reason I would really appreciate if they could stop it...
When they present those percentages does that apply only to Hollywood films, or films world-wide? And do foreign films represent their own populations proportionally, should we and they calculate national proportions or global proportions?
Interestingly Mormons are 2% of the US population (twice the Muslim %), and I can't think of a single openly Mormon character in any TV show I've ever seen.
There have been movies, such as The Other Side of Heaven.
But as a former Mormon myself I think entertainment is more interesting if it focuses on what we have in common despite our differences, rather than focusing solely on amplifying differences.
They have a whole state to themselves and they're pre-dominantly white. Mormons also produce their own media, they're in the middle of making a multi-part Book of Mormon series. They're an insuluar sect much like Jehovah's Witnesses, so they're not _demanding_ mainstream representation on principle, much like the Amish.
Not to say you're not touching on the question of _why_ we're so enthusiastic in media representation for those of the Islamic faith however, but the Mormons are a pretty open and shut case
christianity, islam, hinduism, along with the eastern constellation of buddhism/confucianism are the 4 world religions. people of color are roughly 4/5 of the world population. even while christianity and white folks are the majority in the US, it makes sense numerically to have these other aspects of humanity well represented, in addition to white and/or christian. what's puzzling is the outsized representation of jews/judaism (also roughly 1%) in american media considering the stark underrepresentation of black, brown, and asian folks, who account for nearly half of the population (and growing).
> even while christianity and white folks are the majority in the US, it makes sense numerically to have these other aspects of humanity well represented, in addition to white and/or christian.
I’m not white, Christian, or Jewish, and this sentence does not make sense to me. Making entertaining is a business, and it has nothing to do with what percent of people worldwide have what skin color or tribal affiliations.
If people making entertainment predict that they will earn the most money by targeting white, Christian, or Jewish populations, then they should if making the most money is their goal. Have you noticed how every big movie of the last 10+ years has a Chinese character? And a scene in Hong Kong or Shanghai? Many have Latin American characters as well, and Indian, and so on.
ah yes, the token characters, there to either not alienate a foreign market or to meet some superficial diversity quota.
the point is that in a world without significant bias, we'd expect to see many more people of color and of other religions (to name just two aspects) being represented because of sheer numbers and because talents are distributed widely.
The only world without a bias might be one where everyone is a clone and has the same bank balance.
In the real world, there will always be bias. Height, voice, gender, political affiliations. Forget about bias in US media, there are multiple Hollywood within India itself. And there is nothing wrong with that. They cater to different audiences.
And it does not “make sense” for to expect a group of Tamil film makers to add a couple white, black, Chinese, and Latin American characters of their movie is about people who speak Tamil.
didn't say no bias, but rather without significant bias. instead, we have the narrative peddled about how inclusive and diverse hollywood is, when the stats speak for themselves.
this narrative is one facet of one echo chamber, tying back to the original article.
Good catch. As someone who works with data for a living I know that just about all stats need context to be meaningful. I notice a lot of stats in news given without context as you have noted.
When analyzing data typically the first thing you do is take out the outliers and then focus on the remaining data. News outlets do the opposite, the take the outlier and make it the headline story and ignore the other 99% of the data.
I don't always agree with them ideologically, but I find it valuable to hear a perspective on US politics & media from outside the usual Right/Center-Right binary.
I've been a subscriber to Tangle for a while now and I love his takes on the news.
He operates just a little to the right of my own political persuasions, but even when I disagree with him, it's a respectful disagreement. Isaac's positions are nuanced, well-reasonsed and kind.
That newsletter is exactly what we all wish political debate in the US was like.
I unsubscribed from that newsletter a few months ago when I realized it was just perpetuating the problem by reporting on "both sides", even in cases where there wasn't much worth talking about on either "side". It's interesting if you would like to understand what propaganda the elites in each political party would like their base to digest, but it's not very interesting if you just want to see what actually happened on a particular day.
Someone on Hacker News a while back recommended the Wikipedia current events portal[0] and I have to say this feels like a more efficient way to consume the news. It feels less tied to trending topics and manufactured drama, and is more centered on what actually happened in the world that was especially notable on a particular day.
I feel like a lot of "news" that's reported in the American political media is just ideological argument, which after you've read the same argument for the nth time doesn't come across as very interesting any more.
Google News gives you precisely this portfolio of vendors. Why would anyone subscribe to a single news vendor? I'd also advise adding WION, Al Jazeera, Axios, and The Guardian + BBC.
The Guardian and the BBC basically represent the same political faction as say the New York Times and CNN in the USA, except obviously with more focus on UK stories. You can even see the overlap when they report on stories from the other country.
Inter-rater reliability is very useful. You don't simply seek novelty, right? Not having the vocabulary to discuss the agreement and disagreement of the BBC or the Guardian would be a mistake if you want to talk about news fluency, as they have made a name for themselves in the west.
The BBC and the Guardian do differ on takes, but both are very far cry from the right-leaning outlets. Both are part of the same left-leaning echo chamber in that nobody on the right trusts either source.
Good luck getting a Breitbart/Newsmax reader to switch to even the NY Times or Reuters or AP, much less The Guardian.
It's gotten significantly worse over time. Are there better alternatives that collate news, by topic, from multiple sources?
Newsvoice was an app that tried to crowdsource that job instead of using algorithms. It very quickly became an alt-right cesspool, presumably because those are the same people who feel disenfranchised by FAKE NEWS LIBERAL MEDIA and so flock to alternative communities.
I do not see that as a problem. Most news media is at least to some extent propaganda and basically all of it is biased. At the end of the day, if I want truth then I have to evaluate each bit of news media for its credibility whether it comes from state funded propaganda or from some supposedly impartial organization. So what I want from an aggregator is to just show me relevant content without trying to sort it by credibility. I trust myself to sort news media by credibility much more than I trust any aggregator to sort it for me.
Yes, the utility of an aggregator is not to show you correctness, but to help you survey the landscape of narratives and trajectories.
The utility of looking at multiple similar voices is to get a sense of the scale of a story, and inter-rater reliability; otherwise you have a portfolio of unweighted novelties.
Al Jazeera, Guardian, BBC, etc. are all left of center by US standards, especially the Guardian (which is way left).
Some center-right outlets that are still worth reading* (and I say this as a raging leftist):
The Hill, National Review, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, The Economist
*(as in they provide both informational "what's happening" and insightful analysis without venturing into flat out fake news... as long as you avoid their editorials and comments)
I suppose those are "classically conservative" news outlets, as in "small government but with a general respect for evidence-based governance, science, and the truth". I don't know of any reputable populist-right/alt-right outlets. I don't know if there even IS a reputable populist-right/alt-right movement to begin with, but that's another discussion.
Side note: Google News (as of a year or two ago, when they revamped their algorithms) unfortunately now also gives you a bunch of worthless blogs and fake news (the literal kind) outlets. I have hundreds of sources in my "never show this source" blacklist and even then it's barely usable. That said, it's still a useful way to see different takes on the same topic. Their grouping algorithm is a lot better than their vetting algorithm. Some of those sources should just not show up for anyone.
If you don't like Google News, then you can go with the next best -- Apple News.
But then you can see the consequence. Apple News has less crazy but sometimes misses entire stories. Google catches what Apple misses. For the purposes of understanding the news landscape, it is more important to know that a conversation exists and to estimate its trajectory, than it is to get correct takes.
I would if Apple ever publishes it on Android. They don't really believe in cross-platform =/
I only ever really make time for the news on the crapper. It's a nice way to compartmentalize. Plus it cleanses the soul... shit goes in, shit goes out. Current events are too depressing otherwise.
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives
I remember seeing Twitter chatter from the right re: the Fauci email dump, and so I went on various liberal outlets to try to get the left-wing perspective, and it was complete crickets.
Especially when it's something I can't just read and form an opinion on myself (Fauci's email dump was absolutely massive), I depend on journalists to accurately summarize and contextualize primary sources. And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article.
Thanks! I was looking for a summary as well from someone who understands that their take is just THEIR take. I find it funny that it seems like the most objective people are those that confront their subjectivity. And Isaac Saul seems to do it well here.
Just read that and...there's nothing. Fauci's one of the most prominent people on the planet, dealing with one of the worst pandemics in recent human history, so I'd honestly expect his emails to contain way more interesting stuff than what the Tangle pulled out. If that's all there is, no wonder it's crickets from everybody except the right, who have an obvious interest in discrediting Fauci and a notable disinclination to give a shit about facts.
Was it massive? My impression was that it was exactly what you'd expect - basically a nothingburger, a few interesting tidbits, most of the sensational stuff was taken out of context and/or already known and/or flatly misrepresented.
What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?
I'm not even sure if its true since most media will barely engage with the issue. But Fauci appeared concerned that Covid-19 could potentially be the result of a gain-of-function research that artificially evolved another COVID strain to increase its effectiveness at spreading.
If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research.
Instead, the powers that be sort of dismissed it as a conspiracy theory for over a year until it was suddenly okay to talk about a few months ago.
Again, I can't even tell if any of that is true because most media outlets ignored it.
This should be trivially easy for proponents of that theory to prove it if that is in his emails. Just link to an un-edited, full context email thread relevant to that topic.
So does this exist? If so, just share that link. If not, stop pretending that "media bias" is an excuse to continue sharing the claim surrounded by unfounded conspiracy thinking.
Nobody who is dumb enough to let such a thing come into existence in the first place winds up with a career arc that takes them through a position of substantial authority at the federal level.
>Thanks for sharing. Yes, I saw this earlier today and both Eddie and myself are actually quoted in it. It's a great article, but the problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren't able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues, except if they are completely off. On a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1 ) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.
>We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change
HN formatting is primitive, but the relevant sentence is "Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
Notice how when you present the facts, people get really quiet. No, "Wow, I checked out the source and you appear to be right. I'm going to have to re-think these issues."
Having worked at a media outlet, it's not particularly credible that they "ignored" it. Maybe some of them did.
But if the Washington Post and Buzzfeed (who are also, uh, media sources themselves) FOIA'ed 3200 pages of Fauci emails, there's a zero percent chance - zero - that someone from a bunch of orgs didn't at least take a look.
The reason it looks like they "ignored" it is because they didn't see a story to report. Which is how the process should work.
So if there were a Fauci email saying, "Yeah, we probably created covid, whoops" there's a zero percent chance you wouldn't see at least someone linking to the email in question. Do you see those links? There you go.
Same for Hunter Biden scandals, AZ challenges to election audits, etc.
I recommend Sky Australia or NTD Media for factual coverage of US major stories.
Sky has the #1 coverage of the lab leak, with daily coverage for over a year and just broke the lab's on-site bat zoo. (The only bats in Wuhan were inside the lab.)
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Footage proves bats were kept in Wuhan lab
I read all those but consider them fairly partisan, at this point, e.g. they have to satisfy their clientele. I add Reuters and a few others like that to the mix but even that is difficult. Sometimes you have to search within the website to find coverage for specific stories and it's buried deeper down.
I think the idea that media can be neutral is pretty unrealistic anyway. Even non-profits like PBS or government orgs like VOA will have their slant so it'll always require the extra work.
If you like podcasts, try Left, Right & Center by KCRW. Their sister show All the Presidents' Lawyers is pretty good too, but what I like about LR&C is that it really does show multiple sides without a constant yelling fest. Sure there are the occasional "you don't really believe that do you?" moments, but it's largely civil.
"They dont talk about or even cover the same things" - this is the number one fake news tactic in play. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's a 2x2 matrix -
If a group is left-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the left and everything bad about the right, If a group is right-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the right and everything bad about the left. For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, and you'll almost never see Fox News write an article critical about Republicans. So you end up without much overlap between the two.
They'll only report on the same things when those common things are important enough / loud enough to where they can't ignore it, or when they're able to put their own political interpretation on it when telling the viewer what to think.
Not only that, they go out of their way to police the topics in forums and social media.
Mentioning the wrong topics gets people labelled as pushing "talking points" or "conspiracy theories" with total disregard to the factual reality behind. It doesn't serve the partisan narrative and that's all one needs to know. Insisting will get your suspended, muted, banned or deboosted/shadowbanned.
Except for stuff responding to new Trump-era revelations, they don't seem to have much current criticism of Republicans not buried within criticism of how Democrats deal with them, representing their actual bias in critical opinion coverage, in that it focuses on people currently in power.
(When Republicans held the White House and the Senate, they had more direct criticism of Republicans.)
CNN is a bad example of a left leaning news outlet. They're quite centrist. The reason mainstream media appears to be left biased is because people use the government's political center as their frame of reference rather than that of the populace. The media caters to political beliefs of actual average American. The federal government caters to the center of voting power, which is heavily skewed towards smaller states which tend to be more conservative. This disparity is what people perceive as "left bias".
Studies show that "left bias" in mainstream media is much greater than it is among Americans in general. For example:
"Compared with 2002, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 8 percentage points in 2013 to about 28 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 30 percent, according to a December 12-15, 2013, ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,005 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. An even larger drop was observed among journalists who said they were Republicans in 2013 (7.1 percent) than in 2002 (18 percent), but the 2013 figure is still notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican Party (24 percent according to the poll mentioned above)."
The percentage of the American population which is either Democrat or Republican is consistently[1] well[2] above[3] 90%[4], so I'm not sure where you're getting 54%.
Those links show that out of all Americans who vote in presidential elections, well above 90% vote for either a Democrat or a Republican. However, that does not mean that well above 90% of Americans are either Democrats or Republicans.
> PS Americans also overwhelmingly vote either Democrat or Republican in non-presidential elections
Americans overwhelmingly abstain rather than voting for any of the offered candidates, Democrat, Republican, or independent or minor party, in non-Presidential elections. 2018 had the highest midterm turnout since the before the Reagan era, and it reached the whole way up to 49%.
What do you mean by "people's actions"? If you mean voting, well, Democrats and Republicans get about the same number of votes in presidential elections, which does not seem to justify your view that "left" media bias just reflects the political leaning of the average American.
Except Democrats have been consistently beating Republicans in presidential elections. Click the links. Go back further if you want to. The Republican candidate has won the popular vote exactly once (in 2004) since 1990.
The Presidential election popular vote margin has not gone over 10 million votes in over three decades now, in a country that has averaged about 300 million residents over that time span. These are not margins that support the idea that the population as a whole skews left as much as mainstream media skews left.
> The percentage of the American population which is either Democrat or Republican is consistently[1] well[2] above[3] 90%[4]
Even if you read “voting for a D or R candidate in a Presidential general election” as “being a D or R”, and “eligible voters” as “the American population”, both which are clearly and wildly wrong, your evidence still doesn’t support your claim, because it has 98.2% of 66.2% = 65% of eligible voters, which is not “well above 90%”.
Super interesting take, thanks! I've always been so confused by conservatives labeling all mainstream media as left-biased when I, as a liberal, see them as centrist or conservative.
> The reason mainstream media appears to be left biased is because people use the government's political center as their frame of reference rather than that of the populace. The media caters to political beliefs of actual average American. The federal government caters to the center of voting power, which is heavily skewed towards smaller states which tend to be more conservative. This disparity is what people perceive as "left bias".
COM Library has a ranking system for news organizations that seems to line up pretty well with my personal observations [0]. They show CNN as centrist but left-leaning. This agrees with my personal experience, except for news stories in the "woke" category, where CNN seems to skew far left.
> This agrees with my personal experience, except for news stories in the "woke" category, where CNN seems to skew far left.
You do realize that “woke” as a pejorative originated in left-wing criticism of bourgeois, centrist identity politics?
So, unless you are saying that CNN has joined that leftist critique, I think what you really probably mean is that CNN represents a strongly-held centrist position in that area, not a far-left one.
>For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, and you'll almost never see Fox News write an article critical about Republicans. So you end up without much overlap between the two.
Except for everything Democrats and Republicans agree upon.
Which is a lot.
There's a massive amount Americans miss because thet witness very lively debate on very circumscribed topics.
I don't mind that kind of bias, if your 2x2 matrix was right -- that each of them reports everything good about their side and everything bad about the other side. If that were true, you could sum them up and have a pretty balanced total news source.
The problem with Fox News and CNN is the biased attitude. They report everything good as amazing and everything bad as horrible. The anchors are "performing" the news, telling you with their tone, body language and vocal intonations how disgusted you should be or how much you should be rejoicing. This phenomenon has infiltrated the NYT and WSJ as well, and I've stopped reading both.
I've noticed this "performance" in the NYT, but the WSJ news articles have mostly stayed pretty dry. Their opinion section however does not follow suit.
Slightly OT but it's disheartening to see the overton window at work when people call Democrats "left". It's like the frame of reference has shifted so far to one side that "slightly progressive corporate-run party" vs "socially conservative corporate-run party" is framed as "left vs right".
>All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment.
The thing I look for in good political writing isn't objectivity, which is mostly fictional, but an honest centering of perspective. This has two parts to me - a clear declaration about what the author thinks is the right answer and a commitment to making sure any opposing viewpoints are given as the holders of them would give them before being attacked. Like...I do think the US Republican party is not serious about many of their stated concerns, but I think it's easiest to see that when you contrast their stated views with their mostly political action.
This can get a little distasteful with racist or other hateful views, but there's no need to go into detail with the views of the groups you are writing against. You just need to describe them in a way they can recognize before you tear them apart.
So I guess I do not think good writing requires even treatment - it just requires demonstrating that you have understood what your opponents have said before you move to disagree with it. So, so, so much writing in US politics takes place between commentators who, for all appearances, have no real understanding of what their opponents want or why they might want it.
IMO Comparing viewpoints isn’t as important as simply popping you out of the bubble. The key is to distrust the media more than you distrust the “other side”.
Exactly. The reality is there almost always exists more than two viewpoints. Maybe it's not done deliberately, but this false dilemma may be a big reason the echo chamber effect is so powerful. I'll also acknowledge it's difficult to find reputable sources which present more than two viewpoints.
I tried this for a while and then gave up and read no news whatsoever. For important issues, I’ll hear about it from friends and family in person. In the few situations where I wanted to learn more, it was such a slog to search and filter through garbage to find even the most simple facts (eg, what’s contained in recent us covid stimulus package) it’s just reinforced my decision that putting in routine work just to keep up on events isn’t worth it.
On Facebook it’s even worse. I’d you follow every political party plus some popular figures on every side during an election, you get nothing but extremism from every side. Literal right wing nazis as well as “burn it all down” leftists, at least a few years ago before I deleted my account.
Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this.
It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after they've treated both sides.
It also doesn't fall neatly into any liberal/conservative divide. It tends to be socially progressive yet only interested in solutions that can be practically implemented, pro-free market but deeply concerned about externalities and the environment, pro-democracy but with hard-headed realpolitik.
Plus probably half of what each weekly issue covers is news you won't find in any other American publication, at least -- it's a global publication and one of the best ways to simply learn about the entire world's political and economic news.
I agree, it's a traditional conservative business view point: less regulation, free trade, free press, democratic government with a strong fair legal system.
The Economist strikes me as very liberal, and not particularly conservative. And by that I mean the traditional definition of liberal, not Democratic-Party-of-the-US liberal.
Conservatism is a relative term. You can be a conservative right-winger, a conservative socialist, a conservative liberal or any other kind of conservative as long as your social situation fits it. Many articles by the Economist are conservative in that they intend to defend and conserve the status-quo, especially when dealing with foreign policy.
You're using conservativism vey much in American GOP understanding of the term, which has stopped being conservative a while ago.
Conservativism is a relative position, but you can't be a conservative liberal.
Economist literally had a massive article what is conservativism. And - SPOILER - UK Torries used to be conservative, while GOP has been reactionary/populist for a while now.
I am not. I don't think the GOP definition of conservatism admits conservative socialism.
You definitely can be a conservative liberal. The American society by and large is founded on liberal principles. All you have to do to be a conservative liberal is to stick to 18th-19th century liberalism, in being a so-called "classical liberal".
I agree that the GOP is reactionary more than conservative.
Classical liberalism - complete laissez faire market, no government interference and individual wealth creation. Today's libertarians are closest to classical liberals.
The term classical liberal exists specifically, because conservative liberal creates a massive ambiguity.
And getting back to The Economist - they aren't conservative at all. It's a modern liberal magazine, that routinely promotes wealth redistribution and support for the poor.
This is a frustrating comment chain for me to read. The person you are responding to clearly is already familiar with the concept of classical liberalism, and you are responding as if they are a dunce.
> Conservativism is a relative position, but you can't be a conservative liberal.
As a relative politico-economic position, conservative is “defense of the position of status quo elites”.
In a society with a capitalist (including most modern mixed) economy, “conservative” in the relative sense is always economically liberal, because the status quo elites in a capitalist society are those empowered by and dependent on economic liberalism for their position.
(“Classical conservativism” is not relative, and is defined relative to the pre-capitalist status quo, and is specifically tends to be about the defense of the titled, landed aristocracy. But, because that is no longer an established elite, there's not a lot of classical conservatism left to defend.)
> As a relative politico-economic position, conservative is “defense of the position of status quo elites”.
That's a very narrow understanding of conservativism.
> “conservative” in the relative sense is always economically liberal
Conservatives have often taken steps to restrict market forces, that forced radical changes. So no - you cannot generalize conservativism to "economically liberal".
But rather than listening to me, feel free to read up a scholarly article.
> But rather than listening to me, feel free to read up a scholarly article.
...which amounts to “lots of people have used it lots of conflicting ways, some even denying it has meaning.” Which, as someone with a political science degree with cobsiderable exposure to both political philosophy and more common political dialogue, I’m well aware of. If you accept that whole space of use and non-use, the upthread claim that you can’t be a conservative and an economic liberal at the same time is more, not less, ridiculous, so perhaps you posted your response one comment two far down the thread?
Market forces are radical. They can force incredible change. I don't think that meddling in the market and supporting the status-quo are mutually exclusive.
I also don't think that being economically liberal means letting the market destroy itself or push large societal changes.
> upthread claim that you can’t be a conservative and an economic liberal
Nowhere I claimed that you cannot be economically liberal. You intentionally removed context out of my claim that conservatives will use economic policy to make an ad hominem attack.
It's a semantic debate, and not a particularly interesting one at that.
"Classical liberal" and "conservative" are not necessarily at odds. "Liberal" in the sense that you are using it is a political philosophy, conservative is just a slot to fill in.
I have been reading the economist for a while now and im curious if you have felt a decline in quality or maybe its just my differing in opinion from recent articles.
Mostly i feel more articles coming up that are worded in a way to convince the reader or a certain point without any data. This is something i never really noticed in the past.
That certainly seems true though I wouldn't say it's specific to the economist. I've noticed the change in every publication, even stuff like the Financial Times.
I like their articles, but I can’t recommend the Economist after attempting to cancel my subscription the last time I had one. It took me over an hour of digging through the website, and then phone calls where they tried to up-sell me, side-sell me, every-way-sell me on discounts and different packages no matter how many times I said I just wanted to cancel my account. It’s possibly the worst experience I’ve ever had cancelling something.
Just use a privacy.com card and cancel the card when you're done with the subscription. I agree that it's trash to have to do something like that, but it's a pretty easy solution.
Arguing that Economist is bad, because it was complex to cancel your subscription (I see a massive button on my account page) is like arguing that a restaurant is bad, because they don't accept gold coins as payment.
The Economist certainly doesn't break down easily on the American political spectrum, but in the more coherent language of higher level policy, the Economist is almost 100% liberal.
I agree its a well put together publication, but a socialist (for instance) would argue it is deeply ideological.
Well, it is deeply ideological. But if we're being honest, everything is. The Economist is fine to read as long as you really deeply understand it's ideology.
Then you're already misjudging the bias, the Economist supported interventionist in Syria, Libya, Iraq, and even soft intervention in Bolivia. It's as interventionist as most.
As far as free trade, that's difficult to apply to most situations.
100% agree, but the problem I have with the economist is that it requires serious mental commitment to engage with their articles. The meat of the story is buried deep. The only times I find myself capable of reading are when I'm traveling or commuting.
The issues come weekly with really interesting topical stories, so I always add them to my reading todo list, but they just pile up so fast.
This past year and 1/2 of WFH life meant, I now have about 50 issues to go through LOL.
"the problem with this news source, is that it requires thinking to parse!"
Sorry for the jab, but I think this is our current political situation in a nutshell - surface level, emotional takes are the primary way people engage in news and thus politics. It's hard to engage deeply, but it's required in order to build your own narrative, rather than just take on someone else's.
There are some benefits to the Economist, such as the ones you mentioned but I don't know that I could recommend it, at least without a secondary source for what you're reading there.
I stopped reading it about 10 years ago for a few reasons. During the housing crisis the coverage wasn't as deep as it should have been and I would read articles that were nothing more than "nationalizing banks is bad" without explaining why.
Their coverage of US politics was also laughably bad. During the push to pass the ACA they overstated the GOP's position and willingness to deal. I used to get it from a library a few towns over so I would be 3-4 weeks behind. One time I was reading an article where Charles Grassley was being made out to be principled and respected and I'm laughing because he had recently endorsed the death panel nonsense.
I really, really wish I could recommend the WSJ, however they declined pretty heavily after Murdoch bought them. The number of long form articles declined and I was seeing less journalism and more ideological fluff in the non-editorial sections.
"Their coverage of US politics was also laughably bad."
It's an English magazine that's not even 'News'.
Also this: "During the push to pass the ACA they overstated the GOP's position and willingness to deal." Is a pretty petty reason to not read something. Also, they could have been right.
There are better reasons not to read the Economist.
Multiple examples of a publication's analysis being found lacking and a reaction of no longer consuming it as a result is not "pretty petty". I'm reading them for their non-US coverage, and if I find their US coverage to be lacking(which it was despite your attempts at gaslighting otherwise) than it is reasonable to question their non-US reporting and not waste time on it.
No, they were proven to have been wrong. I provided a specific example of their analysis being wrong, one which you did not address. The ACA passed along party lines after almost a year of deliberation. The GOP spent the subsequent decade running on "repeal and replace" only to get seriously close once. There are multiple other examples (McConnell declaring the goal of making Obama a one term president, refusing to conduct hearings to confirm Garland to the SC after recommending him, etc.) of where the GOP was acting in bad faith, which is also what you are doing here.
I don't recommend using the Economist as your only source for international news. It's very deeply ideological in a way that is almost invisible if you can't easily compare it to a known truth.
It's certainly not only interested in solutions that can be implemented. It's interested in solutions that enforce the free market, and it paints non-market solutions as infeasible, even though they often work and are implementable. But this is invisible ideology and very easy to mistake for pragmatism, because a pure pragmatist will certainly appreciate many market solutions.
The final synthesis is not after having treated both sides. It's after having treated two sides, which are editorially chosen.
As far as dialectics it would be much more interesting if they could dialectically analyze their own internal contradictions between democracy and interventionist realpolitik, or between free-market fundamentalism and concern about externalities. But it doesn't really grapple with those, which is a sign that it's only applying dialectical thinking in convenient ways.
In any case, the Economist is not any worse than any other mainstream publication. Often they do pretty good reporting. But you absolutely must not rely on it solely especially for foreign reporting where you don't have bearings.
The Economist is one of the least biased sources of news, that routinely publishes letters, opeds and articles contradicting the sated editorial agenda.
Very few other news sources actually do that.
They're not perfect, but it sure beats NYT.
If you want the optimal news coverage without needing to read a million sources - The Economist, Financial Times, WSJ and The Guardian.
As I said, they show both sides, but they choose which two.
They are not as forthcoming with their biases as it seems. They mainly set up their ideological oppositions as conservatives, but they in fact have a lot in common with them. This is especially true for foreign relations.
I'd be happy to see examples of articles that go against the Economists' editorial agenda in profound ways and that pertain to foreign policy.
If you want news coverage that is any good at all and you care about foreign affairs you absolutely have to include at least one and preferably two non-anglophone or non-western sources that preferably oppose each other.
A good barometer I have for journals as far as foreign policy is their coverage of the Iraq War before it began. As far as I can see the Economist published almost nothing opposing it, limiting themselves to surface-level reporting of anti-war arguments in the sole goal of defeating them.
I don't understand why you would limit yourself, if you had to choose 4 sources, to 4 centrist anglophone sources. It seems like a very biased media diet.
> And how can 4 "centrist" sources be "very biased"? Isn't it literally the opposite?
No, centrism isn’t the opposite of bias.
Centrism is a position toward which there can bias of any strength. Position of bias on a left/right (or any other ideological) axis and strength of bias or two orthogonal, continuous dimensions.
But in practice "centrist" news sources are far more likely to present multiple points of view -- e.g. a left and right one -- while "left" and "right" news sources generally do not.
But at a deeper level, centrism isn't really an ideology at all, in the way the left and right can be. You can be a hard-core leftist or you can be a hard-core conservative, but the idea of a "hard-core centrist" doesn't really exist.
So I'd argue centrism can be the opposite of bias in a very real way. It's about dropping bias towards ideologies, and treating issues in a practical balanced way.
> But in practice "centrist" news sources are far more likely to present multiple points of view
No, in practice less strongly biased sources are more likely to present multiple points of view. Now, the same amount of variation can seem more diverse when you tend to bucket things into “left/right” binary categories, if the center of variation is near the point where you draw the line between buckets.
But that's an artifact of forcing things into binary buckets making a centrist outlet providing center-left to center-right views look more diverse than a right-wing publication providing center-right to far-right views.
Centrism is a political position just the same as any other, and is just as biased.
Most major news sources in the world report in English too. So you can indeed read news from sources that aren't from culturally similar anglophone countries and instead are from anywhere in the world.
The Economist has not changed its bias in over a hundred and fifty years, staying firmly focused on economic liberalism. Eighteen years is nothing.
>4 sources that aren't radical, have clear motivation behind them. Money makes people write in a particular way, that is easy to gauge.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Just because they have a bias that is for the status quo doesn't mean they are more or less right. As far as I'm concerned all I'm getting from this is "I agree with this ideological bias and I don't want to read anything else"
Anyways, it's your decision to subscribe to a biased news diet. You're not any better because of which bias you choose than someone who only reads Newsmax or CNN.
If your assessment is that anything that's not from the same ideology as these four sources is "insane crap", which it isn't, good points are being made by people of all political persuasions, then it's clear that you have created your own media echo chamber.
+1. I sometimes regret subscribing to Financial Times, but their bias is pretty easy to identify and accept/reject once you understand it. I counterbalance it with Jacobian (far-left/communist - choose your adjective - news).
There's an adage in math modeling/statistics: all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Here, all newspapers are biased, but some are useful.
> In any case, the Economist is not any worse than any other mainstream publication. Often they do pretty good reporting. But you absolutely must not rely on it solely especially for foreign reporting where you don't have bearings.
I think this is perhaps misguided. It's not fair to the economist to compare an article on, eg. politics in Brazil, against the nuanced understanding that a Brazilian citizen would have, because most people from North American with no other ties to Brazil would have no frame of reference.
In other words, the choice is not, a simplified version of the issues vs a nuanced understanding, it's a simplified understanding of the issue vs none at all.
But this is a bit of a false dichotomy. There is no reason why you would have to limit yourself to North-American sources here. Plenty of news agencies around the world have articles in English without the anglophone bias it may bring.
And even non-local sources may still bring some enlightenment. If you were trying to understand Brazilian politics but couldn't read any Brazilian sources, it would still be much better to read Anglo, European and, say, Middle Eastern reporting and then consider the differences in reporting and how they might be linked to their worldview.
Besides, oftentimes a simplistic and biased understanding whose inaccuracy is not understood is much worse than no understanding at all. At least in the second case you are aware of your ignorance and will probably be more weary of rash action.
I lived in Brazil for many years and read the local news closely.
Whenever the Economist published an article on Brazilian politics, it was generally far superior and far more insightful than anything in the local press. Which genuinely surprised me.
Remember -- most local news sources, whether in the US or Brazil, aren't nuanced at all. They're surface-level and sensationalistic.
But while Brazil has a home-grown news equivalent of Time ("Veja"), as well as USA Today (O Globo) it simply doesn't have any home-grown news source at the level of sophistication of the Economist, not even for domestic news.
For what it's worth, I find the same is true of Canada. We have some decent news organizations but whenever there is an Economist article about Canada, I find the insights a bit deeper and the context more complete.
Interesting, I am often find nonplussed by their cover of Canadian stories, especially by what they choose to cover - "buttergate" and dearth of some obscure condiment Asians use in Vancouver come to mind as recent examples.
I find The Globe & Mail and MacLeans quite solid when it comes to news coverage.
I don't understand why people keep arguing against journals or newspapers because they are allegedly ideological or biased. Everybody is ideological and biased. Are they afraid they might lose all their critical thinking skills once they read such a journal and somehow be influenced or brainwashed without realizing it?
The people who recommend against those medias already believe of themselves that they are better informed and able to recognize the bias. If they are that critical, then they should have no troubles consuming biased and ideological media, and they shouldn't assume without further evidence that others don't have the same ability.
Especially in this case it's weird, because the journal is called The Economist. Obviously you'd expect some bias pro economy there.
I'm arguing against the GP that said that it's okay to read only the Economist. It's not okay to read only a single source. You can be as critical as you want but if you no longer have any bearings on a subject you're being led by the nose.
Also, "pro-economy bias" is pretty vague. There are many ways one could be biased in a way so as to focus on a better economy, and they can be radically different.
That's true. Although it's worth mentioning that "mediums" is also accepted as a plural of "medium" in English, but not when it's used for communication media.
I was listening to all of The Economist's podcasts on Spotify until recently. I found their bias grew and grew over time until it was just too annoying to listen. I think they realized their target market was yuppie (lean strongly left) and made the (correct) business decision to cater to them exclusively.
Fivethirtyeight is not even remotely bipartisan. It’s hard to forget Nate’s role in spreading propaganda polls last election cycle and his reaction afterwards when it was clear they were all fake.
Here’s a simple one: Last year, when anti-asian crimes were on the rise, the NYTimes dutifully reported the crimes.
But repeatedly omitted details like ethnicity or name, until a white attacker made the news.
For those earlier details, the rag the NY Post (conservative and borderline tabloid) was the paper to go to.
Eventually—as in many months after—the NY Times stated covering the full details because the problem was too obvious. Even then the Ny Times uses every opportunity to downplay the issue.
I’m sure conservative journalists are just as biased in their own way.
I cannot recommend the show and podcast 'Breaking Points', by Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball enough. They are top notch journalists who formerly hosted a daily news show called 'Rising' on The Hill, but left recently in order to be more independent and free of advertiser influence (censorship).
While they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They cut through much of the partisan, mainstream BS - and get to the heart of many issues, all while debating ea. other in a civilized way.
agree. recently discovered them, very impressed.
I think their new show has some kinks to work out and a bit more modernization of the graphics to put it back on par with how things they were doing were presented with their spots through "the Hill."
Which I hope stay online to show how they are professional.
I also hope their new show gets the graphics and tech to catch up quickly, as they are a refreshing source of truths that need to be told, and I'd like others to be able to watch and feel the same without being distracted and wondering if the new/current as of June 21 make them amateurs with uninformed opinions - instead of the professionals with the history and knowledge that some of us have become aware of.
So glad to see them doing real and truth - we need more.
When I caught part of on TV the other night with Sharyl Attkisson
) I had a similar - jaw drop - OMG someone is telling the truth and they are on the air and not in a mysterious car accident! This is amazing.
EX-CNN aparrently(?) - maybe it's going to be a new movement of like ex-X-cult - no longer beholden to Y -
Perhaps old media is not just losing but started to be lost.
I want a browser extension to highlight individual reporters and info about past biases - as it's too hard to pin a portal as being one way or the other, when there are shills mixed in with regular reporters and editors all mucking up everything it seems.
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives.
https://ground.news has an interface that highlights which news outlets with what general bias are covering which stories, which is sometimes fun to take a look at
> They dont talk about or even cover the same things
Yeah, this is a key thing to realize. People seem to think that Fox News, for example, just trots out falsehoods all the time, but if you skim the news, I'd say very little is actually factually incorrect. It's more about the story selection, who they choose to interview to get the quote, how they contextualize (or don't) statistics, etc.
But once you realize that, you realize it can apply to, e.g. WaPo, which many Republicans say is very left-biased, while many Democrats say it's neutral.
I think an amusing non-partisan example of how story selection biases viewpoints is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0] where for whatever reason shark attacks became a part of the summer's zeitgeist and got extensively covered. Meanwhile, shark attacks weren't at any particularly elevated level, contrary to what many people ended up believing.
Fox New's actual news coverage is mostly truthful. But a huge amount of their airtime is opinion pieces and media personalities who spout BS all day. Tucker Carlson is probably the most notorious. Plus they have Republican politicians calling in and showing up constantly, and they're allowed to say whatever they want.
I won't say Fox is the only one guilty of it, but they intentionally mix what would best be described as "opinion pieces" with "real news" and don't really make any effort to draw a clear line between the two. The end result is as disastrous as one would expect when taking someone's personal opinion and selling it as a factual source of news.
We don't even have to litigate whether Fox News airtime is distinctively malignant if we just acknowledge that all 24/7 cable news channels are bad. They kind of have to be, just by the nature of how they compete and what they have to work with in both audiences and source material. Just don't get your news from the TV.
> If you aren't paying for your media sources, you're the product.
Even if you are paying, you can still be the product, as long as media can make even more money out of it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? More money is more money.
A fair point, but I don't think the concession is worth what you get out of it. A citizen whose sole news source is Fox is considerably less informed than a viewer who might watch exclusively CNN (or possibly even nothing at all, see [1])
Fox News really is worse, and while there may be lessons learned there which can be applied to the other outlets, such as insisting on clearer labeling of opinion content vs reporting, I think it's an all-lives-matter-style distraction to throw up our hands and say there's nothing that can be done and they're all equally bad because it's a problem inherent in the medium.
While I can technically see that some news organizations are worse than others, my issue is that they are all so bad that they are actively doing significant damage to the world and most of the time they are doing it consciously and intentionally, so I don't really get much utility trying to distinguish them from one another.
And yet while they are all genuinely terrible due to trying to remain profitable AND trying to advance their personal political agendas, people are always trying to use the excuse that "its better than X" to justify supporting them.
My solution would be to ignore the news completely, but that solution isn't effective because I know multiple people that insist on ranting about everything they see/hear from the media on a daily basis.
IMO the media is very important for civilization, but somehow we have accepted that deceit, manipulation, and failure are the golden standard.
In Sweden we have public service TV channels, but even in that context I think your advice holds up – not a good source for news. Too stressed, too shallow reporting.
I mean, sure, but why are we talking about Fox specifically? CNN, MSNBC, etc. are just as bad. I find this ironic since this thread is about how bias isn't necessarily about outright falsehoods, but story selection and what is not said :)
Fox news personalities frequently allow Trump and his allies airtime where they lie about losing the election to Biden. I don't know how you get any less truthful than that
It's an example of how Fox is less honest than other news companies, exactly what you asked for. They let people on air spout obvious lies all the time. Find a mainstream channel that does the same. I'll wait
I am not from US. And could not care less who won.
I think there is no less honest. It is simple, you lie or don't. In my eyes they are all bad, and it is up to me to inform myself.
Day after day for two years, MSNBC and CNN hosts and guests went on and on about how Trump was beholden to Putin. There was a "pee pee tape", remember? There were deals that Trump and Trump Jr. made in a Trump Tower meeting that would give Putin certain guarantees in exchange for his help in getting Trump elected. Pulitzers were given to newspapers that printed one breathless anonymously-sourced accusation after another.
None of it turned out to be true. When you compare the Adam Schiff memo release with the Devin Nunes memo, you can see that Nunes' memo was accurate. Schiff's memo was full of misinformation. Schiff was one of those guests who appeared on CNN and MSNBC over and over, claiming that there was evidence for "Russia collusion with the Trump campaign". He later had to retract that repeated lie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q2su1iknyk
Mueller and his team of Democrats instead tried to make a case for obstruction against a President who waived all executive and even most of his attorney-client privilege. Even the impeachment-hungry Democrats in the House couldn't mount impeachment charges on that weak claim.
What a waste all that was, and it was egged on and sometimes even fabricated at every turn by CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and WaPo.
But keep pretending that Fox News is some big boogeyman or even an outlier in the news business.
How about making up fake stories about Russian prostitutes and hackers to try and overturn the results of an election that didn't go your way? Anyone that wants to complain about Fox News and let CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, and the rest of the "mainstream" media outlets slide for printing that garbage after the 2016 election is not being intellectually honest.
And yet, Hillary Clinton (who made her own claims that Russia had helped Trump steal the Presidential election from her) was a guest on mainstream news programs over and over.
Do you apply the same standards to Hillary Clinton that you apply to Trump?
Jonathan Haidt (who is mentioned in the article) did a study years ago. He separated a group of people into conservatives and liberals and then gave them a questionnaire on politics. Then he got a second group, separated them, and gave them the same questionnaire. Only he asked the second group of liberals and conservatives to answer the questionnaire the way they imagined the other side would.
What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise. Liberals frequently chose the red herrings on the multiple choice questions, the ones that exaggerated the conservative positions to the point of more or less demonizing conservatives.
That's why we're talking about Fox News, don't you see? CNN and MSNBC are just folks. Fox News is the Anti-Christ.
Even the article itself has this same smell of bias about it.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all actually. I'm sure both side demonize the other to some extent, and it's our natural reaction to look at them both as equally bad like we're disciplining two siblings or something, but it really seems that right now the left is more melodramatic in the demonization than the right. In my personal experience, quite a few people I've met seem to think if you disagree with them, you must be full of hate, racist, sexist, dumb, a gun slinging Christian, etc.
It's all part and parcel of the same problem. The default media narrative bubble leans heavily to the left.
People trapped in that bubble are overly confident in what they believe. They aren't often exposed to arguments and data that are contrary to what they're told to believe over and over whenever they turn on the TV. So when these trapped people are confronted with opposing arguments or data, they resort to the easy mechanisms that relieve their cognitive dissonance. "You're a racist" "You're a homophobe" "You're a white supremacist" "You want sick people to die in the streets"
My wife (who is pretty far left), observed that Trump was actually many of the things that G.W. Bush was accused of being.
I think a major tenet of post-trump Republicanism is roughly: "We're going to be accused of being racist and conspiracy theorists by the left no matter what we do, so there is only an upside to openly courting those members of the electorate.
As someone left-leaning, I've always tried to be understanding and compassionate towards those with differing viewpoints. When Trump was campaigning, although I loath the man (and, to be clear, I believe he's outright evil), I did try to understand the viewpoint of "forgotten America" and see them as people whose frustrations are legitimate.
But then Trump tried to overturn the presidential election by attempting to have millions of votes thrown out unceremoniously, without a shred of evidence, with a constantly shifting story. This constitutes no less than an attempted coup. Although some people in the Republican party resisted this, in the end, the party decided not to purge Trump and his supporters (which would be the appropriate response to an attempted coup), and a sizeable portion of the party still publicly stands by him. At the same time, they are openly courting white supremacist militias and conspiracy theorists.
There are no other words for this: this is evil. Continued support for the Republican party is evil, as long as they have not purged Trumpism from the party.
And the Democrats completely want to dismantle the police and let criminals run free on the streets. It is true, I saw these cherry picked quotes and the democrats still supports those politicans! How can you support them when they are pro crime? You are a horrible person, just like everyone else who votes Democrats and thinks that government handouts are more important than ensuring that rapists and murderers can't continue to rape and murder!!!
/s I hope you realize the problem here. Republicans doesn't really support ending democracy, similarly Democrats doesn't support ending the police. Those are just what the other side thinks that side wants.
Defunding the police, government handouts, etc etc, whether you are in favor or against them, are policy decisions that some factions within the Democratic party are striving for using democratic (small 'd') methods. That is, if these factions can convince a majority of people to defund the police, then the police will get defunded. That is how democracy works.
If you disagree with defunding the police but with significant other parts of the Democratic platform, you can ally with these people on some issues but fight them on this issue. This is also how democracy works.
Trump attempted to stay in power even though the people voted against him. This is tyranny. Working with him, in any way, is a subversion of democracy. Anyone who is willing to work with him is, by extension, an enemy of democracy.
The only logical conclusion from your post is that you are against democracy: You argue that a policy you disagree with (defunding the police) getting implemented democratically, is a similar level of "bad" as a tyrant being installed. This means that you are willing to see a tyrant installed if the alternative is (democratically chosen!) policy being enacted that you disagree with. Seems like textbook authoritarianism to me.
I'm currently a registered Pacific Green, lean left, and on the political compass I'm basically smack dab on top of Bernie Sanders (whom I voted for and donated to in the 2016 primaries). And have never voted Republican. So his observation is about my own "side" more or less.
But I'm totally unsurprised to see this downvoted here only 18 minutes in.
What's funny is if you bring this up (even with sources) to conservatives. They're unsurprisingly unsurprised. But if you bring it up to liberals they often get furious because it goes against their beliefs that they're the more intelligent, more educated "side". Nevermind that believing in only two possible sides is six times dumber than astrology... something "both sides" are about equally guilty of. If nothing else I strongly encourage everyone to watch his TED talk. It's super informative, well delivered, and has a solid message of unity tbh.
I have a friend I haven't seen since high school, though I'm connected with him on Facebook. He will outright tell you himself that he's a communist—familiar with the writings of Marx, etc. We could not be more diametrically opposed. However, he's as clear-eyed as you seem to be.
I suspect that most people simply aren't all that intellectually curious. I don't remember if Haidt explicitly mentioned this, but I think somewhere either he or someone commenting on his study asserted that it is much easier to pick up the party line of liberals through osmosis, since those in education, the media, and so forth tend to be liberal. So, even conservatives are more readily exposed to the liberal take on things. Liberals on the other hand are not.
But the point I'm making by mentioning my friend and thanking you is that I suspect that people who are intellectually curious are more or less inoculated against mischaracterizing the side they disagree with, since they don't learn almost exclusively through osmosis.
> But I'm totally unsurprised to see this downvoted here only 18 minutes in.
I am unsurprised as well. Aside from any other concerns about the comment, its relevance, or the study and its methodology, the upthread post, like the popular right-leaning media articles on the study, lies about the results:
Upthread post: “What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise.”
Actual article abstract: “Both liberals and conservatives exaggerated the ideological extremity of moral concerns for the ingroup as well as the outgroup. Liberals were least accurate about both groups.”
(It also misleads about provenance, saying “Jonathan Haidt [...] did a study”, when Haidt was third author.)
The actual results (especially liberals being less right about typical liberal positions on the axes questioned about as well as less accurate about conservative positions) are what you’d expect if the axes chosen were ones that simply tended to be more salient for conservatives.
I recommend watching his TED talk. It goes into more detail, and expounds on the abstract underpinnings of both liberal and conservative morals. They're very different. The axes apply even outside America, consistently.
I'm a fan of Haidt and think his moral "tastebuds" (I think he makes that analogy somewhere) is an interesting model. I largely buy into it, but I found a really perceptive take in this short blog post that came out a few years back that's a bit more skeptical. https://blogs.swarthmore.edu/burke/blog/2017/05/26/trump-as-...
Thank you for that. I used to read Crooked Timber pretty regularly, years ago. In fact, I had one of the sometime contributors for a semester as a philosophy professor (back in the last century).
I agree Haidt's model is flawed, especially on the idea of sacredness being something liberals aren't concerned with. I think he's onto something, but he's painted with too broad a brush.
Lately, I've been reading a lot on the subject of religion: specifically, from an anthropological or sociological perspective. I'm interested in the idea of ersatz religions—filling the void left by modernity's secularism. My suspicion is that the great bulk of people cannot do without the things that religion affords; and so if they aren't "religious" in the traditional sense, they unwittingly find some substitute that does everything but revere Christ, YHWH, Allah, etc.
Behavior that fits that model I see again and again, on what we think of as the political left.
Now how closely do the "What Conservatives believe" responses align with FoxNews, Limbaugh, InfoWars, etc. and how closely do the "What Liberal believe" align with the NYTimes, WaPo, etc.
This study says something, it just doesn't necessarily say what you all think it says. It's also wildly outdated. Because we now live in this reality: Significant majority of Republicans don’t believe Biden’s win was fair[1]
In a way, it's the Family Feud problem. Spiders are not insects. But if you are playing Family Feud and the prompt is "Name the most popular insect", you should say spider because a lot of people will off the cuff say spiders are insects.
So it's possible they are not answering to how conservatives see themselves.
And let's not ignore that the MFQ is kinda shaky at best.
I also find it interesting in that link is the why they were the most off. Liberals seemed to have been wrong because they regressed to the mean when answering for other people. They seemed to think conservatives were more group-focused than they were and less individual-focused. And vice versa for liberals. They thought that the average liberal was less group-focused and more individual-focused than they were.
And it's not like conservatives weren't wrong. They got it right when estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for individuals, but not groups.
Moderates were the most accurate in estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for groups. And both conservatives and liberals over-estimated conservatives concerns for the group.
So I really don't think it's entirely fair to frame the results as "conservatives know how liberals think better than liberals know how conservatives think". Because another reading of it is that liberals give conservatives a greater benefit of the doubt. And also that conservatives don't even know how little they care for the group.
And that's also ignoring that these are self-reported morality questionnaires. It's not really indicative of how these people might act in real situations. Even Hitler thought he was a swell guy just trying to do right. We all kind of think that of ourselves. No one thinks they're the monster.
I would be curious to see what that looks like today when elected Republicans are increasingly spouting what you'd call a "demonized" conservative viewpoint if it wasn't coming out of their mouths directly.
"Those are just the opinions of a small fringe" was much more believable in a pre-Trump world - but now, even more than post-Tea Party, the fringe is pushing the agenda.
And even pre-Trump, you can read that study as an indictment of the conservative media and it's evolution to sensationalism since the 1980s.
To use an example from the linked article: "For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights." - the vocal conservatives were not expressing a very nuanced view, it was the violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime even in conservative outlets.
If you want liberals to understand your complex conservative reasoning, you gotta get the very-un-complex trolls off the air!
If this reasoning is correct, then conservatives should be becoming worse at gauging liberals' position on social justice-related topics, considering how their reporting tends to be dominated by extremists as well.
What exactly seems fair? The reply you're responding to asserts there was a "violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime." Is that fair? The discussion, at the time, concerning gay marriage in conservative national media was dominated by a "violent fringe"? Were their calls for violence? Were there even suggestions that violence "may be necessary"?
I'm going to reach here a bit, but are we going to rope in the Westboro Baptist Church and pretend these people were the "conservative" response? Even if we do that, do you recall them—as odious as they are—being violent or advocating violence? And if we're not pointing to them, who are we pointing to?
Another way to look at this is that extremists have a significant platform on the right, and that is likely to skew the perception of the right by the left.
Atwater's Southern Strategy: attract racists, without saying... you know the rest. He said that a long time ago, but the strategy is obviously still in play (see e.g. Thomas Hofeller, bithers, blatantly anti-mexican and anti-muslim quotes from the party)
The far right keeps showing up bearing the battle flag and nazi flags -- and Flynn, Stone, and Trump appear to love groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Other Republicans who speak out about that get cancelled.
Jerry Sexton's "who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days."
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. For anyone curious, Haidt is a liberal professor who is dedicated to figuring out how to get people talking across political ideologies. The book that covers this topic is called The Righteous Mind and is an excellent read or listen.
Conservatives didn't have "no problem" answering as liberals.
Conservatives were better able to estimate what liberals would answer for individual concerns, but were wrong about group concerns.
Moderates were better able to estimate how both groups would answer for group concerns. Both liberals and conservatives overestimated how much conservatives cared for group concerns.
Liberals underestimated how much conservatives cared for individual concerns and overestimated how much they cared for group concerns. Liberals also overestimated how much liberals cared for individual concerns and underestimated how much the cared for group concerns.
In light of that, we could even frame it as liberals see themselves closer to conservatives than vice versa. Because that's how they answered for the groups. They think there's less difference than there actually is. So they under and overestimate appropriately.
Framing it as "conservatives know liberals better than vice versa" is wrong and is a tactic to put the onus on liberals to do all the changing. Because conservatives can fill out a morality questionnaire better.
Or let me put it this way, if the question was "How many puppies is it acceptable to kick in a lifetime?"
The fact that puppy kickers were correctly able to guess "zero" for the non-kicking group while the non-kickers said the kickers would say "ten" while the kickers really said "twenty" doesn't mean that the puppy kickers are the better group.
That's not at all what I got out of reading "The Righteous Mind", so not sure how to respond to this constructively. Did you read the book? Granted it's been ~ 1 year since I read it, but I walked away with a completely different impression. The interesting thing that was covered was that liberals and conservatives have different ways to approach moral reasoning.
Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational.
The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.
That's a very interesting study, but I think it's quite spurious to connect this result to media quality/partisanship the way you do. Certainly the study doesn't make this connection. After all, surveys tend to find that Fox News viewers are less informed about domestic and international events than consumers of other news media (one study found them less informed than people who did not watch the news at all). So I don't think this effect is caused by media.
Haidt's study uses his five moral foundations model, where one's moral foundations are characterized by five dimensions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The first two are called "individualizing foundations" and the last three are called "binding foundations".
Haidt's findings in other studies (which generalize beyond just the US or the West) are that people across the political spectrum care about the individualizing foundations, but progressives care more about these foundations than conservatives. But progressives care much less about the binding foundations.
With this in mind, I don't think it's too surprising that conservatives have an easier time estimating the viewpoint of progressives, since the moral foundations of progressives are not alien to conservatives, they are just weighted differently. Whereas for progressives, the moral foundations of conservatives can feel utterly alien and inexplicable, especially if they tend to have their social interactions in a progressive bubble.
(Also, be mindful that the population sample of the study is nowhere close to a random sample of the population. The sample is over 60% female, overwhelmingly young (median age is 28), and liberal participants outnumbered moderates and conservatives combined. Since it's an online survey, there's a reasonable chance that you're mostly reaching urban people, which tend to live in progressive bubbles. Conservatives who live in areas that are mostly progressive may understand progressives better than those who live in conservative bubbles. The study acknowledges this in the discussion section. The result might still hold up, but the effect might be exaggerated by the sample.)
Did you read that article? I mean, even that article has the multiple bitchy comments thrown in. I would quote, but honestly it would be every other paragraph. But yes, the headline is generally positive I guess. Now, could we find a similar article for Biden in Fox over the next 4 years? I would guess probably.
Anyways it's kind of pointless to argue what the "opposite" of Fox is as it's really ill-defined. i think it's fair to say CNN and Fox are similar to being opposites.
Ok, I'm going to do it:
> Presidents usually get too much blame when the economy is doing badly, since downturns are often caused by outside shocks or cyclical factors, but that also gives them a chance to crow when things are going full steam ahead. Trump is not the kind of person to pass that up.
> The strong growth number gives the White House a significant boost after days of grim headlines, and its failure to move on from the President’s humiliating summit performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin nearly two weeks ago.
> It also offers some personal respite for Trump, given that he must feel that legal walls are closing around him, following news that one of his most important confidants, Allen Weisselberg, has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors investigating his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
> The New York Times reported on Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller is examining Trump’s tweets, potentially to see whether they can help him build a case that the President acted with malicious intent when he sacked former FBI Director James Comey.
> Trump is forever trying to change the subject. With the current state of the economy, he may have some ammunition.
> Often, the President’s hyperbolic assessment of his own performance is at odds with the facts
> but he [Trump] often has only himself to blame for it getting overlooked, given the daily political turmoil he creates.
> Trump’s end zone dance might come across as a little premature.
It just goes on and on. I'm practically quoting the whole article. Just the language alone: "humiliating", "walls closing in", etc. Then they quote one poll, presumably the one what makes him look as bad as possible. It's just ridiculous. I don't know how you can say this article is "positive" for Trump. The headline is relatively positive (though even then I can feel CNN begrudgingly wrote some credit).
"Now, could we find a similar article for Biden in Fox over the next 4 years? I would guess probably."
Biden's not the opposite of Trump either. Biden pleases some conservatives, which is why he got the nomination over Sanders, so that he'd stand a chance of winning over "undecided" (ie. right wing, but not extreme right wing) voters in battleground states. Many neocons are also fans of Biden, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to find support of him on FOX.
Now I'd be surprised to find any positive coverage of Sanders on FOX.. not to mention people who are really on the left like Noam Chomsky.
This seems much more accurate to my experience as a leftist. The insistence from centrist liberals that CNN/MSNBC is unbiased seems baffling and delusional.
Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years, while CNN and MSNBC have moved quite a bit to the left. You see it more on cultural issues than say economic or foreign policy issues. Joy Reid, for example, just says the most outrageous falsehoods and goes completely unrebutted: https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1403950560907300865?s=20
> Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years
I routinely read Fox News online. I do not think they have moderated over the last 2 years - there was perhaps some moderation 4 years ago, but no longer.
CNN has swung leftward, I don't think MSNBC has substantially changed.
I think they mean the word "Moderated" not in the colloquial sense of removing content, but in the sense that they're opinions are not as strongly right-wing as they once were.
How is that a falsehood? The daughters of the confederacy pushed the "civil war was about state's rights" narrative that is still taught across the South.
> Fox News has moderated a lot over the past few years
They moved slightly back from Trumpism back toward their earlier pre-Trump far-rightism late in the Trump period (not abandoning the former, just not going in whole hog on it), which might be seen as moderation from a tribal/partisan viewpoint (as pre-Trump far-rightism currently lacking a major party home, to the extent many anti-Trump-but-far-right voices advocated voting for Democrats over Republicans despite ideological issues with Democrats in 2020 as essential to the defeat of Trumpism), but is not moderation ideologically.
While the D-R partisan split is not independent of left-right ideology, its not the same thing.
I got the "the civil war wasn't about slavery" line fed to me in school. Reconstruction was a bad thing, too, and it was good when the North stopped meddling. So where's the most outrageous falsehood here? The "nothing to do with" bit? That's not the exact version I got, but the gist was: "the Civil War was about states rights, it's just a coincidence that the right in question was the right to have slaves, but the South wasn't morally in the wrong because states rights are actually that important."
The falsehood is saying that “currently, most K-12 students learn Confederate Race Theory.”
I grew up in solidly Republican Virginia in the 1990s (even my “liberal” Northern VA county voted against Clinton both times) and we certainly didn’t learn the “Daughters of the Confederacy” version. When we visited Monticello, slavery was discussed at length. Teachers have discretion so maybe some kids are still learning this stuff, but it’s a huge lie to say it’s “most” kids today.
Folks like Reid are massively gaslighting people by making it seem like the opposition to CRT is opposition to “teaching kids about slavery.” Conservatives in Virginia weren’t up in arms complaining about that when I was a kid almost 30 years ago, so it’s hard to imagine that’s what they’re doing. The opposition, instead, is to people like Reid who are trying to normalize racism against white people. It’s opposition to people who want to turn slavery into the entire narrative, such as the 1619 Project, which asserted that “nearly everything exceptional about America grew out of slavery”: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/year-zero
> Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music.
Given the number of actual Trump staff CNN has hired and put on air, I don't think one can credibly argue that they are on the opposite end of the spectrum. As someone who generally politically identifies as "left", I can assure you we are quite frustrated with them.
MSNBC too! They may not have as many Trump folks on primetime panels, but their focus on dumb "Resistance" stuff is definitely not what the left wants at all (though liberals seem to eat it up).
Am I the only one who feels Tucker Carlson is so popular because he (a lot like Donald Trump) was willing to challenge the false idols of the Republican establishment (e.g. we need to be at war in Afghanistan/Iraq, the free market isn't always the best especially if it leads to outsourcing and offshoring, etc.)
Might just be me. I dislike 90% of fox news but I listen to Carlson sometimes and never find him to be horrible or BS-y (admittedly I don't listen in all the time so I may be missing some stuff)
I pretty much only see clips of Tucker Carlson that are posted by liberals or leftists to point at and generate outrage.
To me, he seems like a whiner who disingenuously argues against things in a way to bolster conservative talking points. But, I expect the majority of this is selection bias, and only the 'worst' clips are making it into my filter bubble.
I've seen a few clips, they have been pretty bad but with kernel of truths that make it hard to make substantive arguments against whatever he is ranting on. I personally think he's a big stain on news media, even while agreeing with a few points here/there there.
For what it's worth, I've only watched in order to try and understand other people's viewpoints.
More specifically, I think he's terrible because he has mastered the ability to tease out the base instincts of people with his messaging, which makes it hard to either agree or disagree with his statements with logic. He can point to some kernels of truth, and you are left with people saying things like "that's just dogwhistling" when attacking his viewpoints. In other words, he riles up, doesn't cause people to think critically, and overall lowers the level of discourse out there.
Does anyone watch TV anymore? I read Fox News online, which is fine, but I don’t think I’ve ever tuned into shows. My parents have CNN on a loop, and even my dad (a die-hard Carter fan) calls it “DNC talking points.”
Some so old they may no longer be alive even?
"Election fraud is incredibly rare" - this phrase will be etched in the history books, similarly to "it's just a flu"
The left will never live this down.
I've heard people characterize cable news as kayfabe—the handbook for professional wrestling. Cable news is entertainment, and the same way the WWF was eventually pressured into changing their name to the WWE, we have to hope one day CNN and Fox News (along with MSNBC, etc.) will change their monikers.
I'm aware of that, but I don't think that changes things much. They chose to call it "entertainment," when they could have called it any number of things. But at the time they had been under increasing criticism of the matches being fixed, etc.
WWF officially broke kayfabe 1989 way before the name change because they didn't want to spend the money necessary for live sporting events. Before that pro wrestling was regulated just like boxing or MMA, with state commissioners and taxes and medical requirements.
Nope, not even close. Even if we are pretend that all wrestling fans were completely unaware that the WWF was scripted, that ended in Montreal in 1997 when Vince McMahon forced the belt off of Brett Hart. He didn't change the name of the company until 2002. Even before that, Vince declared it was all a work because he was tired of being under the thumb of various athletic and boxing commissions. His people did steroids and he wasn't going to stop them.
It seems that the change from WWF to WWE was mainly caused by a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund, but they used the opportunity to emphasize their entertainment focus.
>Mrs. McMahon [(CEO of WWE)] said the company began considering dropping the word "Federation" from its name when World Wildlife Fund (a/k/a World Wide Fund for Nature) prevailed in a recent court action in the United Kingdom. The court ruling prevents the World Wrestling Federation from the use of the logo it adopted in 1998 and the letters WWF in specified circumstances. The "Fund" has indicated that although the two organizations are very different, there is the likelihood of confusion in the market place by virtue of the fact that both organizations use the letters WWF. The Fund has indicated that it does not want to have any association with the World Wrestling Federation. "Therefore," said, Mrs.McMahon, "we will utilize this opportunity to position ourselves emphasizing the entertainment aspect of our company, and, at the same time, allay the concerns of the Fund." [0]
That seems like a preposterous claim. Those are classic regime television stations. And I find this diagram biased.
Also, "middle" or centrist is not the same as objective. The path of least extreme disagreement is not the same as the truth (ask a Christian: he'll tell you that Jesus is the truth and that the world hates Jesus). Besides, the middle of what? The neoliberal paradigm? The current spread on offer?
CNN has gone so far downhill imo due to this. In the past five years I've seen a shrinking gap between news and opinion, where articles w/o the label are very clearly editorialized. It lowers the quality of the product and at least for me, I no longer read it as much.
That said, journalists are just humans so it's a difficult problem, especially in the heightened political climate we've had.
Fair point - these dichotomies are often false or manufactured.
However I believe that, to a much greater extent than citizen support for particular political issues, media bias tends to polarize along party-line dimensions because of overlapping power structures.
people can hate on tucker all day long, as they attacked rush and oreilly before him, but tucker brings up issues that resonate in red america. he does a pretty fair job, which is evidenced by how trivial the criticism against him is.
if people are confused about what red america thinks, they would be well served to look at Breitbart, tucker, and independent conservative outlets to see how they frame the discussion. I'm always amazed at how people on the left don't really see what the right is going on about.
> if people are confused about what red america thinks, they would be well served to look at Breitbart, tucker, and independent conservative outlets
I've been scolded for using Breitbart or Tucker Carlson as a barometer for right-wing positions because they're claimed to be extreme, or 'alt-right', and not reflective of how real conservatives think or feel.
It’s extremely easy to construct a biased, opinion-manipulating political hit site composed entirely of truthful statements.
Proof by politically-neutral analogy: imagine a newspaper that published an article every time a roulette wheel stopped on 6, but never for any other number.
The google vs DuckDuckGo search results for the same exact phrase "list of conservatives banned by twitter" yield utterly different results. None of the admittedly right wing websites are even listed in the google results for that search. The only site in common on the first page is Forbes, but even then the two articles are different even though they came out the same exact day.
If you use google, you'd think that twitter isn't censoring conservatives. If you use duckduckgo, you'll think that they do.
I highly recommend experimenting with turning off the news completely for a time. You quickly find that the vast majority of "Breaking News!" that gets shoveled out simply isn't that important for most people, and is there mainly to feed a news addiction.
Alternatively, use the Internet Archives to read news from this date from 2-5 few years ago. You'll probably find that most aren't worth reading, which gives you a good sense of how important the news you read today will seem in just a few years.
I started to pay really close attention to political news back in 2015/2016. There was this crazy phenomenon during the Trump administration where both sides felt like the other side was living in an alternate reality.
The truth is that news sources for each side presented completely different stories. While one side got a certain story, the other side was completely silent. So you had two groups of people who had two different sets of unrelated stories, and very rarely did they overlap. The media did an amazing job of putting each group into their own silo, making it impossible to discuss anything between groups or for any positive Trump news to ever be known to a large percentage of the population.
"They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across."
I've noticed this as well. Going from WaPo to Breitbart (or vice versa) is like going to an alternate world. When they are talking about the same thing often they are doing so in a belittling manner (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-ant...). I feel like the tone taken by MSM outlets like WaPo and the NYT has become harsher and more condescending, but it could just be me paying closer attention to it.
Bias by exclusion doesn't get talked about as much as it should. One way you can tell when a media establishment doesn't like something is that they do what they can to ignore it. During the Dem primaries it had become a meme in some left wing communities the length the MSM was going to ignore Bernie and his popularity. Another popular example is how Noam Chomsky is largely shunned by the MSM.
Maybe they don't cover the same things because the "things" are like their flags they are using to signal each other. It's like two different gangs using different symbolism to communicate with their own members. They don't need to talk to the other side, they need to instead rally their own side.
Maybe study each side like you're studying a gang. Get to know the symbolism and language.
From my observation they (at least Fox News) do report on all the same things, they just made the articles not fitting their agenda buried deep in their websites, and on their TV channel they don't report it, or just quickly mention it on their non opinion segments.
You can't always even get supportive viewpoints of some policies. If some policy is too unpopular with the base, they seem to just get very quiet about it, or discuss it in very general terms.
It's difficult because you're so drastically limiting your sources (to ones that are all low-quality IMO). Every time you read an article and care about the topic, just.... Google it. There are a thousand and one independent sources, Twitter threads, etc etc etc. I don't consider myself to truly understand any binary debate unless I've heard an intelligent argument on both sides; it's just not my experience that any interesting discussion has a side that's literally meaningless (though I'm perhaps begging the question by not finding eg Pizzagate "interesting").
Right. Because of these news sources are BUSINESSES. Their job is to manage their own "image" to keep people around for the advertisers. Like it or not (me, not) this is a much easier way to grok what's going on with them. Their priority is viewers -- mostly retaining them. So you keep with the general idea that "you should tell the truth" by choosing which truths to tell, and then perhaps "gambling" by once in a while doing something outrageous that will excite the base.
just watch C-SPAN and cut out the crap; then compare coverage of the same speech or event or whatever. All of the media will pick out single words from an hours-long talk and invent their own context, ignoring the rest of the hour
Bloomberg and Politico are great. Also recommend TheHill and RealClearPolitics.
There’s a growing number of writers on sub stack covering the same issue from different sides. Often this is formulated as a response of rebuttal to the left-leaning media’s coverage of the issue, but that’s fine because you still get both sides of the story if you read things in conjunction.
Ground News handles aggregating and showing each source that is discussing the same topic event. It has become the first site I go to for news and from there I can easily access virtually everything else while knowing what the perspective that I'm stepping into is in advance.
In my experience, the biggest contributor to the echo chambers is a lack of memory.
I do not think people's memories are bad, but rather they willfully ignore the other party's position, never learned it in the first place, or are justifying it because their party is in power. This is what centrists frequently get mocked at "both sides" about. They aren't saying "oh both sides are trying to stage an insurrection" they are saying "both sides are not going to let immigrants across the border" (but it'll be generalized to everything being both sided).
I think the way to cure this is also the way to make parties better. Criticism. We should always critique our parties to make them better. Unless you believe they are perfect already and getting direct commands from god, it is deserving of criticism. But we've encouraged a culture where criticism isn't (effectively) allowed. It is allowed by certain people who speak in a certain way, but not for the average person. (e.g. if you are speaking to someone you don't know that well and politics are brought up and you criticize something x party recently did it will be presumed you are of the opposing side). I believe part of this is because we are comparing politicians and parties rather than judging them independently (this is also why I'm a big supporter of Cardinal voting as opposed to the common Ordinal propositions).
This is essentially the root of whataboutism. The classic example is one I had my parents many times over the last decade. I suggest Trump should be investigated for his connections to Epstein given his frequent contact. And my dad would be like "but what about Clinton!" and my response has always been "yeah, him too." Because it isn't about parties, it is about the crime that was potentially committed. If something is bad, then it is bad if the other party does it or if your party does it. Tribes don't matter. The whataboutism is just a distraction technique.
I would suggest reading some sources outside the US. Specifically, I would recommend the Economist. While the Economist has a very distinct view, it does provide a little higher level, distanced view of US and world politics.
It has highlighted to me some biases from some of the sources I follow on a day by day basis (NYT, Washington Post).
Bonus points for the Economist, because you also get coverage and analysis of events across the world many of which get almost 0 coverage in US press.
I tried this, too and realized similar things. I then decided that I do not really care (at least not that much) about understanding which way each source wants to spin things. I instead want information about the world to form my own opinions.
I started reading international news. That is, focus on publications outside country X when reading about X.
Reports from Sweden, Korea, Russia and UK (thanks google translate!) translated into English, awkward wording and all, plus a minimal dose of CNN and Fox works better for me than a mix of American media. Just my 2c.
I might even wrap it up as a convenient page or app.
I've done something similar. If you look at what, say, the National Review thinks is important on a given day, and compare that to what the NYTimes is reporting on, it's pretty clear that we're not merely disagreeing about a particular set of facts, we're living on different planets.
> I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico.
Those are the sources you tried to balance with? Every one of those is a fringe hard-leaning source, except maybe Wapo which can't be trusted because it's owned by Bezos. You need to seek more moderate sources to begin with.
When I was living in Canada, I managed to get myself to caucuses of Christy Clarke though I wasn't even a citizen. Still have few photos of me in a $20 Chinese suit feeling very odd in the setting of the Vancouver club.
It's amazing how much scoop you can get on both the establishment, and the opposition from first hands.
Just ask, politicians are talkative types. You are blessed with living in a country where you don't end on the bottom of a lake for asking politician a wrong question.
Our tech ingests articles from different publishers, groups them into topics based on the story they are covering, then analyze and score them based on how informative they are and present curated articles as best perspectives from left/right/center.
I am starting to think that it isn't really the "news" but the commentary. Most sites will cover many of the same events. There will be different focuses but a large percentage of the information is the same.
But I recently visited my senior citizen parents and got some exposure to Fox News. During their commentary shows they just throw outrage after outrage at the wall and see what sticks. One example was trying to stir up a controversy over not covid testing people crossing the board illegally. Another was a rich part of Atlanta trying to break away from Atlanta and they were blaming it all on defund the police and black lives matter.
I live in one of the (upper?) middle class parts of Atlanta and I really hope they don't do that. Crime rates are up in a bad way, and the city can be pretty mismanaged, but taking your ball and going home isn't a real option. It's just going to hurt the city that will still be right next door, and that has your sports (some of it, Braves are gone), museums and culture, restaurants, a lot of work spaces and shopping, etc. You can't just wall it off and you do take part in it, so stay, keep paying your share, and fight to make it better. It'll be worse than when people outside the perimeter vote down taxes to cover transportation infrastructure and refuse mass transit, but are the ones commuting into and through town increasing the burden on the transit system. We're all in this together, so let's try to work together to improve it.
In general, I agree with you, but in the case of Atlanta and Fulton county that narrative is in conflict with repeated poor management. Lots of cities have incorporated over the past 20 years and ended up with better services and lower taxes. Part of that is due to siphoning off funds that would help worse off, but most is just due to more efficient management.
I used to not support the idea of reforming Milton county, but it makes more sense as Fulton funds are focused on Atlanta and away from the tax base. Especially with stupid stuff like no Atlanta police chief for a year, etc. And no Marta in north Fulton. And minimal court services, etc.
I live also live in one of the (upper?) northern burbs of Atlanta. I had to handle some property tax stuff and it was kafkaesque in how out of touch and poorly managed it is. Driving an hour to downtown atlanta to meet with an assessor who has never been to my town. Then meeting with a board of “peers” that also don’t even know the town where I live, listen to my arguments, ask no questions and then rubber stamp the county.
I’m not sure how to fix this and it’s so appealing to just give up and work on local stuff.
This is all in the same county, Fulton, and the northern part has voted to extend multiple times. The current Marta line stops about 8 miles from the top of the county.
Even other counties, Gwinnett and Cobb have recently voted to extend but that’s sort of a separate point.
My complaint was that Fulton county sales taxes support Marta, but Marta service does not extend all the way through the county.
> During their commentary shows they just throw outrage after outrage at the wall and see what sticks.
Yep. We’re all addicted to “rage-ahol” [1], but it gets eyeballs which means they can charge more for ads.
What’s worse IMHO is that we consume so much “news” that we can do nothing about [2], and I believe that contributes to people feeling quite helpless, and learning that all they can do is nothing.
We also pretend the law doesn’t say what it says. Look at the sanctuary states for illegal immigration and marijuana. Then the red states started doing the same thing with second amendment sanctuary states.
Looks like if there’s no political will to enforce the law it doesn’t get enforced.
The US system is, perhaps, unusual in that it started from a set of independent states that formed a federal government. While the balance of power has shifted century-upon-century towards federal centralization, the power of the federal government to enforce federal law is still constrained by the money spent on federal-level enforcement; states are not generally legally obligated to go out of their way to assist federal law enforcement (and proving obstruction of justice in an inter-jurisdictional situation is pretty difficult most of the time if the states just use "malicious compliance" and stick to the letter of the law).
Hence, "sanctuary cities" where the state and local government just doesn't feel obligated to hand over records and resources they aren't legally compelled to. It's basically daring the federal government that if the law is so important, they can spend the money on ICE / FBI / ATF / etc. resources to enforce it (because those resources are paid from a completely different pool than the state or town police).
I can hardly imagine how our technical jargon will change in the next 250 years. If you'll permit me…
What it means to execute code on the "bare metal" has changed over time. If you track its usage on HN, it is now common for programmers to use this to describe running a program outside of a Docker container or hypervisor/VM, but still atop an OS.
(I personally think this change in meaning is silly, but my feelings on this matter don't matter.)
Interpreting security policy making use of this "bare metal" term is now tricky. Choice #1 is to interpret the policy in the context in which it was written. Choice #2 is to attempt to interpret the policy in the context of how the term is now used.
(The best choice is, of course, to rewrite the security policy in question to address the change in definition, but for the sake of argument let's consider this to be too impractical to even consider.)
Let's assume that the 1996 policy in question is: "No company-written code that interacts with the Internet shall run on bare metal."
If we strictly interpret the policy in the context in which it was written, then we're in a pickle. Agner's hand-rolled x86_64 HTTP server is permitted. It runs atop GNU/Linux, so it's not freestanding and therefore isn't a "bare metal" program.
On the other hand, if we determine that the modern use of "bare metal" is compatible with what the authors of the policy intended, then the security team is clear to insist that Agner run his HTTP server within Docker, for instance.
Long ago, before the rise of Fox News but after discovering my political identity as being on the left, I listened to a lot of AM talk radio (particularly Michael Savage) both to get out of my bubble and in a "know your enemy" sort of way.
I learned nothing except that this guy was a tremendous asshole, saying things like "I want the US to nuke a country in the Middle East, I don't even care which one". Hearing shit like that, and his arrogant, bigoted, hate-filled bashing of everything to the left of Hitler diatribes just pissed me off, and I decided I really didn't need to hear more right-wing garbage.
While I was there, though, I did listen to others, like Rush Limbaugh and various other right wing "luminaries" (including going back to William F Buckley), and while Michael Savage was the most extreme of the ones I listened to, they were all just different shades of crap.
The same goes for listening, reading, or watching mainstream media like CNN or MSNBC, which I consider way too conservative for me. When I heard them defending the Iraq war, endlessly interviewing generals and other pro-war figures without interviewing any serious anti-war opposition (like, say, Noam Chomsky, or any of the other leaders of the antiwar movement), when they give trite, superficial coverage of protests and focus on sensationalism rather than issues the protests are about, when they (say) crap all over Obama for not wearing a lapel pin (instead of something serious like him enabling the surveillance state), when they give endless air time to Trump or can't stop talking about him (pre-election.. it's harder to ignore him when he's President), when they have an unquestioning support of capitalism, then I wonder why the fuck am I listening to this?
Yes, I'm out of my echo chamber when I listen to right-wing and mainstream news, but what's the point? They're really not telling me anything new... I already know how pro-war, pro-capitalist, right wing, anti-left they are.
Even consuming left-wing media mostly just upsets me because all they do is talk about the injustices of the right and quote right-wing media back at me, which just pisses me off more.
If I was politically active maybe this would be more bearable, as I'd have an outlet for my frustration, but as I'm not I really try to limit my consumption of news, left-or-right.
In theory it would be nice if there was more real communication between the left and the right, mutual understanding, and cooperation on issues we do agree on.. but I just don't see it happening. Both sides see each other as super biased, unfair, and close-minded, and it's hard to see how that's going to change... just getting out of one's echo chamber is not enough.
An underrated way to get out of your echo chamber is to actually talk to people in person. I lean fairly conservative, while my wife and her friends are very liberal. Whenever we happen to talk about political topics, most of the time we end up understanding where each other are coming from, even if we still don't agree.
Perhaps your political viewpoints are fairly mild compared to mainstream conservative discourse? It's difficult to have civil discourse with someone who says your identify (or the identify of those you love) should be outlawed or otherwise severely restricted by the state. That's been a core tenet of conservative politics and policy for several years now and I do not have the intellectual tools nor the emotional strength to find common ground with people who view the world that way.
Well, but do you vote for conservative candidate that may believe it?
So maybe a person is believes in X, but if they continue to vote for candidates or parties actively promoting "not X", you can understand why this advice rings hollow.
The liberal viewpoint is vastly different from the conservative viewpoint, but only if we find a way to communicate and find common ground will we ever hope to move forward together as a nation. Seeing your political opponent as irredeemable is the first step towards sectarianism, which can easily lead to war.
I lean to the right, and yet regularly talk to and see the humanity in liberals on a pretty regular basis. We are all people, even if we see things differently.
If a major political party prioritizes limiting the rights and freedoms of entire groups, how can we expect to find common ground with them? If you are asking people who are directly impacted by these laws to find the humanity in their oppressors, you are asking for the impossible.
The fundamental purpose of law is to place limitations on the allowed behavior of other people. The lines between what behavior is right and wrong varies from people to people and group to group, hence why we have democracy to try to form a consensus.
There is a stark, obvious and undeniable difference between "other people" and narrowly defined groups of people, such as Jews, gay people, black people, immigrants or women. Many people view targeted restrictions on specific groups of people as some of our most atrocious and indefensible errors throughout history. I am one of those people.
Yes, but reality is muddy and people affect each other. Look at the rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide, and see how well they correlate with the liberalization of American culture since 2012. Look at the declining rates of sex in our youth, the number of school shootings, the rise of populist politicians... If a generic goal of diversity and avoiding hurt feelings was what our country truly needed then our country would be better than ever, but its not.
You are obviously right when you look at the far right. Complete oppression is a bad thing. But swinging to the other extreme and saying that no ways of life are better than others causes social instability too.
Whether it should be government's job to do that is another matter.. I'd much prefer that our society handles such social pressures itself, though such social feedback systems seem to have broken down.
>It's difficult to have civil discourse with someone who says your identify (or the identify of those you love) should be outlawed or otherwise severely restricted by the state. That's been a core tenet of conservative politics and policy for several years now
On the far right yes, but not in mainstream conservatism. For example, a recent poll shows that 55% of Republicans support gay marriage (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004629612/a-record-number-of...). And that is even putting aside the question of whether wishing for gay marriage to be illegal really constitutes a severe restriction of someone's identity or the identity of those they love.
This assumes that everyday conservatives believe in the republican representatives that end up in power.
I didn't even vote in the last election as I felt un-represented. For me there was no 'greater evil' candidate. Prior I voted libertarian, but what good does that do?
Does having voted a certain way for a candidate make your beliefs ultimately responsible for the way the representative governs? In America we essentially get `choose red or blue`.
How can the subjects as complicated as everyday topics are ever be reduced to two colors!?
The problem _is_ our tyrannical democratic system.
I think a large bit of conservative viewpoint today is that the government shouldn't even be involved in marriage.
I don't at all care what you do with your life, and really I'd like it if you gave me the same courtesy.
But, if you believe that because I consider myself more conservative than not, I must then hate your lifestyle, how can we ever come to a happy coexistence?
I don't think you hate anyone. I know that millions of voters reliably vote for candidates who are outspoken about oppressing specific groups of people, and who introduce legislation and vote in support of legislation that targets specific groups of people.
I'm glad you don't care what I do with my life. If you vote for candidates that legislate in ways that do restrict my life, I ask that you please stop.
I replied below to another comment, but that reply fits here as well.
> This assumes that everyday conservatives believe in the republican representatives that end up in power.
I didn't even vote in the last election as I felt un-represented. For me there was no 'greater evil' candidate. Prior I voted libertarian, but what good does that do?
> Does having voted a certain way for a candidate make your beliefs ultimately responsible for the way the representative governs? In America we essentially get `choose red or blue`.
> How can the subjects as complicated as everyday topics are ever be reduced to two colors!?
> The problem _is_ our tyrannical democratic system.
I'm for small and lesser government and anti-war. I also like freedoms including gun rights.
I think less taxation is great and believe in the free market.
I believe in a nuclear family and traditional marriage for a healthy society, but not to the point that I'd ever try to force it on someone else, but in that I think it's proven to be the best way for people to rise from poverty and build a healthy community.
I don't think abortion is okay, but I won't stop you from having one.
I don't want the government to provide welfare though I do think that minorities have been hurt by our current system. I think welfare has if anything propagated said system.
I'm skeptical of big pharma and in particular the systems that both hyped COVID's danger and provided the vaccine.
I'm not anti-science, but anti-scientism.
My point is, I'm mostly conservative--to the point I get downvoted a lot when I express my opinions and I identify with a lot of opinions that are removed from twitter and youtube.
I think global governance only leads to more inscrutable bureaucracies and less freedom and privacy.
I believe that governments everywhere are doing their damnedest to scare everyone into believing more governmental control is the only way to protect you from `the other`.
I'm pretty clearly in the conservative camp. That said, I don't wish to control you, simply not to be controlled.
I have been reading daily news for 50 years. When I first started reading the news, it was objective. It portrayed facts with little opinion. Then during the Reagan presidency, I noticed a trend towards liberal bias in the media. This is well documented by MRC.org. To counter this, conservative talk radio was born, and Fox news was created.
In the din of infinite media outlets, the major media outlets must stand out from the crowd. They do this by extending their bias to outright advocacy for their political side. This is happening on both sides. Other niche outlets are doing the same thing to be attractive to a specialized set of readers.
Unfortunately, it has gone from advocacy to outrage. A daily outrage occurred in the media in response to Trump, where every action created an outrage from one offended group or another. It was more than just Trump. "Cancel culture" was created where those who were outraged by something someone said on social media "cancelled" the speaker's life by erasing them from society. They lost their jobs and were ostracized by their peers.
Where does all this lead? I hope it is not violence. However, the political violence I see everyday in the form of violent protests and riots is not a welcome sight.
What I continue to be surprised by is how the left-leaning sources keep denying their liberal bias. Fox news more or less admits to being right-leaning, but CNN is still insisting that they're unbiased, which is almost comical. I think that somehow left-biased types really, honestly, believe they're actually considering both sides of every issue, and just coming to the conclusion that "reality has a liberal bias".
CNN isn't biased to the liberal or conservative viewpoint, it is biased towards clicks and views. A lot of the blame for trump gaining acceptance as a viable voting option belongs to CNN for uncritically promoting him and giving him coverage.
When looking at US politics reality does have a liberal bias. Look at how conservatives handled the pandemic and losing the 2020 election. The minority party with a majority of the voting power in the US actively believes and promotes a false version of reality.
Raw vote totals tell a different story (millions more vote for Democratic candidates, even when the Democrats lose), the fact is that the GOP can win federal elections because land has more voting power than people
> Bullshit. CNN is in the tank for the corporate wing of the Democratic party.
Bullshit. CNN repeatedly focused on trump to the detriment of other candidates because he generated clicks and views.
> Absolute bullshit. You believe CNN was pro-Trump in 2015/2016? Every single story/show was about how terrible he is.
It's hard to report on him without it being obvious how terrible he is. Most of the reporting in 2015/16 were about his zany antics, in your face racism, and sexual assault admissions - but still free airtime.
> I think you're the one with a false version of reality if you believe CNN was/is pro-Trump.
I said they're pro-clicks and views, and trump was a vehicle for that, which helped him get elected. You should work on reading comprehension.
As I said, it is impossible to report on trump without being somewhat negative because very little that he did could be spun in a positive manner. This doesn't justify keeping a camera on his empty podium at one of his rallies while other candidates are giving speeches.
Clicks, and views.
Also your post doesn't really match what you claim it does - in no way does NPR admit that the coverage was unfairly negative. It seems to say it was negative because trump had little substance to his policies and there weren't many positive things to say about the job he did.
Which makes sense given the results of his presidency (coup attempt, many convicted associates pardoned, hundreds of thousands dead due to incompetence/lying, economic collapse, destruction of American family farming, etc.)
> What I continue to be surprised by is how the left-leaning sources keep denying their liberal bias
There are no left-leaning major news outlets in the US (the nature of capitalism assures that; you can’t get the kind of capitalist backing for anti-capitalist positions required to be a major media source), only far-right and center-right, and even the center-right ones treat targets to their left much worse than those their right.
And if there was a left-leaning outlet, their bias would be left, not liberal.
> Fox news more or less admits to being right-leaning
Only recently, in the Trump era, did Fox drop “Fair and Balanced” for “Standing Up For What's Right”.
> but CNN is still insisting that they're unbiased
That's because Fox is marketing to people who see themselves as on the Right and CNN is marketing to people who identify as centrist, non-ideological, or above the fray (who are largely the pro-status quo center-right.) Both label according to the identity group they are marketing to.
Get a list of the names of medium-to-large town newspapers (from, say, 1980, before many of them closed). Look at the names. Note how many papers have "Democrat" or "Republic" in the name. Many of those papers were founded to deliberately support one political party.
So "it was objective" may be a bit much. UPI, AP, and the national news were pretty close to unbiased. Local papers often had their slant, which would include editorials, local news, and maybe even which national stories were covered.
I would have to say that maybe it's not the news that has changed, but your view of it.
The media has always had biases. How can it not, it's run by people.
Look at the propaganda during the Spanish-American War. That's the most obvious U.S. example of how biased media can be. And we enjoy the temporal distance to not be invested in the events so we can evaluate it from a third-party perspective.
Are you saying the media became less biased after that then more biased?
It's certainly possible that my views have changed over time biasing my perspective. I can only speak to the time I have observed the news.
Abd you're point is correct. Yellow Journalism was a phrase coined in past history to described biased news, which obviously has existed in one form or another since the first newspapers. It is not a modern phenomena.
> "Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides," she says, "you don't understand the issue."
I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
(Ironically the search for counterarguments would often strengthen my position because they would turn out to be quite weak. Nevertheless I think that the exercise is important.)
I think the words "well-reasoned opinion" describe it well: try to see what part of your opinion is fact, which experts you trusted for that, and what part is morality and ethics.
> I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
It's a nice quote, but I don't find it accurate for all topics. Should I be trying to figure out how to make passionate arguments for the Q Conspiracy nuttiness? There are lots of antivaxx conspiracy theories that are pretty close to mainstream in parts of the US - should I be trying to figure out how to make a passionate argument for those?
For many of these conspiracy theories the 'understanding' part should probably be more along the lines of epistemic forensics - "What kind of misinformation got them to this point?"
It's not accurate for all topics. Can you make a passionate argument for a flat Earth? One that isn't rooted in ignorance or denial of something basic?
So obviously there are some topics in which you can understand the issue well, but still not be able to make a credible defense of the other side.
Now, the point of the exercise is valid. We should always be approaching an issue from the perspective of "What am I missing?" or "How am I wrong?"
Of course, bad faith debaters will ask this of you while not doing it themselves. Or they will do so only superficially. They won't actually try to disprove themselves.
Which makes discussing things with such people exhausting.
I don't know that you should absolutely not have an opinion without understanding the other side, but if you don't spend at least a little bit of time understanding what motivates people to believe in conspiracy theories you will struggle to understand over half the population of the US.
Most of the main tenets of QAnon are recycled conspiracy theories that predate Q, which is why the "X% of people believe in QAnon" headlines that have been going around recently are so misleading.
Epistemic forensics is necessary for an awful lot of things people believe (true or false) given that for many things personal experience is insufficient to uncover the truth, and for any single truth, only a tiny fraction of the population is making direct observations at scale.
The issue with this standard is it can only be applied to situations where you're making decisions about the fates of other people - where you don't have skin in the game. It would be ridiculous to, for example, require that all trans people possess in-depth knowledge of TERF arguments against the validity of their identity (along with counter-arguments) before accepting that they understand their own identity. So sure, subject the lofty peanut gallery to this standard. If you're actually personally affected by a political issue it's usually pretty easy to figure out where you stand on it.
> It would be ridiculous to, for example, require that all trans people possess in-depth knowledge of TERF arguments against the validity of their identity
Is it though? If you want to convince someone of something, you have to understand the opposing viewpoints well. Many rational viewpoints labeled TERF don't "infringe on the validity of [trans people's] identity." For example, trans women competing against women in sports. You wouldn't convince anyone by straw manning one side by saying that people who oppose trans women competing against women are all simply transphobic; you would say that they believe that trans women have a physical advantage over non-trans women in sports.
I think I see what you are trying to argue and let me say, with as much respect as this comment box allows me to convey, that I completely disagree.
First of all, if you have skin in the game then it becomes even more important to try to understand the opposition's arguments in order to convince them to join your cause and to prevent others from joining the other side.
As for your example, I am convinced that trans people have a battle to fight for greater acceptance in most (all?) societies. But I would still insist that they have only earned the right to call someone, or something, trans-exclusionary, if they have given careful thought to the argumentation and the positions actually taken.
Sometimes this is easy: if someone says "trans women are not women" then in my mind that is not even a coherent position (define "woman"). But if someone says "most trans women have not had the same childhood experiences as cis women" then that is (to me at least) a statement of fact. Calling the latter statement trans-exclusionary is not what I would call a well-reasoned opinion.
Deeply understanding viewpoints that pose a direct threat to you takes a lot of effort. It takes time and mental resources. I don't think it is fair to expect that of everyone; activists, sure, but most people just want to live and feel safe. That is hard as is, especially for trans people.
Yeah, I would estimate <1% of people try to deeply understand the nuances of any issue.
It would be great if we had a reliable way to identify that 1% and sort articles/comment/reach by this metric, but it's a hard problem.
For as many people that deeply understand a topic, there are many more that are parroting or making up rationalization for the beliefs they think they are expected to have. These sorts of arguments aren't really arguments, they are just a self-soothing method of tribal identification.
I think there is a pitfall with trying to "understand the other side" because there are an infinite number of possible opinions and not all have merit. It is useful to a point, but when taken to the extreme you just waste a bunch of time reading garbage.
But this would only disagree with my comment if you further say that trans people should nevertheless be allowed to call something or someone trans-exclusionary without having understood their position. Is that your point?
If it is then I would still disagree: if it is too emotionally taxing to try to understand an opponent's position then I think that one can just refrain from calling them out in public.
In fact, how do you know a viewpoint really poses a threat in the first place? For example, which of your rights does it propose to infringe? If you can answer that then you probably already understand the viewpoint enough to counter it...
>> "Until you can passionately make arguments for both sides," she says, "you don't understand the issue."
> I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
There's a difference between "understand" and "make a passionate argument for" a given position. It's become standard for just about any ideological position to claim that anyone who disagrees "doesn't really understand" and to primarily use extreme emotions paired with unverifiable claims. At what point does one "understand" in these conditions?
The idea that most issues today have two reasonable sides arguing is itself an ideology. Often there's not even one reasonable position.
The vast majority of people do not have the time to even research for an informed opinion. Not to mention for any hotbed issue, being able to differentiate between the actual factual reports and opinionated bullshit is next to impossible on the modern internet unless you are a domain expert who can sniff this stuff out.
But lots of times people will make an argument for the other side, then poke holes in it, aka a straw man. So it's pretty annoying to hear "people on the other side argue X but that's wrong because Y" as a demonstration of one's enlightenment.
My main issue with American news and commentary is the complete lack of skepticism of those on 'their side' of an issue.
On the right, when Trump hadn't yet gotten control of the party, there was some persistent reaction against him from established conservative media. Once he got control, it was almost complete silence.
On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's election team was completely made up and water carrying by the media of Clinton's team's planted story has never been owned by the participants.
There are near infinite examples of this on both sides. I just want media that is skeptical of those in power and those seeking power. All of them, not those on another team.
> On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's election team was completely made up and water carrying by the media of Clinton's team's planted story has never been owned by the participants.
The fact of the matter is the Ratcliffe Letter [0] shows that President Obama was given an briefing well before the Steele Dossier was leaked to the media that the Russians' had picked up intelligence that exactly that kind of fake evidence would be planted by the Clinton campaign.
I really don't believe in a coincidence that big and unless Steele was simultaneously a Russian and Clinton asset, it doesn't matter, and that would be even a bigger issue that should have been the story. Can't have it both ways.
I'm perfectly happy to not have Mr. Trump around any more, but I'd prefer the media not carry water for their preferred candidates and let me make those determinations
> fake evidence would be planted by the Clinton campaign.
Again, this never happened. First of all, the Steele Dossier was raw intelligence, not meant to be taken as fact. It was paid for initially by Republicans, not HRC's campaign, so pinning it on her is disingenuous. Also, there were clear links between the trump campaign and Russia, including some that led to arrests of his folks and some that should have (Jr's meeting that trump helped him lie about).
Your own link (and common sense) disputes your claim that it was proven HRC's campaign did this:
> The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
It was Russian disinformation creating and spreading the lie that you are boldly posting on here.
>Also, there were clear links between the trump campaign and Russia, including some that led to arrests of his folks
Name one Trump person who was arrested (let alone convicted) for something actually, directly related to Russiagate.
Papadopoulos: Indicted for making a false statement to FBI.
Manafort and Gates: Indicted for not registering as foreign agents of Ukraine (which, you might have noticed, is sort of an enemy of Russia right now)
Flynn: Indicted for making a false statement to FBI. (Forced by lack of legal fees into pleading guilty, which later caused problems when the government tried to drop charges.)
Pinedo (Who? Exactly): Indicted for identity fraud.
van der Zwaan: Indicted for making false statements (and not an American, anyway).
Cohen: Indicted for making false statements.
Stone: Indicted for making false statements and witness tampering.
Then we have people like Carter Page, whose name was raked over the coals for years because a FBI lawyer intentionally altered evidence (<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/fbi-ig-report...>) showing that far from being a Russian asset, Page had for years briefed the CIA every time he met with suspicious Russians. (Got to love how the Times describes said altering evidence as a "serious error".) You want an actual Russiagate-related indictment and guilty plea? Kevin Clinesmith, said FBI lawyer, is your man.
- Roger Stone (he lied about his work with Guccifier 2.0, and wikileaks which was working as an arm of the Russian government)
- Paul Manafort (his work in Ukraine was done on behalf of Russia - I mean seriously read about the shit he did: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/05/ex-trump-aid... - also linked with wikileaks, but not in the US election context afaik). And where did the former leader of Ukraine, Yanukovych, who Manafort propped up flee to when the shit he and Manafort did together came out?
- We know Jr attempted to get the Russian governments help and had a meeting in trump tower about it, that his dad helped him lie about (obstructing justice in the process)
Ratcliffe was a big Trump supporter, not sure how much anything he said can be trusted. The letteris lacking in detail and hard proof. It even acknowledges "The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to
which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication."
Right, all the letter says is what anyone who is talking about the Steele Dossier should already know - Russia habitually leaks disinformation, and will mix the lies with fact to confuse folks. Steele said as much himself which the FBI commented on in their review of the dossier (parts of the report he got from Russian contacts he wasn't sure were accurate, but since it was raw intelligence he reported it).
Basically the letter says: "somebody heard from some Russian source that is not trusted that HRC was behind linking trump to Russia, but since that source is not trustworthy and there's no evidence we can't determine that to be a fact."
Treating that tenuous link as a fact is doing exactly what OP is claiming the media did with the Steele Dossier (which generally they did not, they reported on its existence not its accuracy - and the media I consumed was careful about that distinction).
I don't know how to characterize my votes any other way.
Voted Libertarian this election and McMullin last. Both were ways to keep my vote away from Trump, though I had historically voted near straight party Republican most years (never actually straight ticket, just close.)
Going forward no party gets my allegiance and I'll vote per person/issue, but Trump was the turning point.
When you feel a civic duty to vote, but none of the candidates are really acceptable, I'll vote 'against' the worst by picking the least objectionable, until the whole country gets the Nevada option of 'none of the above.'
>When you feel a civic duty to vote, but none of the candidates are really acceptable, I'll vote 'against' the worst by picking the least objectionable, until the whole country gets the Nevada option of 'none of the above.'
...you cannot vote 'against' anyone in an election.
In 2020, I think I wrote myself in for about 8 different positions in my locale, because I won't vote for anyone I don't support. Sure I may not have won that time around, but I didn't assist anyone I didn't actively want to win. Guilt free voting.
Thankfully the facts are on my side. Have a nice day yourself.
If you wish to defend your position, please explain Don Jr's meeting where he's looking for help from the Russian government, trump's obstruction regarding that meeting, Manafort's working in Ukraine on behalf of Putin, and Roger Stone's involvement with guccifier 2.0/wikileaks.
Yes I am doubling down on the facts. For reference, you posted two links with no explanation as to how they supposably refute my points and have refused to backup your claim that HRC created the Russia problem for trump.
Please explain:
- Don Jr's meeting where he's looking for help from the Russian government
- trump's obstruction regarding that meeting
- Manafort's shady dealings in Ukraine on behalf of Putin
- Roger Stone's involvement with guccifier 2.0/wikileaks while working directly with trump
- Why you think HRC created a fake story about Russia given the facts above and the fact that even the Steele Dossier (only part of trump's Russia problem) wasn't initiated by HRC or her campaign
The fact that you cannot defend these actions show the weakness of your position.
The Steele Dossier was paid for by a firm hired by Hillary's campaign.
So essentially what you have is some weak circumstantial evidence and a campaign that tried to take advantage of existing leaks (about... what? was the information provided truthful?) and another campaign that paid to have false information compiled then leaked to the press in order to discredit a political opponent. Then, when that opponent was in office they tried to use it to overturn his presidency subverting the will of the people.
In spite of your "certain" rhetoric you are clearly in the wrong on this issue, as the Mueller investigation ultimately found.
But I suppose it's not worth arguing "religion" as this apparently has become, discarding reason and rationality. So as other poster says, have nice day! And I truly mean that, have great one.
> The Steele Dossier was paid for by a firm hired by Hillary's campaign.
Eventually, you're conveniently ignoring the fact that it was initially paid for by other concerned folks.
> So essentially what you have is some weak circumstantial evidence and a campaign that tried to take advantage of existing leaks
This is where your argument falls down. It isn't circumstantial evidence that Manafort worked for the Russian government's interest in Ukraine, and was convicted for work he did there. The guy he worked with fled to Russia once their ill deeds were known.
Stone worked directly with wikileaks/guccifier 2.0, who were working directly with Russia.
I guess you can try to say Junior was just doing what anyone would do, but his attempt to do so involved conspiring with Russia to get dirt on a political opponent - which doesn't make the Russia entanglements non-problematic. Especially considering trump then obstructed justice by lying about the meeting.
> as the Mueller investigation ultimately found.
Nope, the Mueller investigation was clearly an impeachment referral and documented multiple obstruction counts against the elder trump.
> But I suppose it's not worth arguing "religion" as this apparently has become
You are ignoring facts because that is convenient to your position, which is not backed by reality. Good day.
There's a thing that happened with the Canada subreddit. It used to be kind of an interesting sub where youd get neat Canada-wide local stories (mostly Ontario) that were genrally pleasant. It was a nice place to visit after being inundated with American politics. Then, sometime in the early 10s and it gradually became very partisan and political. Which, to clarify, means it got substantially worse.
It, like the comment sections on Canadian news websites, leaned heavily to the right. So a group got together and made alt Canada subreddit that leaned heavily left called OnGuardForThee.
Originally, I thought it would be helpful to compare the two subs to get something closer to the middle but instead all that happened was I got twice as much screaming hot garbage.
I unsubbed from both and now individually sub to all the Canadian town I can find. It's better now. There's so much less anger.
It's interesting to see how you've characterized what happened in r/canada. I think it is itself an example of polarization.
r/canada used to be great, as you said, but it didn't become polarized in a right vs. left manner. The moderators were self-admitted alt/far-right people who were pushing a particular agenda.
When the country as a whole votes left at a consistent 65-70%, then r/canada simply no longer represents the Canadian viewpoint. r/canada used to give center-right viewpoints attention at about the same rate as the support they got in elections. The push from right-wing mods to move to an even or greater split doesn't reflect the political reality of Canada.
r/OnGuardForThee is now a far more accurate representation of the political landscape of Canada where 70% of people vote center-left to left.
That slippery slope is a byproduct of their subreddit social mechanic combined with a polarized political climate.
If the sub leans 60/40 one way, the minority group will see all their posts being downvoted, and gradually leave. As more leave, the downvote pressure on the remaining few gets more intense, and they leave too, until you're left with a veritable echo chamber.
A lot of "local" subreddits started declining around 2015. It's like all the local news website commenters discovered their local subreddits and started posting there.
A lot of investor-relations style astroturfing began in the lead-up to the 2016 election.
We did some threat tracking for certain organizations as a result of the growing extreme rhetoric in some of these communities and with social media aggregation tools it became very clear that there are a lot of paid political shill accounts.
Facebook's toxic communities are far more grass-roots in comparison. They're also, at least in the cases of the files I was on, a lot more violent, and a lot more volatile. Surveiled Facebook groups looked a lot more like Parler than brigaded reddit subs.
I almost think it was these local news sites trying themselves to post on these subreddits. Looking at the histories of the people who actually post articles on a local subreddit, all they do pretty much is post articles. Who even does that? Either someone with some sort of complex to share every article they read on reddit, or an intern who is paid to post the article on social media and reddit is on that list. Even the LA Fire Department is active on reddit now. It's mainstream, and commercialized.
I think this is missing the darker point, which is that the main stream media along with the political parties that support them, are the the echo chamber. It’s not that we are caught in an echo chamber, rather it’s the information from mass media corporations that has created the echo chamber. If anything, to break out so to speak, is perhaps as easy as simply turning off all news, and paying more attention directly to what politicians are saying.
> I think this is missing the darker point, which is that the main stream media along with the political parties that support them, are the the echo chamber.
They are part of the echo chamber. They aren't the echo chamber. Social media does a fantastic job of demonstrating that people naturally construct their own echo chambers. We tend to judge the main stream media & polities without appreciating a context where they don't exist. It's increasingly clear that for all their ills, they do deliver, albeit in a flawed and limited degree, on their espoused objectives.
They're terrible, except as compared to all the alternatives.
Better to pay attention to what politicians are doing rather than what they are saying. Take a look at who donates to their campaigns, how they vote, and who they hang out with on a regular basis.
I wonder how different the polarization is at the local level. It's easy to get outraged about policies in another part of the country if your position doesn't really affect you. I'm guessing people have more nuanced views about, say, fertilizer or pesticides if they live in a very agricultural area or about investing in mass transport if they live in an urban area.
RT is fantastic for criticizing the US government. Though I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them when covering Russia.
Abby Martin's Breaking the Set show is what got me to pay attention to just how coddled by our domestic media our government is. There are so many things that they straight up don't cover at all.
It's not a slant in stories, it's a total refusal to cover important things.
AllSides buys wholesale into right-wing framing. By what measure is CNN's news coverage on the leftmost side of the spectrum? Is MSNBC really the equivalent of Jacobin or Mother Jones, especially when it devotes 3 hours each morning to center-right Morning Joe?
This is the problem with concepts of polarization: when one side is completely corrupt, reporting on that corruption (that is, observing basic reality) becomes a political act easily described as 'biased.'
It should be noted that Trump supporters literally stopped a vote that would culminate America's biggest democratic event in 4 years, they tore down the American flag on the capitol and replaced it with a Trump flag. Some 5 people died and hundreds were arrested. It's not an exaggeration or hyperbole to say that that Trump, his administration and his followers "assaulted democracy".
This is straightforward reporting. Are CNNs many headlines quoting Trump, Republicans or right-leaning judges examples of right-wing bias? Are news outlets not allow to accurately describe a conspiracy theory as baseless? To do otherwise is to implicitly give credence to it. Reporting is not mindless stenography.
Here's the problem with your framing: It's not "left-wing" if it's true.
The first. Sure, that's an opinionated take on the facts of the matter. But the facts aren't great either.
The second. Did a federal judge call the reasoning "unanchored in any facts"? If so, then they're just telling you what the judge said. Did the Trump DOJ then continue to pursue those records? If so, then they're just telling you what happened. That headline is devoid of any opinion. And let's not ignore, it's about CNN being the target of the Trump DOJ. If this is indicative of bias, it's bias towards CNN themselves, not any "left-wing agenda".
The third. Did Trump have a role in the security of the D.C. and the Capitol? The headline implies he did. And from what we know, he did have some role. He was responsible for certain things. Now the word "stunning" is a smell. But it's not really forcing you to care about one side or the other. It's just saying that the security breakdown was extremely unexpected. That all being said, did the Senate make a report? Did it reveal new details? Did it not say anything about what the President could have done but didn't?
The fourth. Obama is an former President. His words will be reported on. Did he say those things? It's not bias to say someone said something. It's not bias to report on a former President.
The fifth. Once again. Did that happen? Is that audio of Giuliani calling Ukraine to convince them to investigate Biden? Is the investigation he wants based on anything meaningful?
So of the five headlines you've chosen to demonstrate liberal bias by CNN only the top can be said to be actually biased. And that's mostly in presentation. Being critical of Trump, the Republican party, or "the right" in general isn't "left-wing" by default. Republicans themselves should have been critical of Trump. And they were, right up until he won the nomination.
Fairness isn't tit-for-tat. Not every "right-wing" impropriety must be balanced with a "left-wing" one. That's not fairness. That's sports team mentality.
Fairness is everyone being measured against the same standard.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted. It doesn't make sense to put a socialist website like Jacobin in the same category as liberal sites. It's two very different and opposing political philosophies.
More americans have migrated to 4chan and Gab. Interesting art, mind expending videos, and news about as accurate as the weather forecast from your grandpa. Apparently, "2 more weeks" boys.
Who cares? The framing of this issue is strange to me. I know what my values are, I know which side I'm on, I know what I fight for.
If you're looking for new philosophies or perspectives, I strongly suggest two things:
1. fiction
2. history
I don't think day-to-day news coverage can ever be written at a level where it might affect your fundamental values; among many other problems, it is typically written in a hurry, with a lack of context, and so it lacks long-term perspective.
In terms of books that have changed my perspective on some subject, here are some important ones I've read over the last year:
Azar Nafisi's book is both a true life action story, and it's also an intellectual journey, a consideration of how authoritarianism slowly takes over.
Sarah Chayes book is remarkably ambitious, not only did I suddenly see corruption as a global issue, but she connects it to religious extremism and then reviews the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 1400s and how that lead to Martin Luther and that era's own explosion of religious extremism.
Andrew J. Bacevich's book is a sober look at all the things the USA probably cannot do, even though it has the worlds most powerful military
The Brooks book about China was eye opening for me. I previously knew nothing about the Warring States period, or the intense intellectual debate that occurred over the meaning of the state and the duties of the leader to the people. I wish more Westerners knew this story.
Should I expect this kind of writing from the daily newspaper? Absolutely not. It's ridiculous. It's a category error. That's now what the daily newspaper is for. That's certainly not what the 24 hour news cycle is for.
Sometimes I want actionable news I can use, which is partly a matter of knowing which candidates might have the best chances of advancing my goals. Especially during primary races, day-to-day political news is useful to me when it gives me the information I need to decide who of many candidates I should donate money to.
But when I want new perspectives and philosophies? I turn to books.
Nah, the echo chambers are tightening into dominant and submissive; it seems like people are because they are reacting to patently extreme behavior, but in reality modern culture is very much a leftist dominant narrative with a submissive conservative boogeyman narrative.
The issue to me is more that the extremes are so extreme as to be unworkable; you have people being unironic nazis, monarchists, and marxist-communists, so anything else will seem sane and balanced. But it's definitely not being out of an echo chamber.
If you want to counteract the narrative bubbles that you're operating in, you need to work hardest to counteract the one that is the default. If you're like most Americans, you're probably immersed in left-leaning thought. The Left owns the culture. They own the major institutions that are shaping society through Hollywood, academia, sports entertainment, the music industry, social media, etc. They own the bureaucracy that has pretty much eaten up the US government. Even longtime bastions of the Right like the military, FBI, etc. have been taken over by the Left.
If you just consume random media, you're getting the left-leaning perspective. It's the right-leaning perspective that you probably have a deficiency of unless you make a great deal of effort to swim against the current.
Take, for example, Haidt's work on analyzing how well different political ideologies understood each other.
The bottom line: Moderates and Conservatives understood the Liberal perspective better than Liberals understand other perspectives.
Most of this is because the cultural tastemakers have long been college educated cosmopolitans, and the modern right has taken an extreme turn that has alienated them. Orange County votes Democrat on the presidential level now!
> Even longtime bastions of the Right like the military, FBI, etc. have been taken over by the Left.
What? What does this even mean?
The idea that the right understands the left better than the right is silly - how many Fox News profiles are there of Whole Foods shopping Democrats in Arlington? Of Black voters in Gwinnett county? Meanwhile, NYTimes did countless stories for four years about rural voters in diners that still like Trump despite the scandal of the week.
>The idea that the right understands the left better than the right is silly - how many Fox News profiles are there of Whole Foods shopping Democrats in Arlington? Of Black voters in Gwinnett county? Meanwhile, NYTimes did countless stories for four years about rural voters in diners that still like Trump despite the scandal of the week.
myfavoritedog's point is that the default position in the Times is of Whole Foods-shopping Democrats in NoVa. You couldn't read a book review, or sports column, without anti-Trump snark suddenly appearing in there regardless of the subject matter (seriously, it was like there was a quota to meet),
The pieces you mention invariably
* treat the subjects like they're a new, just-discovered animal species
* frame their fears and hopes, needs and concerns, in very patronizing ways. Example: <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/trump-macho-a...>, which a) attributed Latin male support for Trump to their desire for the same kind of authoritarian machismo that ruined their home countries (as opposed to the same reasons that other blue-collar workers, Latino or not, voted for Trump) and b) made wanting to provide for one's family sound like a bad thing. Outcome: Trump in 2024 didn't just again outperform expectations with Latinos in 2024 (<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/trump-latino-...>), but also increased his Latin support.
(Needless to say, there's never, ever any Times article discussing how Latinos' support for a large welfare state hearkens back to their home countries' social models.)
* dismiss those being profiled as aberrations. Example: In 2016 the Clinton-friendly media backfired on Clinton by missing the facts on the ground. If in Ohio—for the past 150 years perhaps the quintessential swing state—and Iowa Trump was 10 points up in the polls, the right conclusion was that the rest of the Midwest was swinging to him too. The wrong conclusion was to come up with imaginary reasons why Ohio is suddenly no longer representative of the region or country (<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/us/politics/ohio-campaign...>). One guess on which the press and the Clinton campaign chose.
> without anti-Trump snark suddenly appearing in there regardless of the subject matter (seriously, it was like there was a quota to meet),
This sounds like some sort of victimhood complex. I think you should understand that 54% of the country did not like that man, ever, and we gave outsized influence to the 46% that did at the expense of the otherwise silent majority. Joe Biden blew the doors off turnout in history despite never having blockbuster rallies like Donald Trump or his Democratic rivals.
> frame their fears and hopes, needs and concerns, in very patronizing ways
I don't really disagree, which should mean they would do the same for working class black folk in the same cities, yes? But no, they don't.
> If in Ohio—for the past 150 years perhaps the quintessential swing state—and Iowa Trump was 10 points up in the polls, the right conclusion was that the rest of the Midwest was swinging to him too
This is not a good example - when a state stops being within 2-3 points of the national margin (~+0 R in '04, +3 R in '08, +1 R in '12) and starts becoming +10 R and then +12 R in '16 and '20 it does stop being a bellwether.
I've found that I have to carefully tailor my arguments depending on the audience, to a greater and greater degree lately. In many places it seems the only way to get someone to listen to you is to couch everything you say in the terms of their pet causes. If I argue for LGBT rights with a conservative I have to make it about constitutionality and government overreach. If I discuss male victims of sexual and domestic violence with a leftist I have to talk mostly about female victims. If I advocate for the free speech rights of racists I get called a Nazi and when I advocate for the free speech rights of Drag Queen Story Hour I get called a communist.
I worked at a large US news agency for several years. It's a for-profit shit show.
After watching CNN's technical director saying on spy cam that their publication is entirely driven by propaganda, I lost trust in all the news agencies out there. Quote:
> Yeah. I mean like Trump, we did it, like when Trump was, I don't know, like his hand was shaking or whatever I think. We brought in like so many medical people to like all tell a story that like, it was all speculation, that he was neurologically damaged, that he was losing it. He's unfit to, you know, whatever. We were... we were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about, you know? That's what -- I think that's propaganda, you know? We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off the bow just hoping something would hit, you know?
I'm a massive centrist, not a US citizen, trying to be as objective as possible. A shit and for-profit/power propaganda is flowing from both ends.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] threadYou’ll learn something reading a liberal or conservative argue why their position is correct versus then other side. You can usually distinguish these article because they fairly state the other side’s position.
You won’t learn much reading something whose basic premise is “of course our side is right, let me tell you about all the bad things the other side is up to”.
It is kind of 'interesting' to watch but you are not going to get much out of it. I cut a bunch of that sort of 'news' out of my life. It was not giving me news but curated opinions to have. I found my stress levels were so much nicer.
In Ireland, say, there's a pretty sharp divide on the issues (Dublin was Yes+50 in the same-sex marriage referendum, most rural constituencies were more like Yes+5-10; similar though not quite as extreme split on the abortion referendum), but there isn't even remotely as large a divide on the _parties_.
All the outrage over "cancel culture" is not about censorship. Censorship means state power is deployed to silence speech, and that is not (at least in the USA) happening much. What the outrage is about is money. While you can still speak elsewhere or on your own web site, being kicked off the majors makes it hard to monetize that speech.
Deplatforming really knocked the wind out of a burgeoning outrage-for-profit industry that had some influencers making millions by being controversy and outrage trolls on social media.
Since when? You're attempting to give default context to a word that has none.
Somehow, api, I doubt that you'd be attempting that redefinition if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were silencing people and organizations of the Left.
Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
It happens in a token way in infrequent and extreme circumstances. But there's nothing even remotely comparable to the fact that Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter, that numerous internet powers worked together to shut down Parler, that the NY Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, etc.
the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery
Popularity despite censorship just goes to show how the operators of Facebook are in a different narrative bubble than a sizable portion of their users. The notion that Ben Shapiro is far-right is just demagoguery of your own. Shapiro is a pretty benign and centrist-sympathetic conservative.
I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488950
The reason why is NBC, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, etc are far more in competition with each other than Fox is with them. There are no major right of center competitors to Fox. This results in most right of center tv news watchers going with Fox. If there was only one left of center news channel Fox would closer to even with it.
No really, that's it. His games weren't political, and while he was open about who he was, he pretty much seemed to be inoffensive in practice. But since his fanbase has a lot of LGBT, they felt betrayed because he did so, and as far as i know he was definitely not trolling them or being any form of negative person apart from supporting people they disliked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/fivenightsatfreddys/comments/nybyo1...
I can understand not wanting to support legit offensive personalities, but increasingly it will be used as a weapon to enforce proper thought.
You can't really get used to siccing the tiger of cancel culture on people, because it gets really tempting to sic it on anyone. Homophobia for example is a useful concept to make people think about why they disagree with legalizing gay marriage, or their attitudes about alternative sexualities. But it also can and has been used as a club to silence enemies or any disagreement whatsoever.
You have to keep things civil and restrained because once unrestrained, like the tiger, it can be used on and go after anyone.
The LGBT community was [1] and still are violently attacked for the mere act of existing. The idea that people's political beliefs, what, don't affect other people who live in that country? Is insane.
Voting is a political act which affects others. If someone votes for a politician who gives cover and support to a group which - as an example - believes atheists are unfit to have the right to vote - then they are voting to strip the right to vote from me and I do not and will not support them or their personal enterprises.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots
The Stonewall Inn was effectively a brothel with mafia protection, not a gay version of Cheers.
Drug deals and transactions for sex occurred at Stonewall just as they have occurred on Discord, but I’ve not seen any credible evidence that it was a primary function of the place.
It seems somewhat a habit of yours to find something bad about victims and then use that to dismiss any wrong done to them. Someone subjected to police abuse? Oh they had a criminal record, so it’s ok. Indigenous people being tortured, enslaved and slaughtered by Spain? Oh, it’s ok because some of them practiced human sacrifice. There’s no going the extra step and recognizing Spain was in the middle of the Inquisition and creating their own murderous horror, or that the Spanish allied with the Aztecs to eliminate groups that didn’t have human sacrifice, or that the Spanish cruelty was applied to the people in the Caribbean as sport from Columbus. It reads like intellectual laziness.
Recasting criminals as innocent angels is a disinformation tactic. You don't get to accuse people of laziness when they correct the record.
As far as I can recall the Spanish did not ally with the Aztecs but conquered the leading faction of the Aztecs through an alliance with rival factions and effects of smallpox.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_Empire
Yes, that is insane, but I don't think the person you're replying to or the FNAF guy believe that. It sounds like Mr. FNAF might actually be opposed to Trump to some extent on LGBT issues. However, he feels more strongly about other things (USA-China relations, abortion), and he, like all of us, only gets two choices. So he chose the mix of good and bad stuff that he thought was better than the other mix of good and bad stuff. I disagree with him so I voted the other way, but I'm not going to hold him accountable for everything Trump says or does, and I hope I am not held accountable for everything Biden says or does.
Presidents cause unnecessary death and suffering without exception. That's not to say that "everything's a gray area so nothing matters", rather it means that you can't just take one issue and be like "I can't imagine how you would vote for somebody who believes this". Maybe the other option was somebody who is ~3% more likely to start a bad war, for example. Or 3% more likely to lose an inevitable war. I might take a bible-thumping evangelical with a slightly higher chance of winning WWII over somebody with exactly my ethics in office with less strategic acumen. It depends on the actual degree of difference. I'd have to assign weights to things and sum them up, because it's democracy and that's what you do.
I don't think this is a cancellable offense. I think if you are going to sanction someone for voting, it has to be real and clear danger of present harm, not "they are republicans, you know they hate us."
Like, if that's the case, why not just sanction everyone who voted for him?
These are incredibly different issues. For me personally, given that we ought to only have a small peace time army and we currently have lots of volunteers I support only accepting the strongest, buffets, most agile soldiers which 99/100 times will be a mostly male force.
When we have a war, then we can talk about adding more people, but fighting a war or being in the army is not a right and frankly the army is too big.
Now whether those men are homosexual or not is immaterial, but trans soldiers would require higher costs and more lifetime healthcare costs.
Being "cancelled" isn't some autonomous process, it's not a button that gets pushed it's people reading about an issue and making a personal decision they're entitled to make. What I do with my free time and money, and who I choose to support is my decision to make. Not yours.
This guy can still produce whatever games he wants, say whatever he wants in a public forum, make his own websites declaring whatever he wants to declare, probably get on TV and talk about it, get licensure to establish a talk radio station and talk about it all day, ... He isn't legally muzzled, and he's hardly reached a point where he has no audience in society. This is the balance of free speech. You are allowed to hold and express an opinion and everyone else is too.
Basically it’s just like calling for a boycott and removal of apps and removal from social media platforms.
It’s not calling for execution, just for reducing the person’s ability to communicate and/or make a living.
This seems like a basic understanding of what “cancelling” is although it gets spun up quite a bit because lots of people like arguing about it.
But I think it’s a “bad thing” TM to call for boycott and removal from social media. Not that it’s illegal or shouldn’t be allowed, just that it’s dumb and people who do it are dumb.
Similar to how Tipper Gore was dumb in the 80s/90s for calling for the “cancelling” of rappers and whatnot.
So, people who are or care about LGBT+ share the information that Cawthon voted in a way that could harm them. That’s not ‘siccing a tiger’ for any disagreement whatsoever.
It’s not a good idea to “cancel” people based on a single characteristic.
Only if you believe mainstream media sources, if you step out of your bubble you will see that trump will be reinstated this August
> No really, that's it.
No, that's really not it. Cawthon contributed thousands of dollars to multiple Republican campaigns in 2020, including some noted hate magnets (e.g. Devin Nunes and Mitch McConnell). This naturally sparked discussion of boycotting his products, some of which was level-headed and some of which wasn't. As has happened countless times for many other vendors and issues across the political spectrum.
edit: I guess I hit a nerve, lol
Trying to end a career of people because they donated to some politician or said some inappropriate years ago (that very often was accepted back then) is completely different.
Similar to how I think that racism is bad and systemic and must be eliminated and there are people who make a good living on raging about stuff. People building on a cause doesnt mean that the cause is bad.
>cen·sor (sĕn′sər)
>1. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and *to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.*
Being authorized by twitter to do it on twitter is still censorship. A simple non-political example: censor bars on nudity in media, literally labelled 'censored': https://duckduckgo.com/?q=censored&iax=images&ia=images
The mental gymnastics to excuse censorship by private entities when it's done to the "correct" targets or for the "correct" reasons is infuriating.
Censorship is censorship. It doesn't matter who is doing it.
Censorship historically means the initiation of force by the state (in the form of bans, fines, arrests, etc.) to suppress speech. There's very little of that in the USA outside certain well known areas like child porn or explicit personal threats of violence.
No, it doesn't, it historically means action by any locus of institutional power to control speech (and, before and directly inspiring that, specifically the review by particular officials of the Roman Catholic Church in the process of pre-publication review of material to assure it was free of doctrinal error.)
I started doing that and now I’m kind of politically homeless but oh well. I do notice that I can talk to either side now which is cool and no one automatically puts up their defenses.
For example, lots of left-leaning Asian Americans agree that race-based affirmative action is unconstitutional, which puts them at odds with many of the people they'll likely vote for.
As a data point. I moved to a red state and have befriended quite a few republicans. Any of them with a busy life really don’t care about the current hot button issues the media says they do. They mainly seem to want the government to leave them alone. It’s hard to fault them for that.
The only ones that care about the hot button issues are the ones that watch the news several hours a day.
IMHO, the most inflammatory and dangerous things in our political discourse nowadays are the "we're under an existential attack (by our domestic political opponents)" narratives. Shit stirrers in both camps are enthusiastically engaging in them, and in the short term that keeps their bases enthusiastic and committed, but it leads to a vicious cycle that might actually bring about one of the feared scenarios in the medium/long term. Power play responses to the "existential threat" posed by the other side are likely to themselves be interpreted as "existential threats" by that side.
Deescalation is needed, and that's going to look like compromise that the activists/partisans are going to be really unhappy with.
(Of course, even then it's not simple. There's also party infighting, subparties, etc, so even if my opinion on "what the issue is" lines up, my opinion on "what the solution is" might not.)
Edit: another complication is strength of conviction. For example, standard American left/right dichotomy comes with very strong conviction about guns. I have very very weak conviction about guns. Even though I tend to agree with my ideologies' opinion on what should be done about gun control, I don't really care that much either way whether there's no gun control or super strict gun control. So while I do "identify" as my ideology here, there's clearly a disconnect from the mainstream form of it.
I mean sometimes I fit with the far left (for example, mother Jones had a great article on private prisons a while ago), but for the most part I'm a conservative.
Anyway, my friend pointed out it's disingenuous to basically always end up with conservative views and claim to be independent because you want the brownie points. And he's right.
Like sure, neither of the major parties in America matches all of my opinions exactly but I still have strong opinions on a number of things, and they tend to align with a particular party.
I imagine this is the position most Americans find themselves in.
I've picked up some great regular reads from that list.
http://www.readacrosstheaisle.com
They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across.
In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not mention the other side or present a very simplified or exaggerated view and provide an opposing viewpoint.
They cover the same thing differently depending on which party is in power. The border crisis is a good example of this.
All of these make it real hard to compare viewpoints with a proper reference frame and even treatment. Eventually I just gave up and read Politico, Bloomberg and FiveThrityEight now. They seem to be used by pros from both sides and mostly report on what's "happening" rather than provide opinion. I can then form my own opinions.
I used to do what you did(just read a bunch of major publications from differing political orientations) but also found issue with not being able to compare different perspectives easily.
This is a big issue. But at the same time - it's not clear to me what the solution when every side is pushing hype rather than news. How do you publish an "opposing take" on something the other side is publishing that isn't real in the first place? It's not ideal to even acknowledge lies.
(According to [1], only 1% of Americans are Muslim, and 60+% are Christian--and I would be shocked if 60+% of American film characters are identifiably Christian never mind [how they are portrayed][2])
Worse, this seems to be increasingly prevalent in the academy as well. Indeed, the study cited in the article (from University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative) also doesn't mention these points of context and the paper is pretty overtly propagandist.
[0]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/movie-characters-muslim-riz-a...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States
[2]: http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem
Yet both Muslims and Christians are in the news a lot, and there's a lot of political discussion about them.
It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
The question I have is what is being preserved by not having a diversity of backgrounds, ethnicities and belief systems in films?
But interesting movies can be made about diverse characters as they can about homogeneous characters.
Only depicting homogeneous societies furthers ignorance and demonization of people who are different.
Showing more diversity, in interesting, authentic, and deep ways is one an important way we have of striving towards a society where we better understand and value one another, and get along.
I think you're arguing against a straw man. It seems pretty clear that no one is arguing for less diversity, but rather against diversity for its own sake or prioritizing it above all other concerns.
It has skewed perception, but whether that matters is up for debate.
Yes and no. First, so much media has fallen down when it comes to character development. Then there's the problem of big companies like Disney that are deliberately secular in their content.
That's the handy thing about essentialism, you don't need an individual character when you have pre-packaged narratives about their race, gender, etc. Rather than a complex character, we get a canned Black character or a canned White character or a canned Female character or a canned Male character. What do you need to know about a person that you can't infer from their immutable characteristics? (:
I'm not sure what your point is? That Muslims and Christians should be grateful that the news media talks about them a bit more than the entertainment media? To be clear, I'm not arguing that any particular group should have more representation; I'm criticizing the media for its increasingly propagandist angles.
> It would be refreshing if more mainstream fictional media featured them in realistic, three-dimensional portrayals rather than as faceless stereotypes, wouldn't you agree?
In general, yes, but that doesn't justify misleading or agenda-driven news media. And in any case, every time people try to "fix" the entertainment media, we end up with awful content (e.g., the GhostBusters reboot) and frankly I don't want to sacrifice that much quality for sake of representation. My wife and I were just talking about how many really good pre-2015 films wouldn't be made today because they don't thrust the characters' race, gender, etc into the foreground.
My point is that religious people, whether Christian, Muslim, or whatever, have a serious impact on our lives, and it would benefit everyone if we engaged with them as real people rather than fantasy stereotypes.
Fictional media can help with this by giving us insight in to what people are really like. My contention is that this is more desirable than merely leaving them as faceless talking points in the news.
Otherwise it's like asking for better sources to read about Chinese culture, or like visiting China once a year for vacation. You can't read your way into being culturally competent. You might even move your entire family to China, but it may only be your children who truly begin the road to integration. Anyone who is part of an immigrant community will have a story of the trajectory of cultural competency. It is an optimism which must be fulfilled by your next generation.
You can, however, follow generic protocols of kindness whilst in ignorance.
But I'd rather have there be movies on the Himalayas than not, even when we are aware it's not a perfect substitute for the real thing.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
You smile and nod your way through.
Anyways, the call here is for community integration, not for individual action.
Why go it alone?
Is one's clarity on community affairs the difference between choosing WION and India Times? Or The World Journal?
The solution is better movies on Tokyo, not no movies on Tokyo.
You're in luck, though, because there are plenty of great movies on Tokyo -- movies that even people living in Tokyo find give great insights in to their own society.
I'm more interested in them making more of an effort at a good story.
I recall seeing news about big movies, eg transformers and others where in order to satisfy the global market, ie China, decisions needed to be made.. and given that many of those markets appear to be more racist/anti-muslim, (obv not 100, but majority I believe)
and your comment seems to be suggesting [hope] that things above "will get better as the global market continues to expand." -
I'm not chiming in to say this or that is a good or bad thing, just trying to clarify that some things may make one think catering to broader global markets may not make "western whiter countries" more anti-racist or whatever is being suggested as 'changing and will get better' - if that is the perspective being considered for 'get better'.
There are studies showing "diversity" on movie posters hurt sales abroad - and of course there has been local pushback for whitewashing things for increased sales -
Unless we are talking about gov funded wokeness spreading where making money is not a goal. But I did not get that impression from the thread here.
But as a former Mormon myself I think entertainment is more interesting if it focuses on what we have in common despite our differences, rather than focusing solely on amplifying differences.
Not to say you're not touching on the question of _why_ we're so enthusiastic in media representation for those of the Islamic faith however, but the Mormons are a pretty open and shut case
I’m not white, Christian, or Jewish, and this sentence does not make sense to me. Making entertaining is a business, and it has nothing to do with what percent of people worldwide have what skin color or tribal affiliations.
If people making entertainment predict that they will earn the most money by targeting white, Christian, or Jewish populations, then they should if making the most money is their goal. Have you noticed how every big movie of the last 10+ years has a Chinese character? And a scene in Hong Kong or Shanghai? Many have Latin American characters as well, and Indian, and so on.
the point is that in a world without significant bias, we'd expect to see many more people of color and of other religions (to name just two aspects) being represented because of sheer numbers and because talents are distributed widely.
but that doesn't happen in this world.
In the real world, there will always be bias. Height, voice, gender, political affiliations. Forget about bias in US media, there are multiple Hollywood within India itself. And there is nothing wrong with that. They cater to different audiences.
And it does not “make sense” for to expect a group of Tamil film makers to add a couple white, black, Chinese, and Latin American characters of their movie is about people who speak Tamil.
this narrative is one facet of one echo chamber, tying back to the original article.
If you indicated that you want to see more minorities cast - then you have the option of going to see Moonlight, over La-la-land.
If one goes to the desert, they should not expect to see maple trees.
When analyzing data typically the first thing you do is take out the outliers and then focus on the remaining data. News outlets do the opposite, the take the outlier and make it the headline story and ignore the other 99% of the data.
Check out Counterspin, from the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting).[1]
They monitor mainstream media and critique it from a left-wing perspective.
[1] - https://fair.org/counterspin/
I don't always agree with them ideologically, but I find it valuable to hear a perspective on US politics & media from outside the usual Right/Center-Right binary.
They compare similar headlines and also show you what you might have missed because one side doesn't even surface the headline
Edit: this article is about allsides, if you read it
https://www.readtangle.com/
He operates just a little to the right of my own political persuasions, but even when I disagree with him, it's a respectful disagreement. Isaac's positions are nuanced, well-reasonsed and kind.
That newsletter is exactly what we all wish political debate in the US was like.
Someone on Hacker News a while back recommended the Wikipedia current events portal[0] and I have to say this feels like a more efficient way to consume the news. It feels less tied to trending topics and manufactured drama, and is more centered on what actually happened in the world that was especially notable on a particular day.
I feel like a lot of "news" that's reported in the American political media is just ideological argument, which after you've read the same argument for the nth time doesn't come across as very interesting any more.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Good luck getting a Breitbart/Newsmax reader to switch to even the NY Times or Reuters or AP, much less The Guardian.
Newsvoice was an app that tried to crowdsource that job instead of using algorithms. It very quickly became an alt-right cesspool, presumably because those are the same people who feel disenfranchised by FAKE NEWS LIBERAL MEDIA and so flock to alternative communities.
The utility of looking at multiple similar voices is to get a sense of the scale of a story, and inter-rater reliability; otherwise you have a portfolio of unweighted novelties.
Some center-right outlets that are still worth reading* (and I say this as a raging leftist):
The Hill, National Review, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, The Economist
*(as in they provide both informational "what's happening" and insightful analysis without venturing into flat out fake news... as long as you avoid their editorials and comments)
I suppose those are "classically conservative" news outlets, as in "small government but with a general respect for evidence-based governance, science, and the truth". I don't know of any reputable populist-right/alt-right outlets. I don't know if there even IS a reputable populist-right/alt-right movement to begin with, but that's another discussion.
Side note: Google News (as of a year or two ago, when they revamped their algorithms) unfortunately now also gives you a bunch of worthless blogs and fake news (the literal kind) outlets. I have hundreds of sources in my "never show this source" blacklist and even then it's barely usable. That said, it's still a useful way to see different takes on the same topic. Their grouping algorithm is a lot better than their vetting algorithm. Some of those sources should just not show up for anyone.
But then you can see the consequence. Apple News has less crazy but sometimes misses entire stories. Google catches what Apple misses. For the purposes of understanding the news landscape, it is more important to know that a conversation exists and to estimate its trajectory, than it is to get correct takes.
I only ever really make time for the news on the crapper. It's a nice way to compartmentalize. Plus it cleanses the soul... shit goes in, shit goes out. Current events are too depressing otherwise.
I remember seeing Twitter chatter from the right re: the Fauci email dump, and so I went on various liberal outlets to try to get the left-wing perspective, and it was complete crickets.
Especially when it's something I can't just read and form an opinion on myself (Fauci's email dump was absolutely massive), I depend on journalists to accurately summarize and contextualize primary sources. And it's really hard to get a straight take when one side won't even bother to write a "this is a nothingburger, here's why" article.
https://www.readtangle.com/p/dr-anthony-fauci-emails-coronav...
What are some things that we should have taken away from the Fauci emails that the broader left/centrist medias missed?
If true, COVID-19 is the biggest scientific fuck up of all time. Fauci had allegedly pushed to resume funding that sort of research.
Instead, the powers that be sort of dismissed it as a conspiracy theory for over a year until it was suddenly okay to talk about a few months ago.
Again, I can't even tell if any of that is true because most media outlets ignored it.
So does this exist? If so, just share that link. If not, stop pretending that "media bias" is an excuse to continue sharing the claim surrounded by unfounded conspiracy thinking.
Nobody who is dumb enough to let such a thing come into existence in the first place winds up with a career arc that takes them through a position of substantial authority at the federal level.
Politicians may be evil but they're not dumb.
>We have a good team lined up to look very critically at this, so we should know much more at the end of the weekend. I should mention that after discussions earlier today, Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory. But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change
Page 3187: https://www.scribd.com/document/510220252/Fauci-Emails#from_...
HN formatting is primitive, but the relevant sentence is "Eddie, Bob, Mike, and myself all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory."
So much for intellectual integrity.
Like "But we have to look at this much more closely and there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change"
He basically, said "Eh, maybe, but we really need to look harder".
But if the Washington Post and Buzzfeed (who are also, uh, media sources themselves) FOIA'ed 3200 pages of Fauci emails, there's a zero percent chance - zero - that someone from a bunch of orgs didn't at least take a look.
The reason it looks like they "ignored" it is because they didn't see a story to report. Which is how the process should work.
So if there were a Fauci email saying, "Yeah, we probably created covid, whoops" there's a zero percent chance you wouldn't see at least someone linking to the email in question. Do you see those links? There you go.
I recommend Sky Australia or NTD Media for factual coverage of US major stories.
Sky has the #1 coverage of the lab leak, with daily coverage for over a year and just broke the lab's on-site bat zoo. (The only bats in Wuhan were inside the lab.)
WORLD EXCLUSIVE: Footage proves bats were kept in Wuhan lab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANRs4DojOek
Gets tiring responding to the rights lies.
I think the idea that media can be neutral is pretty unrealistic anyway. Even non-profits like PBS or government orgs like VOA will have their slant so it'll always require the extra work.
If a group is left-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the left and everything bad about the right, If a group is right-leaning, they'll report on everything good about the right and everything bad about the left. For example, you'll almost never see CNN write an article critical about Democrats, and you'll almost never see Fox News write an article critical about Republicans. So you end up without much overlap between the two.
They'll only report on the same things when those common things are important enough / loud enough to where they can't ignore it, or when they're able to put their own political interpretation on it when telling the viewer what to think.
Mentioning the wrong topics gets people labelled as pushing "talking points" or "conspiracy theories" with total disregard to the factual reality behind. It doesn't serve the partisan narrative and that's all one needs to know. Insisting will get your suspended, muted, banned or deboosted/shadowbanned.
Not true at all. Here's one critical about Democrats as being too beholden to progressives: https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro...
Here’s one critical about the current Democratic VP largely for being too concerned with (and ultimately ineffective at) undercutting Republican talking points. https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/11/opinions/democratic-party-pro...
And that's just one day.
Except for stuff responding to new Trump-era revelations, they don't seem to have much current criticism of Republicans not buried within criticism of how Democrats deal with them, representing their actual bias in critical opinion coverage, in that it focuses on people currently in power.
(When Republicans held the White House and the Senate, they had more direct criticism of Republicans.)
"Compared with 2002, the percentage of full-time U.S. journalists who claim to be Democrats has dropped 8 percentage points in 2013 to about 28 percent, moving this figure closer to the overall population percentage of 30 percent, according to a December 12-15, 2013, ABC News/Washington Post national poll of 1,005 adults. This is the lowest percentage of journalists saying they are Democrats since 1971. An even larger drop was observed among journalists who said they were Republicans in 2013 (7.1 percent) than in 2002 (18 percent), but the 2013 figure is still notably lower than the percentage of U.S. adults who identified with the Republican Party (24 percent according to the poll mentioned above)."
(https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...)
"Some of the professional groups have clear liberal leanings. People who work in the news media are almost exclusively donors to liberal candidates:"
(https://www.businessinsider.com/charts-show-the-political-bi...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_United_States_presidentia... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_United_States_presidentia... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_presidentia... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...
PS Americans also overwhelmingly vote either Democrat or Republican in non-presidential elections, even down to the city council level.
Americans overwhelmingly abstain rather than voting for any of the offered candidates, Democrat, Republican, or independent or minor party, in non-Presidential elections. 2018 had the highest midterm turnout since the before the Reagan era, and it reached the whole way up to 49%.
Even if you read “voting for a D or R candidate in a Presidential general election” as “being a D or R”, and “eligible voters” as “the American population”, both which are clearly and wildly wrong, your evidence still doesn’t support your claim, because it has 98.2% of 66.2% = 65% of eligible voters, which is not “well above 90%”.
Wow, I never thought of that.
[0] https://libguides.com.edu/c.php?g=649909&p=4556556
You do realize that “woke” as a pejorative originated in left-wing criticism of bourgeois, centrist identity politics?
So, unless you are saying that CNN has joined that leftist critique, I think what you really probably mean is that CNN represents a strongly-held centrist position in that area, not a far-left one.
Except for everything Democrats and Republicans agree upon.
Which is a lot.
There's a massive amount Americans miss because thet witness very lively debate on very circumscribed topics.
The problem with Fox News and CNN is the biased attitude. They report everything good as amazing and everything bad as horrible. The anchors are "performing" the news, telling you with their tone, body language and vocal intonations how disgusted you should be or how much you should be rejoicing. This phenomenon has infiltrated the NYT and WSJ as well, and I've stopped reading both.
I can name one CNN reporter right off the bat who does and his post is nearly always in the headline section for the topic being covered:
Chris Cillizza
Find me the same thing on Fox and I will accept your arguement.
The thing I look for in good political writing isn't objectivity, which is mostly fictional, but an honest centering of perspective. This has two parts to me - a clear declaration about what the author thinks is the right answer and a commitment to making sure any opposing viewpoints are given as the holders of them would give them before being attacked. Like...I do think the US Republican party is not serious about many of their stated concerns, but I think it's easiest to see that when you contrast their stated views with their mostly political action.
This can get a little distasteful with racist or other hateful views, but there's no need to go into detail with the views of the groups you are writing against. You just need to describe them in a way they can recognize before you tear them apart.
So I guess I do not think good writing requires even treatment - it just requires demonstrating that you have understood what your opponents have said before you move to disagree with it. So, so, so much writing in US politics takes place between commentators who, for all appearances, have no real understanding of what their opponents want or why they might want it.
Rage makes more ad money than facts.
Their articles mostly follow a dialectical format -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis, with about a third of the article spent on each one. I don't know of any other publication whose house style is so rigorous in this.
It's also highly editorialized, but very open and transparent about the positions it takes -- any bias they have is in the open, but is in the final synthesis after they've treated both sides.
It also doesn't fall neatly into any liberal/conservative divide. It tends to be socially progressive yet only interested in solutions that can be practically implemented, pro-free market but deeply concerned about externalities and the environment, pro-democracy but with hard-headed realpolitik.
Plus probably half of what each weekly issue covers is news you won't find in any other American publication, at least -- it's a global publication and one of the best ways to simply learn about the entire world's political and economic news.
Conservativism is a relative position, but you can't be a conservative liberal.
Economist literally had a massive article what is conservativism. And - SPOILER - UK Torries used to be conservative, while GOP has been reactionary/populist for a while now.
You definitely can be a conservative liberal. The American society by and large is founded on liberal principles. All you have to do to be a conservative liberal is to stick to 18th-19th century liberalism, in being a so-called "classical liberal".
I agree that the GOP is reactionary more than conservative.
The term classical liberal exists specifically, because conservative liberal creates a massive ambiguity.
And getting back to The Economist - they aren't conservative at all. It's a modern liberal magazine, that routinely promotes wealth redistribution and support for the poor.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberalism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
As a relative politico-economic position, conservative is “defense of the position of status quo elites”.
In a society with a capitalist (including most modern mixed) economy, “conservative” in the relative sense is always economically liberal, because the status quo elites in a capitalist society are those empowered by and dependent on economic liberalism for their position.
(“Classical conservativism” is not relative, and is defined relative to the pre-capitalist status quo, and is specifically tends to be about the defense of the titled, landed aristocracy. But, because that is no longer an established elite, there's not a lot of classical conservatism left to defend.)
That's a very narrow understanding of conservativism.
> “conservative” in the relative sense is always economically liberal
Conservatives have often taken steps to restrict market forces, that forced radical changes. So no - you cannot generalize conservativism to "economically liberal".
But rather than listening to me, feel free to read up a scholarly article.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/
...which amounts to “lots of people have used it lots of conflicting ways, some even denying it has meaning.” Which, as someone with a political science degree with cobsiderable exposure to both political philosophy and more common political dialogue, I’m well aware of. If you accept that whole space of use and non-use, the upthread claim that you can’t be a conservative and an economic liberal at the same time is more, not less, ridiculous, so perhaps you posted your response one comment two far down the thread?
I also don't think that being economically liberal means letting the market destroy itself or push large societal changes.
Nowhere I claimed that you cannot be economically liberal. You intentionally removed context out of my claim that conservatives will use economic policy to make an ad hominem attack.
Congratulations on coming out a "winner".
To the point that they had a whole issue dedicated to the death of modern conservativism and how their editorial policy is classic liberal.
"Classical liberal" and "conservative" are not necessarily at odds. "Liberal" in the sense that you are using it is a political philosophy, conservative is just a slot to fill in.
Because as political movements they are vey much at odds.
Mostly i feel more articles coming up that are worded in a way to convince the reader or a certain point without any data. This is something i never really noticed in the past.
It might just be me though.
Arguing that Economist is bad, because it was complex to cancel your subscription (I see a massive button on my account page) is like arguing that a restaurant is bad, because they don't accept gold coins as payment.
I agree its a well put together publication, but a socialist (for instance) would argue it is deeply ideological.
Unlike many "well renowned sources" (ahem... NYT)
I listen to their articles and they often repeat this.
Literally typing this into Google would have provided you with the link to their website.
https://www.economist.com/news/2020/06/19/frequently-asked-q...
Now, what is a classically liberal bias, concretely, as far as international affairs are concerned?
As far as free trade, that's difficult to apply to most situations.
The issues come weekly with really interesting topical stories, so I always add them to my reading todo list, but they just pile up so fast.
This past year and 1/2 of WFH life meant, I now have about 50 issues to go through LOL.
Sorry for the jab, but I think this is our current political situation in a nutshell - surface level, emotional takes are the primary way people engage in news and thus politics. It's hard to engage deeply, but it's required in order to build your own narrative, rather than just take on someone else's.
I stopped reading it about 10 years ago for a few reasons. During the housing crisis the coverage wasn't as deep as it should have been and I would read articles that were nothing more than "nationalizing banks is bad" without explaining why.
Their coverage of US politics was also laughably bad. During the push to pass the ACA they overstated the GOP's position and willingness to deal. I used to get it from a library a few towns over so I would be 3-4 weeks behind. One time I was reading an article where Charles Grassley was being made out to be principled and respected and I'm laughing because he had recently endorsed the death panel nonsense.
I really, really wish I could recommend the WSJ, however they declined pretty heavily after Murdoch bought them. The number of long form articles declined and I was seeing less journalism and more ideological fluff in the non-editorial sections.
It's an English magazine that's not even 'News'.
Also this: "During the push to pass the ACA they overstated the GOP's position and willingness to deal." Is a pretty petty reason to not read something. Also, they could have been right.
There are better reasons not to read the Economist.
No, they were proven to have been wrong. I provided a specific example of their analysis being wrong, one which you did not address. The ACA passed along party lines after almost a year of deliberation. The GOP spent the subsequent decade running on "repeal and replace" only to get seriously close once. There are multiple other examples (McConnell declaring the goal of making Obama a one term president, refusing to conduct hearings to confirm Garland to the SC after recommending him, etc.) of where the GOP was acting in bad faith, which is also what you are doing here.
It's certainly not only interested in solutions that can be implemented. It's interested in solutions that enforce the free market, and it paints non-market solutions as infeasible, even though they often work and are implementable. But this is invisible ideology and very easy to mistake for pragmatism, because a pure pragmatist will certainly appreciate many market solutions.
The final synthesis is not after having treated both sides. It's after having treated two sides, which are editorially chosen.
As far as dialectics it would be much more interesting if they could dialectically analyze their own internal contradictions between democracy and interventionist realpolitik, or between free-market fundamentalism and concern about externalities. But it doesn't really grapple with those, which is a sign that it's only applying dialectical thinking in convenient ways.
In any case, the Economist is not any worse than any other mainstream publication. Often they do pretty good reporting. But you absolutely must not rely on it solely especially for foreign reporting where you don't have bearings.
It used to be a much better magazine.
They're not perfect, but it sure beats NYT.
If you want the optimal news coverage without needing to read a million sources - The Economist, Financial Times, WSJ and The Guardian.
They are not as forthcoming with their biases as it seems. They mainly set up their ideological oppositions as conservatives, but they in fact have a lot in common with them. This is especially true for foreign relations.
I'd be happy to see examples of articles that go against the Economists' editorial agenda in profound ways and that pertain to foreign policy.
If you want news coverage that is any good at all and you care about foreign affairs you absolutely have to include at least one and preferably two non-anglophone or non-western sources that preferably oppose each other.
A good barometer I have for journals as far as foreign policy is their coverage of the Iraq War before it began. As far as I can see the Economist published almost nothing opposing it, limiting themselves to surface-level reporting of anti-war arguments in the sole goal of defeating them.
I don't understand why you would limit yourself, if you had to choose 4 sources, to 4 centrist anglophone sources. It seems like a very biased media diet.
And how can 4 "centrist" sources be "very biased"? Isn't it literally the opposite?
No, centrism isn’t the opposite of bias.
Centrism is a position toward which there can bias of any strength. Position of bias on a left/right (or any other ideological) axis and strength of bias or two orthogonal, continuous dimensions.
But in practice "centrist" news sources are far more likely to present multiple points of view -- e.g. a left and right one -- while "left" and "right" news sources generally do not.
But at a deeper level, centrism isn't really an ideology at all, in the way the left and right can be. You can be a hard-core leftist or you can be a hard-core conservative, but the idea of a "hard-core centrist" doesn't really exist.
So I'd argue centrism can be the opposite of bias in a very real way. It's about dropping bias towards ideologies, and treating issues in a practical balanced way.
No, in practice less strongly biased sources are more likely to present multiple points of view. Now, the same amount of variation can seem more diverse when you tend to bucket things into “left/right” binary categories, if the center of variation is near the point where you draw the line between buckets.
But that's an artifact of forcing things into binary buckets making a centrist outlet providing center-left to center-right views look more diverse than a right-wing publication providing center-right to far-right views.
Most major news sources in the world report in English too. So you can indeed read news from sources that aren't from culturally similar anglophone countries and instead are from anywhere in the world.
Their latest issue literally has a massive article against vaccine nationalism. Their opposition to breaking of the Iranian deal.
> A good barometer I have for journals as far as foreign policy is their coverage of the Iraq War before it began
That's very arbitrary, considering that 18 years have passed. The Economist has changed hands and most of its staff.
> 4 centrist anglophone sources
4 sources that aren't radical, have clear motivation behind them. Money makes people write in a particular way, that is easy to gauge.
Also - why would I read insane crap on either side, my job isn't to read news all day.
>4 sources that aren't radical, have clear motivation behind them. Money makes people write in a particular way, that is easy to gauge.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Just because they have a bias that is for the status quo doesn't mean they are more or less right. As far as I'm concerned all I'm getting from this is "I agree with this ideological bias and I don't want to read anything else"
Anyways, it's your decision to subscribe to a biased news diet. You're not any better because of which bias you choose than someone who only reads Newsmax or CNN.
If your assessment is that anything that's not from the same ideology as these four sources is "insane crap", which it isn't, good points are being made by people of all political persuasions, then it's clear that you have created your own media echo chamber.
Also, not specific enough. Which Iraq war? The one in 2000's? 90s? 80s?
That said, the editorial stance of the Economist comes through extremely clearly in their writings and they are unabashedly economically liberal.
Your characterization of NYT as being less ideologically diverse really doesn't match my experience.
Your list is incredibly West focused and honestly not that ideologically diverse, with the Guardian I guess supposed to take the "left" position.
NYT has lost my subscription, after they just straight up started running exaggerated stories.
> Your list is incredibly West focused
I read in 4 languages, would you like some news sources in Russian, Lithuanian or Italian?
There's an adage in math modeling/statistics: all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Here, all newspapers are biased, but some are useful.
Unless there is some link between calculus and socialism that I have yet to discover
I think this is perhaps misguided. It's not fair to the economist to compare an article on, eg. politics in Brazil, against the nuanced understanding that a Brazilian citizen would have, because most people from North American with no other ties to Brazil would have no frame of reference.
In other words, the choice is not, a simplified version of the issues vs a nuanced understanding, it's a simplified understanding of the issue vs none at all.
And even non-local sources may still bring some enlightenment. If you were trying to understand Brazilian politics but couldn't read any Brazilian sources, it would still be much better to read Anglo, European and, say, Middle Eastern reporting and then consider the differences in reporting and how they might be linked to their worldview.
Besides, oftentimes a simplistic and biased understanding whose inaccuracy is not understood is much worse than no understanding at all. At least in the second case you are aware of your ignorance and will probably be more weary of rash action.
Whenever the Economist published an article on Brazilian politics, it was generally far superior and far more insightful than anything in the local press. Which genuinely surprised me.
Remember -- most local news sources, whether in the US or Brazil, aren't nuanced at all. They're surface-level and sensationalistic.
But while Brazil has a home-grown news equivalent of Time ("Veja"), as well as USA Today (O Globo) it simply doesn't have any home-grown news source at the level of sophistication of the Economist, not even for domestic news.
I find The Globe & Mail and MacLeans quite solid when it comes to news coverage.
The people who recommend against those medias already believe of themselves that they are better informed and able to recognize the bias. If they are that critical, then they should have no troubles consuming biased and ideological media, and they shouldn't assume without further evidence that others don't have the same ability.
Especially in this case it's weird, because the journal is called The Economist. Obviously you'd expect some bias pro economy there.
I'm arguing against the GP that said that it's okay to read only the Economist. It's not okay to read only a single source. You can be as critical as you want but if you no longer have any bearings on a subject you're being led by the nose.
Also, "pro-economy bias" is pretty vague. There are many ways one could be biased in a way so as to focus on a better economy, and they can be radically different.
Here’s a simple one: Last year, when anti-asian crimes were on the rise, the NYTimes dutifully reported the crimes.
But repeatedly omitted details like ethnicity or name, until a white attacker made the news.
For those earlier details, the rag the NY Post (conservative and borderline tabloid) was the paper to go to.
Eventually—as in many months after—the NY Times stated covering the full details because the problem was too obvious. Even then the Ny Times uses every opportunity to downplay the issue.
I’m sure conservative journalists are just as biased in their own way.
While they are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They cut through much of the partisan, mainstream BS - and get to the heart of many issues, all while debating ea. other in a civilized way.
https://www.youtube.com/c/breakingpoints
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-k...
It is INCREDIBLY refreshing, if you've fallen into the rut of mainstream internet or tv news.
https://soundcloud.com/moderaterebels
Which I hope stay online to show how they are professional. I also hope their new show gets the graphics and tech to catch up quickly, as they are a refreshing source of truths that need to be told, and I'd like others to be able to watch and feel the same without being distracted and wondering if the new/current as of June 21 make them amateurs with uninformed opinions - instead of the professionals with the history and knowledge that some of us have become aware of.
So glad to see them doing real and truth - we need more.
When I caught part of on TV the other night with Sharyl Attkisson
( eg https://youtu.be/ol-6AwoPLH4?t=947
) I had a similar - jaw drop - OMG someone is telling the truth and they are on the air and not in a mysterious car accident! This is amazing.
EX-CNN aparrently(?) - maybe it's going to be a new movement of like ex-X-cult - no longer beholden to Y -
Perhaps old media is not just losing but started to be lost.
I want a browser extension to highlight individual reporters and info about past biases - as it's too hard to pin a portal as being one way or the other, when there are shills mixed in with regular reporters and editors all mucking up everything it seems.
https://ground.news has an interface that highlights which news outlets with what general bias are covering which stories, which is sometimes fun to take a look at
After quitting reddit I'm often oblivious to clickbait flamebait minutiae that my colleagues all get worked up over.
Also- are there any reputable conservative print news sources?
The coverage/focus is the perspective.
Is it some fake news site, or some radio personality's take? Or is it some twitter spat / spam?
I don't think 'the other side' is all that simple to cover / has an obvious quantity to include with every news article.
Yeah, this is a key thing to realize. People seem to think that Fox News, for example, just trots out falsehoods all the time, but if you skim the news, I'd say very little is actually factually incorrect. It's more about the story selection, who they choose to interview to get the quote, how they contextualize (or don't) statistics, etc.
But once you realize that, you realize it can apply to, e.g. WaPo, which many Republicans say is very left-biased, while many Democrats say it's neutral.
I think an amusing non-partisan example of how story selection biases viewpoints is the so-called "Summer of the Shark"[0] where for whatever reason shark attacks became a part of the summer's zeitgeist and got extensively covered. Meanwhile, shark attacks weren't at any particularly elevated level, contrary to what many people ended up believing.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_the_Shark
Between the need to access government figures for interview, and their funding sources, how could you ever expect straight forward reporting?
If you aren't paying for your media sources, you're the product.
Even if you are paying, you can still be the product, as long as media can make even more money out of it. I mean, why wouldn’t they? More money is more money.
Fox News really is worse, and while there may be lessons learned there which can be applied to the other outlets, such as insisting on clearer labeling of opinion content vs reporting, I think it's an all-lives-matter-style distraction to throw up our hands and say there's nothing that can be done and they're all equally bad because it's a problem inherent in the medium.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/study-watching-fox-news-make...
And yet while they are all genuinely terrible due to trying to remain profitable AND trying to advance their personal political agendas, people are always trying to use the excuse that "its better than X" to justify supporting them.
My solution would be to ignore the news completely, but that solution isn't effective because I know multiple people that insist on ranting about everything they see/hear from the media on a daily basis.
IMO the media is very important for civilization, but somehow we have accepted that deceit, manipulation, and failure are the golden standard.
What are you arguing about?
1. Someone mentions Fox being bad for bias in story selection.
2. I ask: why are we singling out Fox specifically? Others do it too?
3. You say: "They give Trump airtime!"
Ok? That is a difference I guess? Not got much to do with what we're talking about though?
Is it less honest or is it just a narrative you don't like.
> They let people on air spout obvious lies all the time. Find a mainstream channel that does the same. I'll wait
MSNBC just like the other outrage opinion info-tainments has a lack of nuance (what you call lies) in many of its narratives.
None of it turned out to be true. When you compare the Adam Schiff memo release with the Devin Nunes memo, you can see that Nunes' memo was accurate. Schiff's memo was full of misinformation. Schiff was one of those guests who appeared on CNN and MSNBC over and over, claiming that there was evidence for "Russia collusion with the Trump campaign". He later had to retract that repeated lie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q2su1iknyk
Mueller and his team of Democrats instead tried to make a case for obstruction against a President who waived all executive and even most of his attorney-client privilege. Even the impeachment-hungry Democrats in the House couldn't mount impeachment charges on that weak claim.
What a waste all that was, and it was egged on and sometimes even fabricated at every turn by CNN, MSNBC, NYT, and WaPo.
But keep pretending that Fox News is some big boogeyman or even an outlier in the news business.
Trump pardoned 2 of those convicted for lying to the FBI during these investigations, George Papadopoulos and Alex van der Zwaan
And when did anyone try to overturn the election results? Hillary conceded within days. Trump still hasn't.
You're in la la land, no point talking to you
And yet, Hillary Clinton (who made her own claims that Russia had helped Trump steal the Presidential election from her) was a guest on mainstream news programs over and over.
Do you apply the same standards to Hillary Clinton that you apply to Trump?
What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise. Liberals frequently chose the red herrings on the multiple choice questions, the ones that exaggerated the conservative positions to the point of more or less demonizing conservatives.
That's why we're talking about Fox News, don't you see? CNN and MSNBC are just folks. Fox News is the Anti-Christ.
Even the article itself has this same smell of bias about it.
People trapped in that bubble are overly confident in what they believe. They aren't often exposed to arguments and data that are contrary to what they're told to believe over and over whenever they turn on the TV. So when these trapped people are confronted with opposing arguments or data, they resort to the easy mechanisms that relieve their cognitive dissonance. "You're a racist" "You're a homophobe" "You're a white supremacist" "You want sick people to die in the streets"
I think a major tenet of post-trump Republicanism is roughly: "We're going to be accused of being racist and conspiracy theorists by the left no matter what we do, so there is only an upside to openly courting those members of the electorate.
But then Trump tried to overturn the presidential election by attempting to have millions of votes thrown out unceremoniously, without a shred of evidence, with a constantly shifting story. This constitutes no less than an attempted coup. Although some people in the Republican party resisted this, in the end, the party decided not to purge Trump and his supporters (which would be the appropriate response to an attempted coup), and a sizeable portion of the party still publicly stands by him. At the same time, they are openly courting white supremacist militias and conspiracy theorists.
There are no other words for this: this is evil. Continued support for the Republican party is evil, as long as they have not purged Trumpism from the party.
/s I hope you realize the problem here. Republicans doesn't really support ending democracy, similarly Democrats doesn't support ending the police. Those are just what the other side thinks that side wants.
If you disagree with defunding the police but with significant other parts of the Democratic platform, you can ally with these people on some issues but fight them on this issue. This is also how democracy works.
Trump attempted to stay in power even though the people voted against him. This is tyranny. Working with him, in any way, is a subversion of democracy. Anyone who is willing to work with him is, by extension, an enemy of democracy.
The only logical conclusion from your post is that you are against democracy: You argue that a policy you disagree with (defunding the police) getting implemented democratically, is a similar level of "bad" as a tyrant being installed. This means that you are willing to see a tyrant installed if the alternative is (democratically chosen!) policy being enacted that you disagree with. Seems like textbook authoritarianism to me.
The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266
Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
But I'm totally unsurprised to see this downvoted here only 18 minutes in.
Here's a short article on the paper: https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand...
The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266
Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
What's funny is if you bring this up (even with sources) to conservatives. They're unsurprisingly unsurprised. But if you bring it up to liberals they often get furious because it goes against their beliefs that they're the more intelligent, more educated "side". Nevermind that believing in only two possible sides is six times dumber than astrology... something "both sides" are about equally guilty of. If nothing else I strongly encourage everyone to watch his TED talk. It's super informative, well delivered, and has a solid message of unity tbh.
I have a friend I haven't seen since high school, though I'm connected with him on Facebook. He will outright tell you himself that he's a communist—familiar with the writings of Marx, etc. We could not be more diametrically opposed. However, he's as clear-eyed as you seem to be.
I suspect that most people simply aren't all that intellectually curious. I don't remember if Haidt explicitly mentioned this, but I think somewhere either he or someone commenting on his study asserted that it is much easier to pick up the party line of liberals through osmosis, since those in education, the media, and so forth tend to be liberal. So, even conservatives are more readily exposed to the liberal take on things. Liberals on the other hand are not.
But the point I'm making by mentioning my friend and thanking you is that I suspect that people who are intellectually curious are more or less inoculated against mischaracterizing the side they disagree with, since they don't learn almost exclusively through osmosis.
I appreciate your contribution to this thread.
I am unsurprised as well. Aside from any other concerns about the comment, its relevance, or the study and its methodology, the upthread post, like the popular right-leaning media articles on the study, lies about the results:
Upthread post: “What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise.”
Actual article abstract: “Both liberals and conservatives exaggerated the ideological extremity of moral concerns for the ingroup as well as the outgroup. Liberals were least accurate about both groups.”
(It also misleads about provenance, saying “Jonathan Haidt [...] did a study”, when Haidt was third author.)
The actual results (especially liberals being less right about typical liberal positions on the axes questioned about as well as less accurate about conservative positions) are what you’d expect if the axes chosen were ones that simply tended to be more salient for conservatives.
https://crookedtimber.org/2017/01/22/protestandpolarization/
I agree Haidt's model is flawed, especially on the idea of sacredness being something liberals aren't concerned with. I think he's onto something, but he's painted with too broad a brush.
Lately, I've been reading a lot on the subject of religion: specifically, from an anthropological or sociological perspective. I'm interested in the idea of ersatz religions—filling the void left by modernity's secularism. My suspicion is that the great bulk of people cannot do without the things that religion affords; and so if they aren't "religious" in the traditional sense, they unwittingly find some substitute that does everything but revere Christ, YHWH, Allah, etc.
Behavior that fits that model I see again and again, on what we think of as the political left.
This study says something, it just doesn't necessarily say what you all think it says. It's also wildly outdated. Because we now live in this reality: Significant majority of Republicans don’t believe Biden’s win was fair[1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-pr...
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
So it's possible they are not answering to how conservatives see themselves.
And let's not ignore that the MFQ is kinda shaky at best.
I also find it interesting in that link is the why they were the most off. Liberals seemed to have been wrong because they regressed to the mean when answering for other people. They seemed to think conservatives were more group-focused than they were and less individual-focused. And vice versa for liberals. They thought that the average liberal was less group-focused and more individual-focused than they were.
And it's not like conservatives weren't wrong. They got it right when estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for individuals, but not groups.
Moderates were the most accurate in estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for groups. And both conservatives and liberals over-estimated conservatives concerns for the group.
So I really don't think it's entirely fair to frame the results as "conservatives know how liberals think better than liberals know how conservatives think". Because another reading of it is that liberals give conservatives a greater benefit of the doubt. And also that conservatives don't even know how little they care for the group.
And that's also ignoring that these are self-reported morality questionnaires. It's not really indicative of how these people might act in real situations. Even Hitler thought he was a swell guy just trying to do right. We all kind of think that of ourselves. No one thinks they're the monster.
"Those are just the opinions of a small fringe" was much more believable in a pre-Trump world - but now, even more than post-Tea Party, the fringe is pushing the agenda.
And even pre-Trump, you can read that study as an indictment of the conservative media and it's evolution to sensationalism since the 1980s.
To use an example from the linked article: "For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights." - the vocal conservatives were not expressing a very nuanced view, it was the violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime even in conservative outlets.
If you want liberals to understand your complex conservative reasoning, you gotta get the very-un-complex trolls off the air!
If this reasoning is correct, then conservatives should be becoming worse at gauging liberals' position on social justice-related topics, considering how their reporting tends to be dominated by extremists as well.
I'm going to reach here a bit, but are we going to rope in the Westboro Baptist Church and pretend these people were the "conservative" response? Even if we do that, do you recall them—as odious as they are—being violent or advocating violence? And if we're not pointing to them, who are we pointing to?
The far right keeps showing up bearing the battle flag and nazi flags -- and Flynn, Stone, and Trump appear to love groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Other Republicans who speak out about that get cancelled.
Jerry Sexton's "who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days."
And the QAnon candidates.
Too many people are hopelessly trapped in their narrative bubbles and unable to calmly evaluate arguments against what they've been taught to believe.
Conservatives didn't have "no problem" answering as liberals.
Conservatives were better able to estimate what liberals would answer for individual concerns, but were wrong about group concerns.
Moderates were better able to estimate how both groups would answer for group concerns. Both liberals and conservatives overestimated how much conservatives cared for group concerns.
Liberals underestimated how much conservatives cared for individual concerns and overestimated how much they cared for group concerns. Liberals also overestimated how much liberals cared for individual concerns and underestimated how much the cared for group concerns.
In light of that, we could even frame it as liberals see themselves closer to conservatives than vice versa. Because that's how they answered for the groups. They think there's less difference than there actually is. So they under and overestimate appropriately.
Framing it as "conservatives know liberals better than vice versa" is wrong and is a tactic to put the onus on liberals to do all the changing. Because conservatives can fill out a morality questionnaire better.
Or let me put it this way, if the question was "How many puppies is it acceptable to kick in a lifetime?"
The fact that puppy kickers were correctly able to guess "zero" for the non-kicking group while the non-kickers said the kickers would say "ten" while the kickers really said "twenty" doesn't mean that the puppy kickers are the better group.
Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational.
The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.
Someone posted this which breaks down the results of the study. I wasn't speaking to "The Righteous Mind" specifically, but the study it's based on.
Haidt's study uses his five moral foundations model, where one's moral foundations are characterized by five dimensions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The first two are called "individualizing foundations" and the last three are called "binding foundations".
Haidt's findings in other studies (which generalize beyond just the US or the West) are that people across the political spectrum care about the individualizing foundations, but progressives care more about these foundations than conservatives. But progressives care much less about the binding foundations.
With this in mind, I don't think it's too surprising that conservatives have an easier time estimating the viewpoint of progressives, since the moral foundations of progressives are not alien to conservatives, they are just weighted differently. Whereas for progressives, the moral foundations of conservatives can feel utterly alien and inexplicable, especially if they tend to have their social interactions in a progressive bubble.
(Also, be mindful that the population sample of the study is nowhere close to a random sample of the population. The sample is over 60% female, overwhelmingly young (median age is 28), and liberal participants outnumbered moderates and conservatives combined. Since it's an online survey, there's a reasonable chance that you're mostly reaching urban people, which tend to live in progressive bubbles. Conservatives who live in areas that are mostly progressive may understand progressives better than those who live in conservative bubbles. The study acknowledges this in the discussion section. The result might still hold up, but the effect might be exaggerated by the sample.)
The opposite would be something like The Nation or Democracy Now!.
Anyways it's kind of pointless to argue what the "opposite" of Fox is as it's really ill-defined. i think it's fair to say CNN and Fox are similar to being opposites.
Ok, I'm going to do it:
> Presidents usually get too much blame when the economy is doing badly, since downturns are often caused by outside shocks or cyclical factors, but that also gives them a chance to crow when things are going full steam ahead. Trump is not the kind of person to pass that up.
> The strong growth number gives the White House a significant boost after days of grim headlines, and its failure to move on from the President’s humiliating summit performance with Russian President Vladimir Putin nearly two weeks ago.
> It also offers some personal respite for Trump, given that he must feel that legal walls are closing around him, following news that one of his most important confidants, Allen Weisselberg, has been subpoenaed by federal prosecutors investigating his former lawyer Michael Cohen.
> The New York Times reported on Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller is examining Trump’s tweets, potentially to see whether they can help him build a case that the President acted with malicious intent when he sacked former FBI Director James Comey.
> Trump is forever trying to change the subject. With the current state of the economy, he may have some ammunition.
> Often, the President’s hyperbolic assessment of his own performance is at odds with the facts
> but he [Trump] often has only himself to blame for it getting overlooked, given the daily political turmoil he creates.
> Trump’s end zone dance might come across as a little premature.
It just goes on and on. I'm practically quoting the whole article. Just the language alone: "humiliating", "walls closing in", etc. Then they quote one poll, presumably the one what makes him look as bad as possible. It's just ridiculous. I don't know how you can say this article is "positive" for Trump. The headline is relatively positive (though even then I can feel CNN begrudgingly wrote some credit).
Biden's not the opposite of Trump either. Biden pleases some conservatives, which is why he got the nomination over Sanders, so that he'd stand a chance of winning over "undecided" (ie. right wing, but not extreme right wing) voters in battleground states. Many neocons are also fans of Biden, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to find support of him on FOX.
Now I'd be surprised to find any positive coverage of Sanders on FOX.. not to mention people who are really on the left like Noam Chomsky.
Right, which is why this is kind of a pointless thing. What the hell does it mean for one media organization to be the opposite of another anyway?
I agree I did kind of start it with my earlier comment though.
CNN/MSNBC the Democrats.
Democracy Now is essentially the American grassroots left. Not generally fans of either party.
I routinely read Fox News online. I do not think they have moderated over the last 2 years - there was perhaps some moderation 4 years ago, but no longer.
CNN has swung leftward, I don't think MSNBC has substantially changed.
And Reid said “most” kids, not just those in the South.
They moved slightly back from Trumpism back toward their earlier pre-Trump far-rightism late in the Trump period (not abandoning the former, just not going in whole hog on it), which might be seen as moderation from a tribal/partisan viewpoint (as pre-Trump far-rightism currently lacking a major party home, to the extent many anti-Trump-but-far-right voices advocated voting for Democrats over Republicans despite ideological issues with Democrats in 2020 as essential to the defeat of Trumpism), but is not moderation ideologically.
While the D-R partisan split is not independent of left-right ideology, its not the same thing.
I grew up in solidly Republican Virginia in the 1990s (even my “liberal” Northern VA county voted against Clinton both times) and we certainly didn’t learn the “Daughters of the Confederacy” version. When we visited Monticello, slavery was discussed at length. Teachers have discretion so maybe some kids are still learning this stuff, but it’s a huge lie to say it’s “most” kids today.
Folks like Reid are massively gaslighting people by making it seem like the opposition to CRT is opposition to “teaching kids about slavery.” Conservatives in Virginia weren’t up in arms complaining about that when I was a kid almost 30 years ago, so it’s hard to imagine that’s what they’re doing. The opposition, instead, is to people like Reid who are trying to normalize racism against white people. It’s opposition to people who want to turn slavery into the entire narrative, such as the 1619 Project, which asserted that “nearly everything exceptional about America grew out of slavery”: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/year-zero
> Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, its diet and popular music.
MSNBC too! They may not have as many Trump folks on primetime panels, but their focus on dumb "Resistance" stuff is definitely not what the left wants at all (though liberals seem to eat it up).
Might just be me. I dislike 90% of fox news but I listen to Carlson sometimes and never find him to be horrible or BS-y (admittedly I don't listen in all the time so I may be missing some stuff)
To me, he seems like a whiner who disingenuously argues against things in a way to bolster conservative talking points. But, I expect the majority of this is selection bias, and only the 'worst' clips are making it into my filter bubble.
For what it's worth, I've only watched in order to try and understand other people's viewpoints.
More specifically, I think he's terrible because he has mastered the ability to tease out the base instincts of people with his messaging, which makes it hard to either agree or disagree with his statements with logic. He can point to some kernels of truth, and you are left with people saying things like "that's just dogwhistling" when attacking his viewpoints. In other words, he riles up, doesn't cause people to think critically, and overall lowers the level of discourse out there.
https://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/01/study-fox-ne...
There was no pressuring over intent. The World Wildlife Fund owned the rights to WWF and sued.
https://www.cnet.com/news/wrestling-loses-wwf-to-wildlife
>Mrs. McMahon [(CEO of WWE)] said the company began considering dropping the word "Federation" from its name when World Wildlife Fund (a/k/a World Wide Fund for Nature) prevailed in a recent court action in the United Kingdom. The court ruling prevents the World Wrestling Federation from the use of the logo it adopted in 1998 and the letters WWF in specified circumstances. The "Fund" has indicated that although the two organizations are very different, there is the likelihood of confusion in the market place by virtue of the fact that both organizations use the letters WWF. The Fund has indicated that it does not want to have any association with the World Wrestling Federation. "Therefore," said, Mrs.McMahon, "we will utilize this opportunity to position ourselves emphasizing the entertainment aspect of our company, and, at the same time, allay the concerns of the Fund." [0]
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090119180317/http://corporate....
This mapping has proven useful
https://www.adfontesmedia.com/static-mbc/
Also, "middle" or centrist is not the same as objective. The path of least extreme disagreement is not the same as the truth (ask a Christian: he'll tell you that Jesus is the truth and that the world hates Jesus). Besides, the middle of what? The neoliberal paradigm? The current spread on offer?
That said, journalists are just humans so it's a difficult problem, especially in the heightened political climate we've had.
However I believe that, to a much greater extent than citizen support for particular political issues, media bias tends to polarize along party-line dimensions because of overlapping power structures.
if people are confused about what red america thinks, they would be well served to look at Breitbart, tucker, and independent conservative outlets to see how they frame the discussion. I'm always amazed at how people on the left don't really see what the right is going on about.
I've been scolded for using Breitbart or Tucker Carlson as a barometer for right-wing positions because they're claimed to be extreme, or 'alt-right', and not reflective of how real conservatives think or feel.
Last week in English news it headlined an anti masker/antivax March in London which the BBC didn't mention at all.
This is why we need more than just fact checkers.
It’s extremely easy to construct a biased, opinion-manipulating political hit site composed entirely of truthful statements.
Proof by politically-neutral analogy: imagine a newspaper that published an article every time a roulette wheel stopped on 6, but never for any other number.
The google vs DuckDuckGo search results for the same exact phrase "list of conservatives banned by twitter" yield utterly different results. None of the admittedly right wing websites are even listed in the google results for that search. The only site in common on the first page is Forbes, but even then the two articles are different even though they came out the same exact day.
If you use google, you'd think that twitter isn't censoring conservatives. If you use duckduckgo, you'll think that they do.
Some examples: Persuasion, The Dispatch, The Bulwark, and an assortment of substacks.
I get my news from Reuters with a sprinkling of fox/nytimes/reddit thrown in
Alternatively, use the Internet Archives to read news from this date from 2-5 few years ago. You'll probably find that most aren't worth reading, which gives you a good sense of how important the news you read today will seem in just a few years.
The truth is that news sources for each side presented completely different stories. While one side got a certain story, the other side was completely silent. So you had two groups of people who had two different sets of unrelated stories, and very rarely did they overlap. The media did an amazing job of putting each group into their own silo, making it impossible to discuss anything between groups or for any positive Trump news to ever be known to a large percentage of the population.
I've noticed this as well. Going from WaPo to Breitbart (or vice versa) is like going to an alternate world. When they are talking about the same thing often they are doing so in a belittling manner (https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/11/13/safety-pin-ant...). I feel like the tone taken by MSM outlets like WaPo and the NYT has become harsher and more condescending, but it could just be me paying closer attention to it.
Bias by exclusion doesn't get talked about as much as it should. One way you can tell when a media establishment doesn't like something is that they do what they can to ignore it. During the Dem primaries it had become a meme in some left wing communities the length the MSM was going to ignore Bernie and his popularity. Another popular example is how Noam Chomsky is largely shunned by the MSM.
Maybe study each side like you're studying a gang. Get to know the symbolism and language.
With a pillow...
Until they go away.
There’s a growing number of writers on sub stack covering the same issue from different sides. Often this is formulated as a response of rebuttal to the left-leaning media’s coverage of the issue, but that’s fine because you still get both sides of the story if you read things in conjunction.
Shout out to Annafi– how are you all doing there?!
[1] https://www.theflipside.io/
In my experience, the biggest contributor to the echo chambers is a lack of memory.
I do not think people's memories are bad, but rather they willfully ignore the other party's position, never learned it in the first place, or are justifying it because their party is in power. This is what centrists frequently get mocked at "both sides" about. They aren't saying "oh both sides are trying to stage an insurrection" they are saying "both sides are not going to let immigrants across the border" (but it'll be generalized to everything being both sided).
I think the way to cure this is also the way to make parties better. Criticism. We should always critique our parties to make them better. Unless you believe they are perfect already and getting direct commands from god, it is deserving of criticism. But we've encouraged a culture where criticism isn't (effectively) allowed. It is allowed by certain people who speak in a certain way, but not for the average person. (e.g. if you are speaking to someone you don't know that well and politics are brought up and you criticize something x party recently did it will be presumed you are of the opposing side). I believe part of this is because we are comparing politicians and parties rather than judging them independently (this is also why I'm a big supporter of Cardinal voting as opposed to the common Ordinal propositions).
This is essentially the root of whataboutism. The classic example is one I had my parents many times over the last decade. I suggest Trump should be investigated for his connections to Epstein given his frequent contact. And my dad would be like "but what about Clinton!" and my response has always been "yeah, him too." Because it isn't about parties, it is about the crime that was potentially committed. If something is bad, then it is bad if the other party does it or if your party does it. Tribes don't matter. The whataboutism is just a distraction technique.
TLDR: Don't forget the past. Criticize everyone. Stop saying "what about...".
It has highlighted to me some biases from some of the sources I follow on a day by day basis (NYT, Washington Post).
Bonus points for the Economist, because you also get coverage and analysis of events across the world many of which get almost 0 coverage in US press.
I started reading international news. That is, focus on publications outside country X when reading about X.
Reports from Sweden, Korea, Russia and UK (thanks google translate!) translated into English, awkward wording and all, plus a minimal dose of CNN and Fox works better for me than a mix of American media. Just my 2c.
I might even wrap it up as a convenient page or app.
Those are the sources you tried to balance with? Every one of those is a fringe hard-leaning source, except maybe Wapo which can't be trusted because it's owned by Bezos. You need to seek more moderate sources to begin with.
It's amazing how much scoop you can get on both the establishment, and the opposition from first hands.
Just ask, politicians are talkative types. You are blessed with living in a country where you don't end on the bottom of a lake for asking politician a wrong question.
Our tech ingests articles from different publishers, groups them into topics based on the story they are covering, then analyze and score them based on how informative they are and present curated articles as best perspectives from left/right/center.
All of this automated and running continuously on our website : https://www.thefactual.com/news and also in our app : iOS (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-factual/id1537259360) and Android (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=group.thefactu...)
Do check us out.
But I recently visited my senior citizen parents and got some exposure to Fox News. During their commentary shows they just throw outrage after outrage at the wall and see what sticks. One example was trying to stir up a controversy over not covid testing people crossing the board illegally. Another was a rich part of Atlanta trying to break away from Atlanta and they were blaming it all on defund the police and black lives matter.
I used to not support the idea of reforming Milton county, but it makes more sense as Fulton funds are focused on Atlanta and away from the tax base. Especially with stupid stuff like no Atlanta police chief for a year, etc. And no Marta in north Fulton. And minimal court services, etc.
I live also live in one of the (upper?) northern burbs of Atlanta. I had to handle some property tax stuff and it was kafkaesque in how out of touch and poorly managed it is. Driving an hour to downtown atlanta to meet with an assessor who has never been to my town. Then meeting with a board of “peers” that also don’t even know the town where I live, listen to my arguments, ask no questions and then rubber stamp the county.
I’m not sure how to fix this and it’s so appealing to just give up and work on local stuff.
Even other counties, Gwinnett and Cobb have recently voted to extend but that’s sort of a separate point.
My complaint was that Fulton county sales taxes support Marta, but Marta service does not extend all the way through the county.
Yep. We’re all addicted to “rage-ahol” [1], but it gets eyeballs which means they can charge more for ads.
What’s worse IMHO is that we consume so much “news” that we can do nothing about [2], and I believe that contributes to people feeling quite helpless, and learning that all they can do is nothing.
[1] Homer Simpson https://youtu.be/JKRn2nEw7rY
[2] Fires, car chases, etc. And even if there is, indirectly, something we could do, the reporting never mentions it.
And then you read how some Supreme Court justices make a decision and you’re wondering if they are even reading the same document
Looks like if there’s no political will to enforce the law it doesn’t get enforced.
Hence, "sanctuary cities" where the state and local government just doesn't feel obligated to hand over records and resources they aren't legally compelled to. It's basically daring the federal government that if the law is so important, they can spend the money on ICE / FBI / ATF / etc. resources to enforce it (because those resources are paid from a completely different pool than the state or town police).
What it means to execute code on the "bare metal" has changed over time. If you track its usage on HN, it is now common for programmers to use this to describe running a program outside of a Docker container or hypervisor/VM, but still atop an OS.
(I personally think this change in meaning is silly, but my feelings on this matter don't matter.)
Interpreting security policy making use of this "bare metal" term is now tricky. Choice #1 is to interpret the policy in the context in which it was written. Choice #2 is to attempt to interpret the policy in the context of how the term is now used.
(The best choice is, of course, to rewrite the security policy in question to address the change in definition, but for the sake of argument let's consider this to be too impractical to even consider.)
Let's assume that the 1996 policy in question is: "No company-written code that interacts with the Internet shall run on bare metal."
If we strictly interpret the policy in the context in which it was written, then we're in a pickle. Agner's hand-rolled x86_64 HTTP server is permitted. It runs atop GNU/Linux, so it's not freestanding and therefore isn't a "bare metal" program.
On the other hand, if we determine that the modern use of "bare metal" is compatible with what the authors of the policy intended, then the security team is clear to insist that Agner run his HTTP server within Docker, for instance.
I learned nothing except that this guy was a tremendous asshole, saying things like "I want the US to nuke a country in the Middle East, I don't even care which one". Hearing shit like that, and his arrogant, bigoted, hate-filled bashing of everything to the left of Hitler diatribes just pissed me off, and I decided I really didn't need to hear more right-wing garbage.
While I was there, though, I did listen to others, like Rush Limbaugh and various other right wing "luminaries" (including going back to William F Buckley), and while Michael Savage was the most extreme of the ones I listened to, they were all just different shades of crap.
The same goes for listening, reading, or watching mainstream media like CNN or MSNBC, which I consider way too conservative for me. When I heard them defending the Iraq war, endlessly interviewing generals and other pro-war figures without interviewing any serious anti-war opposition (like, say, Noam Chomsky, or any of the other leaders of the antiwar movement), when they give trite, superficial coverage of protests and focus on sensationalism rather than issues the protests are about, when they (say) crap all over Obama for not wearing a lapel pin (instead of something serious like him enabling the surveillance state), when they give endless air time to Trump or can't stop talking about him (pre-election.. it's harder to ignore him when he's President), when they have an unquestioning support of capitalism, then I wonder why the fuck am I listening to this?
Yes, I'm out of my echo chamber when I listen to right-wing and mainstream news, but what's the point? They're really not telling me anything new... I already know how pro-war, pro-capitalist, right wing, anti-left they are.
Even consuming left-wing media mostly just upsets me because all they do is talk about the injustices of the right and quote right-wing media back at me, which just pisses me off more.
If I was politically active maybe this would be more bearable, as I'd have an outlet for my frustration, but as I'm not I really try to limit my consumption of news, left-or-right.
In theory it would be nice if there was more real communication between the left and the right, mutual understanding, and cooperation on issues we do agree on.. but I just don't see it happening. Both sides see each other as super biased, unfair, and close-minded, and it's hard to see how that's going to change... just getting out of one's echo chamber is not enough.
So maybe a person is believes in X, but if they continue to vote for candidates or parties actively promoting "not X", you can understand why this advice rings hollow.
I lean to the right, and yet regularly talk to and see the humanity in liberals on a pretty regular basis. We are all people, even if we see things differently.
You are obviously right when you look at the far right. Complete oppression is a bad thing. But swinging to the other extreme and saying that no ways of life are better than others causes social instability too.
Whether it should be government's job to do that is another matter.. I'd much prefer that our society handles such social pressures itself, though such social feedback systems seem to have broken down.
Maybe the problem is just a majority forcing a minority into their beliefs?
I'm anti-government in general, so that _is_ my standpoint.
On the far right yes, but not in mainstream conservatism. For example, a recent poll shows that 55% of Republicans support gay marriage (https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004629612/a-record-number-of...). And that is even putting aside the question of whether wishing for gay marriage to be illegal really constitutes a severe restriction of someone's identity or the identity of those they love.
I didn't even vote in the last election as I felt un-represented. For me there was no 'greater evil' candidate. Prior I voted libertarian, but what good does that do?
Does having voted a certain way for a candidate make your beliefs ultimately responsible for the way the representative governs? In America we essentially get `choose red or blue`.
How can the subjects as complicated as everyday topics are ever be reduced to two colors!?
The problem _is_ our tyrannical democratic system.
I don't at all care what you do with your life, and really I'd like it if you gave me the same courtesy.
But, if you believe that because I consider myself more conservative than not, I must then hate your lifestyle, how can we ever come to a happy coexistence?
I'm glad you don't care what I do with my life. If you vote for candidates that legislate in ways that do restrict my life, I ask that you please stop.
> This assumes that everyday conservatives believe in the republican representatives that end up in power. I didn't even vote in the last election as I felt un-represented. For me there was no 'greater evil' candidate. Prior I voted libertarian, but what good does that do?
> Does having voted a certain way for a candidate make your beliefs ultimately responsible for the way the representative governs? In America we essentially get `choose red or blue`.
> How can the subjects as complicated as everyday topics are ever be reduced to two colors!?
> The problem _is_ our tyrannical democratic system.
How is it you think that your viewpoint connects to conservative viewpoints at large?
At some point you have to admit and understand: you aren't conservative. You aren't what most people think of when they think of conservatives.
I think less taxation is great and believe in the free market.
I believe in a nuclear family and traditional marriage for a healthy society, but not to the point that I'd ever try to force it on someone else, but in that I think it's proven to be the best way for people to rise from poverty and build a healthy community.
I don't think abortion is okay, but I won't stop you from having one.
I don't want the government to provide welfare though I do think that minorities have been hurt by our current system. I think welfare has if anything propagated said system.
I'm skeptical of big pharma and in particular the systems that both hyped COVID's danger and provided the vaccine.
I'm not anti-science, but anti-scientism.
My point is, I'm mostly conservative--to the point I get downvoted a lot when I express my opinions and I identify with a lot of opinions that are removed from twitter and youtube.
I think global governance only leads to more inscrutable bureaucracies and less freedom and privacy.
I believe that governments everywhere are doing their damnedest to scare everyone into believing more governmental control is the only way to protect you from `the other`.
I'm pretty clearly in the conservative camp. That said, I don't wish to control you, simply not to be controlled.
In the din of infinite media outlets, the major media outlets must stand out from the crowd. They do this by extending their bias to outright advocacy for their political side. This is happening on both sides. Other niche outlets are doing the same thing to be attractive to a specialized set of readers.
Unfortunately, it has gone from advocacy to outrage. A daily outrage occurred in the media in response to Trump, where every action created an outrage from one offended group or another. It was more than just Trump. "Cancel culture" was created where those who were outraged by something someone said on social media "cancelled" the speaker's life by erasing them from society. They lost their jobs and were ostracized by their peers.
Where does all this lead? I hope it is not violence. However, the political violence I see everyday in the form of violent protests and riots is not a welcome sight.
When looking at US politics reality does have a liberal bias. Look at how conservatives handled the pandemic and losing the 2020 election. The minority party with a majority of the voting power in the US actively believes and promotes a false version of reality.
Bullshit. CNN is in the tank for the corporate wing of the Democratic party.
> A lot of the blame for trump gaining acceptance as a viable voting option belongs to CNN for *uncritically promoting* him and giving him coverage.
Absolute bullshit. You believe CNN was pro-Trump in 2015/2016? Every single story/show was about how terrible he is.
> a false version of reality.
I think you're the one with a false version of reality if you believe CNN was/is pro-Trump.
Bullshit. CNN repeatedly focused on trump to the detriment of other candidates because he generated clicks and views.
> Absolute bullshit. You believe CNN was pro-Trump in 2015/2016? Every single story/show was about how terrible he is.
It's hard to report on him without it being obvious how terrible he is. Most of the reporting in 2015/16 were about his zany antics, in your face racism, and sexual assault admissions - but still free airtime.
> I think you're the one with a false version of reality if you believe CNN was/is pro-Trump.
I said they're pro-clicks and views, and trump was a vehicle for that, which helped him get elected. You should work on reading comprehension.
Clicks, and views.
Also your post doesn't really match what you claim it does - in no way does NPR admit that the coverage was unfairly negative. It seems to say it was negative because trump had little substance to his policies and there weren't many positive things to say about the job he did.
Which makes sense given the results of his presidency (coup attempt, many convicted associates pardoned, hundreds of thousands dead due to incompetence/lying, economic collapse, destruction of American family farming, etc.)
There are no left-leaning major news outlets in the US (the nature of capitalism assures that; you can’t get the kind of capitalist backing for anti-capitalist positions required to be a major media source), only far-right and center-right, and even the center-right ones treat targets to their left much worse than those their right.
And if there was a left-leaning outlet, their bias would be left, not liberal.
> Fox news more or less admits to being right-leaning
Only recently, in the Trump era, did Fox drop “Fair and Balanced” for “Standing Up For What's Right”.
> but CNN is still insisting that they're unbiased
That's because Fox is marketing to people who see themselves as on the Right and CNN is marketing to people who identify as centrist, non-ideological, or above the fray (who are largely the pro-status quo center-right.) Both label according to the identity group they are marketing to.
So "it was objective" may be a bit much. UPI, AP, and the national news were pretty close to unbiased. Local papers often had their slant, which would include editorials, local news, and maybe even which national stories were covered.
It was far better than today, I'll grant you.
The media has always had biases. How can it not, it's run by people.
Look at the propaganda during the Spanish-American War. That's the most obvious U.S. example of how biased media can be. And we enjoy the temporal distance to not be invested in the events so we can evaluate it from a third-party perspective.
Are you saying the media became less biased after that then more biased?
Abd you're point is correct. Yellow Journalism was a phrase coined in past history to described biased news, which obviously has existed in one form or another since the first newspapers. It is not a modern phenomena.
I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
(Ironically the search for counterarguments would often strengthen my position because they would turn out to be quite weak. Nevertheless I think that the exercise is important.)
I think the words "well-reasoned opinion" describe it well: try to see what part of your opinion is fact, which experts you trusted for that, and what part is morality and ethics.
It's a nice quote, but I don't find it accurate for all topics. Should I be trying to figure out how to make passionate arguments for the Q Conspiracy nuttiness? There are lots of antivaxx conspiracy theories that are pretty close to mainstream in parts of the US - should I be trying to figure out how to make a passionate argument for those?
For many of these conspiracy theories the 'understanding' part should probably be more along the lines of epistemic forensics - "What kind of misinformation got them to this point?"
So obviously there are some topics in which you can understand the issue well, but still not be able to make a credible defense of the other side.
Now, the point of the exercise is valid. We should always be approaching an issue from the perspective of "What am I missing?" or "How am I wrong?"
Of course, bad faith debaters will ask this of you while not doing it themselves. Or they will do so only superficially. They won't actually try to disprove themselves.
Which makes discussing things with such people exhausting.
Most of the main tenets of QAnon are recycled conspiracy theories that predate Q, which is why the "X% of people believe in QAnon" headlines that have been going around recently are so misleading.
Epistemic forensics is necessary for an awful lot of things people believe (true or false) given that for many things personal experience is insufficient to uncover the truth, and for any single truth, only a tiny fraction of the population is making direct observations at scale.
Is it though? If you want to convince someone of something, you have to understand the opposing viewpoints well. Many rational viewpoints labeled TERF don't "infringe on the validity of [trans people's] identity." For example, trans women competing against women in sports. You wouldn't convince anyone by straw manning one side by saying that people who oppose trans women competing against women are all simply transphobic; you would say that they believe that trans women have a physical advantage over non-trans women in sports.
First of all, if you have skin in the game then it becomes even more important to try to understand the opposition's arguments in order to convince them to join your cause and to prevent others from joining the other side.
As for your example, I am convinced that trans people have a battle to fight for greater acceptance in most (all?) societies. But I would still insist that they have only earned the right to call someone, or something, trans-exclusionary, if they have given careful thought to the argumentation and the positions actually taken.
Sometimes this is easy: if someone says "trans women are not women" then in my mind that is not even a coherent position (define "woman"). But if someone says "most trans women have not had the same childhood experiences as cis women" then that is (to me at least) a statement of fact. Calling the latter statement trans-exclusionary is not what I would call a well-reasoned opinion.
It would be great if we had a reliable way to identify that 1% and sort articles/comment/reach by this metric, but it's a hard problem.
For as many people that deeply understand a topic, there are many more that are parroting or making up rationalization for the beliefs they think they are expected to have. These sorts of arguments aren't really arguments, they are just a self-soothing method of tribal identification.
I think there is a pitfall with trying to "understand the other side" because there are an infinite number of possible opinions and not all have merit. It is useful to a point, but when taken to the extreme you just waste a bunch of time reading garbage.
If it is then I would still disagree: if it is too emotionally taxing to try to understand an opponent's position then I think that one can just refrain from calling them out in public.
In fact, how do you know a viewpoint really poses a threat in the first place? For example, which of your rights does it propose to infringe? If you can answer that then you probably already understand the viewpoint enough to counter it...
> I think this is the key quote. It should really be taboo to have an opinion without an understanding of how the other side argues.
There's a difference between "understand" and "make a passionate argument for" a given position. It's become standard for just about any ideological position to claim that anyone who disagrees "doesn't really understand" and to primarily use extreme emotions paired with unverifiable claims. At what point does one "understand" in these conditions?
The idea that most issues today have two reasonable sides arguing is itself an ideology. Often there's not even one reasonable position.
On the right, when Trump hadn't yet gotten control of the party, there was some persistent reaction against him from established conservative media. Once he got control, it was almost complete silence.
On the left, evidence of how much of the investigation into Russian collusion with Trump's election team was completely made up and water carrying by the media of Clinton's team's planted story has never been owned by the participants.
There are near infinite examples of this on both sides. I just want media that is skeptical of those in power and those seeking power. All of them, not those on another team.
This is bizarre. No such thing happened.
And people are that easy to mislead. At least for a while.
The fact of the matter is the Ratcliffe Letter [0] shows that President Obama was given an briefing well before the Steele Dossier was leaked to the media that the Russians' had picked up intelligence that exactly that kind of fake evidence would be planted by the Clinton campaign.
I really don't believe in a coincidence that big and unless Steele was simultaneously a Russian and Clinton asset, it doesn't matter, and that would be even a bigger issue that should have been the story. Can't have it both ways.
I'm perfectly happy to not have Mr. Trump around any more, but I'd prefer the media not carry water for their preferred candidates and let me make those determinations
[0]: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/09-29-20_Lett...
Again, this never happened. First of all, the Steele Dossier was raw intelligence, not meant to be taken as fact. It was paid for initially by Republicans, not HRC's campaign, so pinning it on her is disingenuous. Also, there were clear links between the trump campaign and Russia, including some that led to arrests of his folks and some that should have (Jr's meeting that trump helped him lie about).
Your own link (and common sense) disputes your claim that it was proven HRC's campaign did this:
> The IC does not know the accuracy of this allegation or the extent to which the Russian intelligence analysis may reflect exaggeration or fabrication.
It was Russian disinformation creating and spreading the lie that you are boldly posting on here.
Name one Trump person who was arrested (let alone convicted) for something actually, directly related to Russiagate.
Papadopoulos: Indicted for making a false statement to FBI.
Manafort and Gates: Indicted for not registering as foreign agents of Ukraine (which, you might have noticed, is sort of an enemy of Russia right now)
Flynn: Indicted for making a false statement to FBI. (Forced by lack of legal fees into pleading guilty, which later caused problems when the government tried to drop charges.)
Pinedo (Who? Exactly): Indicted for identity fraud.
van der Zwaan: Indicted for making false statements (and not an American, anyway).
Cohen: Indicted for making false statements.
Stone: Indicted for making false statements and witness tampering.
Then we have people like Carter Page, whose name was raked over the coals for years because a FBI lawyer intentionally altered evidence (<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/us/politics/fbi-ig-report...>) showing that far from being a Russian asset, Page had for years briefed the CIA every time he met with suspicious Russians. (Got to love how the Times describes said altering evidence as a "serious error".) You want an actual Russiagate-related indictment and guilty plea? Kevin Clinesmith, said FBI lawyer, is your man.
- Paul Manafort (his work in Ukraine was done on behalf of Russia - I mean seriously read about the shit he did: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/05/ex-trump-aid... - also linked with wikileaks, but not in the US election context afaik). And where did the former leader of Ukraine, Yanukovych, who Manafort propped up flee to when the shit he and Manafort did together came out?
- We know Jr attempted to get the Russian governments help and had a meeting in trump tower about it, that his dad helped him lie about (obstructing justice in the process)
Done
Basically the letter says: "somebody heard from some Russian source that is not trusted that HRC was behind linking trump to Russia, but since that source is not trustworthy and there's no evidence we can't determine that to be a fact."
Treating that tenuous link as a fact is doing exactly what OP is claiming the media did with the Steele Dossier (which generally they did not, they reported on its existence not its accuracy - and the media I consumed was careful about that distinction).
You cannot vote "against" someone in any election except a recall.
Who you voted for is who you voted for.
Simple example: When I voted for Howie Hawkins in 2020, who was my vote "against"?
Voted Libertarian this election and McMullin last. Both were ways to keep my vote away from Trump, though I had historically voted near straight party Republican most years (never actually straight ticket, just close.)
Going forward no party gets my allegiance and I'll vote per person/issue, but Trump was the turning point.
When you feel a civic duty to vote, but none of the candidates are really acceptable, I'll vote 'against' the worst by picking the least objectionable, until the whole country gets the Nevada option of 'none of the above.'
...you cannot vote 'against' anyone in an election.
In 2020, I think I wrote myself in for about 8 different positions in my locale, because I won't vote for anyone I don't support. Sure I may not have won that time around, but I didn't assist anyone I didn't actively want to win. Guilt free voting.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/01/03/dear-cnn-...
If you wish to defend your position, please explain Don Jr's meeting where he's looking for help from the Russian government, trump's obstruction regarding that meeting, Manafort's working in Ukraine on behalf of Putin, and Roger Stone's involvement with guccifier 2.0/wikileaks.
The facts are not on your side but the reverse. It's amazing to see in real time to be honest.
Please explain:
- Don Jr's meeting where he's looking for help from the Russian government
- trump's obstruction regarding that meeting
- Manafort's shady dealings in Ukraine on behalf of Putin
- Roger Stone's involvement with guccifier 2.0/wikileaks while working directly with trump
- Why you think HRC created a fake story about Russia given the facts above and the fact that even the Steele Dossier (only part of trump's Russia problem) wasn't initiated by HRC or her campaign
The fact that you cannot defend these actions show the weakness of your position.
So essentially what you have is some weak circumstantial evidence and a campaign that tried to take advantage of existing leaks (about... what? was the information provided truthful?) and another campaign that paid to have false information compiled then leaked to the press in order to discredit a political opponent. Then, when that opponent was in office they tried to use it to overturn his presidency subverting the will of the people.
In spite of your "certain" rhetoric you are clearly in the wrong on this issue, as the Mueller investigation ultimately found.
But I suppose it's not worth arguing "religion" as this apparently has become, discarding reason and rationality. So as other poster says, have nice day! And I truly mean that, have great one.
Eventually, you're conveniently ignoring the fact that it was initially paid for by other concerned folks.
> So essentially what you have is some weak circumstantial evidence and a campaign that tried to take advantage of existing leaks
This is where your argument falls down. It isn't circumstantial evidence that Manafort worked for the Russian government's interest in Ukraine, and was convicted for work he did there. The guy he worked with fled to Russia once their ill deeds were known.
Stone worked directly with wikileaks/guccifier 2.0, who were working directly with Russia.
I guess you can try to say Junior was just doing what anyone would do, but his attempt to do so involved conspiring with Russia to get dirt on a political opponent - which doesn't make the Russia entanglements non-problematic. Especially considering trump then obstructed justice by lying about the meeting.
> as the Mueller investigation ultimately found.
Nope, the Mueller investigation was clearly an impeachment referral and documented multiple obstruction counts against the elder trump.
> But I suppose it's not worth arguing "religion" as this apparently has become
You are ignoring facts because that is convenient to your position, which is not backed by reality. Good day.
It, like the comment sections on Canadian news websites, leaned heavily to the right. So a group got together and made alt Canada subreddit that leaned heavily left called OnGuardForThee.
Originally, I thought it would be helpful to compare the two subs to get something closer to the middle but instead all that happened was I got twice as much screaming hot garbage.
I unsubbed from both and now individually sub to all the Canadian town I can find. It's better now. There's so much less anger.
r/canada used to be great, as you said, but it didn't become polarized in a right vs. left manner. The moderators were self-admitted alt/far-right people who were pushing a particular agenda.
When the country as a whole votes left at a consistent 65-70%, then r/canada simply no longer represents the Canadian viewpoint. r/canada used to give center-right viewpoints attention at about the same rate as the support they got in elections. The push from right-wing mods to move to an even or greater split doesn't reflect the political reality of Canada.
r/OnGuardForThee is now a far more accurate representation of the political landscape of Canada where 70% of people vote center-left to left.
I just checked the top posts for last week and it looks pretty... non-partisan? Certainly better than something /r/all.
https://old.reddit.com/r/canada/top/?t=week
If the sub leans 60/40 one way, the minority group will see all their posts being downvoted, and gradually leave. As more leave, the downvote pressure on the remaining few gets more intense, and they leave too, until you're left with a veritable echo chamber.
We did some threat tracking for certain organizations as a result of the growing extreme rhetoric in some of these communities and with social media aggregation tools it became very clear that there are a lot of paid political shill accounts.
Facebook's toxic communities are far more grass-roots in comparison. They're also, at least in the cases of the files I was on, a lot more violent, and a lot more volatile. Surveiled Facebook groups looked a lot more like Parler than brigaded reddit subs.
They are part of the echo chamber. They aren't the echo chamber. Social media does a fantastic job of demonstrating that people naturally construct their own echo chambers. We tend to judge the main stream media & polities without appreciating a context where they don't exist. It's increasingly clear that for all their ills, they do deliver, albeit in a flawed and limited degree, on their espoused objectives.
They're terrible, except as compared to all the alternatives.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world/us_and_canada
Abby Martin's Breaking the Set show is what got me to pay attention to just how coddled by our domestic media our government is. There are so many things that they straight up don't cover at all.
It's not a slant in stories, it's a total refusal to cover important things.
https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/media-bias-ratings
"The latest Trump scandal shows how much we must still discover about his presidency's assault on democracy"
"Trump's DOJ continued to pursue a CNN reporter's records even after a federal judge called the reasoning 'unanchored in any facts'"
"A senate report reveals new details about the stunning security breakdowns ahead of the January 6 attack but omits Trump's role"
"Ex-president Obama says he never thought the darkness that rose in the GOP during his tenure would reach the party's epicenter"
"Exclusive audio of a 2019 phone call shows how Rudy Giuliani pressured Ukraine to investigate baseless conspiracies about Biden"
These are CNN headlines from just the past week.
The Republican party is fascist.
The first. Sure, that's an opinionated take on the facts of the matter. But the facts aren't great either.
The second. Did a federal judge call the reasoning "unanchored in any facts"? If so, then they're just telling you what the judge said. Did the Trump DOJ then continue to pursue those records? If so, then they're just telling you what happened. That headline is devoid of any opinion. And let's not ignore, it's about CNN being the target of the Trump DOJ. If this is indicative of bias, it's bias towards CNN themselves, not any "left-wing agenda".
The third. Did Trump have a role in the security of the D.C. and the Capitol? The headline implies he did. And from what we know, he did have some role. He was responsible for certain things. Now the word "stunning" is a smell. But it's not really forcing you to care about one side or the other. It's just saying that the security breakdown was extremely unexpected. That all being said, did the Senate make a report? Did it reveal new details? Did it not say anything about what the President could have done but didn't?
The fourth. Obama is an former President. His words will be reported on. Did he say those things? It's not bias to say someone said something. It's not bias to report on a former President.
The fifth. Once again. Did that happen? Is that audio of Giuliani calling Ukraine to convince them to investigate Biden? Is the investigation he wants based on anything meaningful?
So of the five headlines you've chosen to demonstrate liberal bias by CNN only the top can be said to be actually biased. And that's mostly in presentation. Being critical of Trump, the Republican party, or "the right" in general isn't "left-wing" by default. Republicans themselves should have been critical of Trump. And they were, right up until he won the nomination.
Fairness isn't tit-for-tat. Not every "right-wing" impropriety must be balanced with a "left-wing" one. That's not fairness. That's sports team mentality.
Fairness is everyone being measured against the same standard.
Then Fox News is also not right-wing.
If you're looking for new philosophies or perspectives, I strongly suggest two things:
1. fiction
2. history
I don't think day-to-day news coverage can ever be written at a level where it might affect your fundamental values; among many other problems, it is typically written in a hurry, with a lack of context, and so it lacks long-term perspective.
In terms of books that have changed my perspective on some subject, here are some important ones I've read over the last year:
Reading Lolita In Tehran, by Azar Nafisi
https://www.amazon.com/Reading-Lolita-Tehran-Memoir-Books/dp...
Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security, by Sarah Chayes
https://www.amazon.com/Thieves-State-Corruption-Threatens-Se...
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, by Andrew J. Bacevich
https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Power-American-Exceptionalism-...
The Emergence of China: From Confucius to the Empire, by E. Bruce Brooks and A. Taeko Brooks
https://www.amazon.com/Emergence-China-Confucius-Ancient-Con...
Azar Nafisi's book is both a true life action story, and it's also an intellectual journey, a consideration of how authoritarianism slowly takes over.
Sarah Chayes book is remarkably ambitious, not only did I suddenly see corruption as a global issue, but she connects it to religious extremism and then reviews the corruption of the Catholic Church in the 1400s and how that lead to Martin Luther and that era's own explosion of religious extremism.
Andrew J. Bacevich's book is a sober look at all the things the USA probably cannot do, even though it has the worlds most powerful military
The Brooks book about China was eye opening for me. I previously knew nothing about the Warring States period, or the intense intellectual debate that occurred over the meaning of the state and the duties of the leader to the people. I wish more Westerners knew this story.
Should I expect this kind of writing from the daily newspaper? Absolutely not. It's ridiculous. It's a category error. That's now what the daily newspaper is for. That's certainly not what the 24 hour news cycle is for.
Sometimes I want actionable news I can use, which is partly a matter of knowing which candidates might have the best chances of advancing my goals. Especially during primary races, day-to-day political news is useful to me when it gives me the information I need to decide who of many candidates I should donate money to.
But when I want new perspectives and philosophies? I turn to books.
The issue to me is more that the extremes are so extreme as to be unworkable; you have people being unironic nazis, monarchists, and marxist-communists, so anything else will seem sane and balanced. But it's definitely not being out of an echo chamber.
The Republican party is engaged in a fascist lie about the validity of our elections. Wake up.
If you just consume random media, you're getting the left-leaning perspective. It's the right-leaning perspective that you probably have a deficiency of unless you make a great deal of effort to swim against the current.
Take, for example, Haidt's work on analyzing how well different political ideologies understood each other.
The bottom line: Moderates and Conservatives understood the Liberal perspective better than Liberals understand other perspectives.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva...
[edit: fixed a typo]
> Even longtime bastions of the Right like the military, FBI, etc. have been taken over by the Left.
What? What does this even mean?
The idea that the right understands the left better than the right is silly - how many Fox News profiles are there of Whole Foods shopping Democrats in Arlington? Of Black voters in Gwinnett county? Meanwhile, NYTimes did countless stories for four years about rural voters in diners that still like Trump despite the scandal of the week.
myfavoritedog's point is that the default position in the Times is of Whole Foods-shopping Democrats in NoVa. You couldn't read a book review, or sports column, without anti-Trump snark suddenly appearing in there regardless of the subject matter (seriously, it was like there was a quota to meet),
The pieces you mention invariably
* treat the subjects like they're a new, just-discovered animal species
* frame their fears and hopes, needs and concerns, in very patronizing ways. Example: <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/trump-macho-a...>, which a) attributed Latin male support for Trump to their desire for the same kind of authoritarian machismo that ruined their home countries (as opposed to the same reasons that other blue-collar workers, Latino or not, voted for Trump) and b) made wanting to provide for one's family sound like a bad thing. Outcome: Trump in 2024 didn't just again outperform expectations with Latinos in 2024 (<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/02/us/politics/trump-latino-...>), but also increased his Latin support.
(Needless to say, there's never, ever any Times article discussing how Latinos' support for a large welfare state hearkens back to their home countries' social models.)
* dismiss those being profiled as aberrations. Example: In 2016 the Clinton-friendly media backfired on Clinton by missing the facts on the ground. If in Ohio—for the past 150 years perhaps the quintessential swing state—and Iowa Trump was 10 points up in the polls, the right conclusion was that the rest of the Midwest was swinging to him too. The wrong conclusion was to come up with imaginary reasons why Ohio is suddenly no longer representative of the region or country (<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/30/us/politics/ohio-campaign...>). One guess on which the press and the Clinton campaign chose.
This sounds like some sort of victimhood complex. I think you should understand that 54% of the country did not like that man, ever, and we gave outsized influence to the 46% that did at the expense of the otherwise silent majority. Joe Biden blew the doors off turnout in history despite never having blockbuster rallies like Donald Trump or his Democratic rivals.
> frame their fears and hopes, needs and concerns, in very patronizing ways
I don't really disagree, which should mean they would do the same for working class black folk in the same cities, yes? But no, they don't.
> If in Ohio—for the past 150 years perhaps the quintessential swing state—and Iowa Trump was 10 points up in the polls, the right conclusion was that the rest of the Midwest was swinging to him too
This is not a good example - when a state stops being within 2-3 points of the national margin (~+0 R in '04, +3 R in '08, +1 R in '12) and starts becoming +10 R and then +12 R in '16 and '20 it does stop being a bellwether.
After watching CNN's technical director saying on spy cam that their publication is entirely driven by propaganda, I lost trust in all the news agencies out there. Quote:
> Yeah. I mean like Trump, we did it, like when Trump was, I don't know, like his hand was shaking or whatever I think. We brought in like so many medical people to like all tell a story that like, it was all speculation, that he was neurologically damaged, that he was losing it. He's unfit to, you know, whatever. We were... we were creating a story there that we didn't know anything about, you know? That's what -- I think that's propaganda, you know? We had nothing else to run with at that time. We were like, just taking shots off the bow just hoping something would hit, you know?
I'm a massive centrist, not a US citizen, trying to be as objective as possible. A shit and for-profit/power propaganda is flowing from both ends.