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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31001 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Richard Hanania has a new essay out, "Why the Media is Honest and Good":

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good

He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation. His argument has a few parts but the major thrust of it is that there is no better alternative--when everything is tallied up the MSM is far more truthful than competitors like Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Berenson, etc. He points out that the revealed preferences of intelligent right-wingers seem to agree with him--many still read the MSM and even those who do not don't object to Hanania linking their articles with commentary as "fake news." He attributes this to conservative incompetence at institution building:

"No matter how conservative you are, if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation, one has to seek out liberal reporters and institutions. Your choices are to rely on leftists to be an informed person, or to live in ignorance. Nothing is stopping conservatives from building their own media institutions, except for their own incompetence and lack of idealism. Even the few conservative institutions that people take seriously like The Wall Street Journal have to rely to a large extent on left-wing staff. There is no shortage of right-wing grifters though, and the movement should spend more time reflecting on this fact and less time criticizing others. After the 2020 election, Fox lost much of its audience to other news stations because it dared to acknowledge that Biden had won. Fox should be praised for maintaining its standards here, as it appears the Republican base has a much larger appetite for delusion than conservative elites are willing to provide."

He goes on to use Vice as an example of good(ish) liberal media. While he says they publish a lot of disgusting and stupid content, he likes much of their reporting, such as when they traveled to Lebanon to interview bank robbers or snuck into North Korea. He thinks the good more or less outweighs the bad here, especially since reporting like this cannot be found elsewhere.

He then makes some concessions about bias in the coverage but goes on to argue that the media is far less bad than academia:

"But I don’t have high standards for humanity. “Be intelligent, don’t explicitly lie to me, don’t see yourself as on a team trying to ‘own’ the other side, and have some kind of professional standards where you at least care a little bit about truth” is about the best that I think we have the right to expect. And institutions like the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic generally meet that standard, at least to a much greater extent than most of their critics. I would argue that much of academia is broken in the way that a lot of media critics think the press is. In many fields, reading the scholarly literature will either be worthless or actually make you dumber. The press largely works though, and I’m afraid that if we dismiss the Atlantic as crude propaganda that is destroying society we won’t have any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics.

The MSM is at its worst when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation because the left has lost its mind on these issues. One should be able to disaggregate various areas of coverage. If the media was as bad on every topic as it is on identity, I would probably join conservatives in suggesting we burn the whole thing to the ground, which is the posture I’m in favor of taking towards much of the academy. The press is committed to a narrative in which disparities are caused by discrimination and whites and men are constantly oppressing women and people of color. Even here, they’re usually not explicitly lying. For example, they’ll lower their standards in order to publish an unconfirmed report about an alleged hate crime against a minority, and often treat what should be at most local stories into matters of national significance. Recently, three black UVA football players were killed, and the Washington Post made it into a story about white racism, not informing the reader that the shooter himself was black until paragraph 8. This article may not technically contain a “lie,” but it is clearly giving a false impression regarding what happened."

Now, why does Hanania think we should care that the media isn't all bad? He thinks blindly hating journalists will simply lead to the right trusting even worse sources, and can even make people lose sight of the real issues in favor of lashing out to "own the libs." He sees the destruction of media as a pipe dream that is not even particularly desirable, and would rather reform it or create equally high-quality right-wing outlets. It also makes it more difficult for right wingers to achieve reform if they blindly hate media institutions and fail to see why the New York Times is read by many more educated, powerful people than Breitbart.

He ends the piece with an interesting example of counterproductive media criticism, partially from the right, which I copy below:

"To take a concrete example of this, in 2022 the labor union representing NYT reporters accused the paper of bias for giving minorities lower performance ratings than whites. This data should have reflected well on the paper; disparities are practically always a sign that a process is fair, while equality of outcomes should make you suspicious and can only be found in the most politicized industries and professions, or where standards are practically non-existent. Of course, the NYT was attacked from the left for its supposed bigotry. But the report was also featured in conservative outlets, with the articles not disputing the NYT Guild’s assumption that differential scores for blacks and whites indicates something is wrong. More broadly, the conservative press and even Republican politicians are generally inclined to support unionization for companies they dislike in the first place, often in the correct belief that it will hurt the institution in question by doing things like requesting diversity audits (sometimes they actually fantasize about unions being a force for conservatism, but this is a delusion that ignores not only what most unions are like today, but the long history of organized labor almost always being at the vanguard of far left causes, with the only exceptions being when it was in bed with organized crime). If your goal is just to harm your enemies, that’s a great strategy, but it will end up making society even more woke, since you’re not going to destroy these powerful institutions, and, as we already mentioned, conservatives have nothing to replace them with if they did. The NYT having dared to give black journalists low ratings in the first place should be taken as a sign that the newspaper isn’t nearly as bad as you think, and that if you engage constructively with it you can make it better. But if the Right is going to join the Left in accepting witch hunts involving unfounded accusations of racism, there will be much less of a tendency to maintain current standards."

I think his arguments are fairly convincing and the piece is a nice counterbalance to the usual MSM hate, but that Hanania underestimates just how damaging the MSM coverage of race, gender and sexual orientation has been. I am not sure I would say that the good from the large volume of pretty good reporting from these outlets outweighs the bad from what I consider the national gaslighting of the American population on these issues. He also sees the NYT's harassment of Scott as an unfortunate exception rather than a rule, which I'm not sure I am convinced by.

Curious what you all think.

1/2

Geeze I wonder why this guy loves the press :

Personally, I’ve always been treated well by the mainstream press.

This advice of course isn’t going to apply to people who think January 6 was a peaceful protest, Trump really won the 2020 election, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, or that the world is run by a cabal of Satanic pedophiles, because such views, unlike anti-wokeness and anti-masking, don’t have any support in newsrooms or among the kinds of people who become successful journalists.

Wow I wonder how somebody with such bold and brave opinions could find that the media is not that bad after all.

But let's see.

This guy claims that somebody with these opinions could NOT be 'among the kinds of people who become successful journalists'?

What is an example of good journalism according to him?

Vice.

[Let's see what Vice thinks of the Jan 6 protests.](

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7w743/gavin-mcinnes-wears-proud-boy-colors-again-throws-support-behind-jan-6-defendants)

Gavin McInnes Wears Proud Boy Colors Again, Throws Support Behind Jan. 6 Defendants

Oh my, that sounds like one of these people that could never be successful journalists right there according to Mr Hanania!

(Disclosure: Gavin McInnes was a co-founder of VICE in the mid-1990s. He left the company in 2008 and has had no involvement since then. He founded the Proud Boys in 2016.)

Oh.

I know several people have already pointed out that right-wing journalists are pushed away from the media, but I thought that this part was especially savory.

I have another example of course.

Andrew Anglin who draws millions of people to read his blog.

He writes a dozen article every single day, derivative, not of his own research, usually using the MSM as the source.

Why is Andrew Anglin not sending teams of journalists to report on first-hand information?

Gee I wonder maybe it has to do with him getting banned from social media, all payment processing systems, getting banned from Cloudflare, getting banned from several DNS, getting banned from webhosts...

He would be a successful journalist if he were a leftist, or if the right-wing were in charge.

Currently sitting at 10k followers on twitter a couple months after joining back in.

Part of the problem is that Republicans aren’t very smart, so they can’t pressure the media in effective ways to give them better coverage and do actually do things that can’t be defended like equivocate on who won the 2020 election.

Just smart yourself out of depending on banks and internet access to be a successful media company.

But don't smart yourself too much or they'll put you in jail like Virgil Griffith.

Back in the 2010s they'd just have roasted the guy on a reality tv show like King of the Nerds instead.

Now, let's look at the 'right-wing' media that is allowed to exist.

Ben Shapiro for years has enjoyed great promotion on Youtube, to the extent that left-wingers complain that he was part of the gateway to the altright or the radicalization engine etc... Funnily enough one of my zoomer friends said he was first 'radicalized' by Ben Shapiro.

Here is another example from Reddit, Shapiro has ads on Youtube.

Meanwhile, ever since Gamergate or earlier, a wide range of Youtube streamers can testify that their videos were demonetized, removed, shadowbanned or deamplified. For example Pewdiepie.

The 'Adpocalypse' began over two separate incidents. The first was when it came to light that terrorist groups like Hezbollah were using YouTube to upload and monetize videos promoting terrorism.

The second occurred when Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg made a video that included men he had paid to hold signs that read 'Death to all Jews.' Kjellberg insisted his video was satirical in nature and has since apologized. But since his channel remains the largest on YouTube, and since he was partnered with Disney's Maker Studios at the time and worked closely with YouTube Red on original content, the backlash was intense, and the reverberations were felt throughout the YouTube community.

Now, why is Ben Shapiro allowed to enjoy such an audience on Youtube?

Is it because he is such a consummate professional, expert at SIO?

He didn't do too well against an actual conservative journalist Andrew Neil.

Is it perhaps because his opinions are not actually a threat to the system, much like Hanania's?

['And by the way, I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America."

Color doesn't matter. Ideology does.'](https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/875730927002963968)

Perhaps Susan Wojcicki the CEO of YouTube thinks that she needs some 'conservative' talking heads.

Another example quoted in the MediaMatters link above is PragerU, which has an Israeli intelligence veteran for CEO, on video saying :

Frankly, I think a big thing we’ve changed people’s minds on is Israel. I got a phone call from … Israel’s foreign ministry … they called me. They specifically said “what you guys [PragerU] are doing is probably better than most pro-Israel organizations” because our audience is not Jewish or Israeli, so we’re not called ‘Israel.com.’ We do videos on 52 different topics, and a few of them happen to be on Israel… In no case we’re preaching to the choir on no issue because we have such diverse issues. Yes, we’re always conservative and pro Judeo-Christian, you know, American values, but we have moved a lot of people who have never heard positive things about Israel more towards Israel because of the diversity of our content.

There's a lot of such media out there. American exposure to Israel in the media is overwhelmingly positive. And that country gets a lot more media coverage than any other smallish country (prior to Ukraine in 2022-2023).

Another aspect is how tied up at the hip with American intelligence / deep state the media is.

Twitter for example had a lot of former FBI agents working there. But they are not the only ones.

The initial articles covering the January 6 protests said that policemen were killed during the protests.

The only death during the protest was an unarmed, female protestor.

This was known at time of publishing, but it took weeks for the NYT article to show a correction that the one cop who died was not 'bludgeoned' to death but died after the protests in some other location and without really getting hurt by protestors.

Moreover, there is evidence that the protests were directed by people who were working for the federal government, and this is not something that the MSM has been willing to cover much.

The MSM journalists don't even believe their own lies in some cases, as with January 6:

NYT National Security Correspondent, Matthew Rosenberg, contradicts his own January 6 reporting: “There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”

Rosenberg: “It was like, me and two other colleagues who were there [January 6] outside and we were just having fun!”

Rosenberg: “I know I’m supposed to be traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the [Capitol] building and are like ‘Oh my God it was so scary!’ I’m like, ‘f*ck off!’”

Rosenberg: “I’m like come on, it’s not the kind place I can tell someone to man up but I kind of want to be like, ‘dude come on, you were not in any danger.’”

Rosenberg: “These fcking little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the fck up. They’re fcking btches.”

Rosenberg: "They were making too big a deal. They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

Rosenberg RESPONDS: “Will I stand by those comments? Absolutely.”

The irony with this is that during the Charlottesville protests of 2016, one of the deaths was a female left-wing protestor who was walking on the street in front of stopped cars, when one car ran at moderate speed into the car at the back of the line, which caused the other cars to move and hit her.

The Dailystormer was mainly deplatformed because they made a joke about her being fat.

I don't think any of the media outlets calling the dead female protestor of 2022 an insurrectionist or a terrorist has been deplatformed.

The perpetrator had his time of glory on TV instead of getting several life sentences like James Field.

I think the biggest problem for the media is what they choose to cover.

If a team of scientists makes a discovery, they have guidelines to go out of their way to find a woman or a non-white to talk about it, even if their involvement was very minor.

If they talk about a country that their bosses like, then they say (mostly) positive things, no matter what.

The issue is that this kind of thing can change very fast.

One day we support #MeToo, the next we have to remember the tragedy of Emmett Till.

Here's an example with a NYT journalist writing a hitpiece on Americans who indulge in Russian propaganda, getting their own media's links thrown back at them when asking for source on Ukraine being a corrupt country.

2/2

Another issue is that when needed they are all coordinated to cover up or create urgency.

The joke at the time 'Oh it's Ukraine season? I still have my Covid decorations up'

illustrates this state of affairs, where the American/Western media overwhelmingly talks about the same thing at the same time, to take over the mind of the people.

Then they claim that there is such a thing as democracy, while the majority of people get their opinions fed directly from the same sources, with a handful of billionaires controlling all large corporate media that is allowed to have bank accounts and appear on the internet.

The recent Biden classified documents 'scandal' is another example.

The initial find was on November 2.. Right before the Midterms.

But we did not see it in the media before the end of the election of the speaker of the House.

Compare this to the leak of the Roe v. Wade overturning before the Midterms.

Finally, here is a critique of this article on unz.com.

I will quote just the end:

second opinion, from Paleo Retiree, who worked for decades at a major weekly news magazine. After I wrote about the bronze statue boom of the last third of a century, which I’ve seen with my own eyes all across the country but can’t recall ever reading about in the national press as a subject worthy of art criticism, he responded:

BTW, there’s a surprisingly big world out there of gifted people — architects, painters, composers, poets, etc — creating delightful, solid and beautiful stuff in trad kinds of ways. I’ve met a bunch of them. The reason your average American culturefan isn’t aware of this activity is that the press doesn’t cover it, so you aren’t being told about it. You won’t know about it if you don’t stumble into it yourself.

You can trust me on this, btw: back in the ‘90s I pitched a lot of story ideas about the various New Traditionalisms to a lot of different editors, and 99.9% of the time my ideas were shot down. I had to have had the worst batting average of any arts reporter ever, lol.

You’d think editors of arts sections and arts publications would find such people and developments interesting, and would want to explore them and tell readers and viewers about them. But no: in fact what I found was that the editors and producers (and the people behind them) who run the discussion about the arts in our country aren’t interested in mere reporting, let alone in giving their readers and viewers a fair picture of what’s really going on culturally in the world. They’re interested in dictating terms and promoting agendas. A few scales fell from my eyes. It’s almost like the entire news business generally!

Well our media only laundered two or three disastrous wars in the last years, invented and still maintain a few extremely damaging myths and isms while covering up other stories of immense significance... They're a paragon of excellence!

Let's compare to Russia Today, Hanania's chosen example of bad alternative media. What Russia Today does is slant its reporting, which is basically factual but they pick facts or perspectives in such a way as to make the West look bad and Russia look good. For example, their top story right now is 'US Navy SEAL killed in Ukraine' which is true in that it literally happened but it presents the West in a bad light.

When I go look through the sources that describe RT as disinformation, they use the same language as Scott and Hanania: misleading or incomplete information as well as just lies.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210423124457/https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/773054/mod_resource/content/0/hellman2017.pdf

Another strategy is the spread of disinformation, a term that may be of German origin and adopted by the Soviet Union in order to describe secret intelligence operations (Bittman 1990). It was used by a KGB department for black propaganda referring to intentionally produced “false, incomplete, or misleading information” targeting particular actor groups (Shultz and Godson 1984, p. 41).

Another article, listing various incidences of RT lying, came up with this. It is another one of Scott's 'oh we were just reporting what govt officials said so we're not really lying': https://russian.rt.com/article/130966

I trace another example back to Ofcom describing RT as 'not impartial' which is pretty obvious. Most people know that RT takes a pro-Russian perspective, it's in the name: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-releases/2019/ofcom-fines-rt

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0020/131159/Issue-369-Broadcast-and-On-Demand-Bulletin.pdf

They got fined for not being 'duly impartial', for not presenting alternate points of view. Great, now we're just back to Scott's definition of not quite lying but misleading using the truth. In the opinion of Ofcom, RT did not provide 'an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight in each programme or in clearly linked and timely programs' on the Skripal case, where they imply that it's a badly executed British provocation to make Russia look bad.

Can anyone here think of substantial issues where the media does not provide 'alternate points of view' and give 'due weight'? A lot of weight is riding on 'appropriately wide' and 'significant'. In China there might well be a similar 'appropriately wide' range between the left-faction and right-factions of the CCP. You might have a wide-ranging and flourishing debate on how Xi Xinping thought can be best implemented to achieve National Rejuvenation. That's 'appropriately wide' under a certain definition.

Is there a qualitative difference between the established media and RT? RT is certainly more outspoken about its slant and choice of narratives, they're more obvious in how they pick out stories that favor what they want to say. They probably do lie from time to time, there was one link that said they were going on about microchips in worker's arms make them more pliant. Unfortunately, that video is dead. Our media also outright lies from time to time to further its narratives: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story/ (unlike literally every website I saw that listed RT's 'lies' without providing actual refutations, the Intercept actually bothered to provide screenshots of allegations and refutations/corrections. Though to their credit they mostly did manage to provide corrections.)

But is that sufficient? Does a few corrections to some demonstrably false Russiagate stories put them ahead of RT, which I haven't seen providing corrections?

They got fined for not being 'duly impartial', for not presenting alternate points of view. Great, now we're just back to Scott's definition of not quite lying but misleading using the truth. In the opinion of Ofcom, RT did not provide 'an appropriately wide range of significant views must be included and given due weight in each programme or in clearly linked and timely programs' on the Skripal case, where they imply that it's a badly executed British provocation to make Russia look bad.

When you make comparisons between Ofcom's judgement and mistakes of MSM, you've got to remember the strict rules about news reporting on television in the UK, which require no overt partisan lean, in general, and the appropriate airing of all major viewpoints, which of course newspapers and American television media are not subject to. Looking at Ofcom's requirements, it's fairly obvious that RT came up way, way short.

Absolutely, I agree that RT does not hold to those standards. But those standards could be used to class almost every media outlet as disinformation, depending on one's interpretation of the rules in question. Thus it's somewhat unreasonable for Hanania to say 'the NYT and so on do a great job compared to RT which is much worse'.

This post joins Scott's in totally and completely missing the point of MSM criticism. Oh great, they're not lying about non culture war topics that they have no incentive to lie about. How could anyone with even moderate awareness of the criticism think this matters at all? Skilled liars don't have a truth counter that requires them to throw in a lie whenever they've said too many true things. Telling the truth is a liars most powerful tool, it does not disprove lies. The whole point is that you cannot trust them when it matters, not that they're going to waste their credibility on inconsequential reporting.

He seems to halfway get to figuring this out in his criticism of the academy, apply his same argument to it would be like laundering the grievance studies departments in with the hard sciences to show that actually only a small amount of the output is toxic garbage.

He points out that the revealed preferences of intelligent right-wingers seem to agree with him--many still read the MSM and even those who do not don't object to Hanania linking their articles with commentary as "fake news."

I think Hanania is falling for what it means that the mainstream media is infused with left-wing ideology much more than right-wing ideology.

Put simply, there will always be people who talk about music, sports, art, comedy, local heroes, current events, etc. There will always be people who don't really give a fuck about politics and ideology (for the most part, anyways). These people will largely reflect the ideology that dominates in circles of public intellectuals and what not. They are Normies By Default, the ideological equivalent of Ozy's Cis By Default people. If the Nazis are in power, they will speak Nazi ideas. If the Soviets are, then Soviet ideas.

Yes, you can obviously influence how many of these people there are and what counts or does not count as being a "normie", but you should never take the capture of these people as a sign that no one else can do what they do.

I share your sentiment, but you are dead wrong about Turkey. Do you have any ideas how many hijabs there are now? At universities no less? That was unthinkable before. You have sex segregated swimming pools at some hotels now. Judges and deans are chosen according to party affiliation. Erdogan has been in power for ages and he massively shifted the country's culture.

Well, in the same way the existence of rednecks is not the result of Trump. But Erdogan (and Gülen) brought Islam to cultural and political relevance, raised its status, and put a lot of its adherence into positions of power. The story has some interesting parallels to the US, actually. Arrogant and complacent coastal elites, disenfranchised hinterland dwellers, a populist with an underdog story...

particularly fecund

Neither are the Anatolian peasants, considering the Kurds as a separate entity.

It would devolve into religious-conservative cleruchs administering a society not particularly different from the one that already exists, because that’s functionally the only demographic the right can recruit administrators from.

I find it pretty obvious that the mainstream media is dishonest and awful.

But I do think, in general, that mainstream media is better than right wing media for the simple reason that they grind their axe less. Mainstream media can write about style, or sports, or music, or science or a million other topics and sometimes they can even leave their woke bullshit out of it. Whereas right wing media exists largely only to counter the mainstream media and therefore spends nearly all their energy on the culture war.

A strong right wing media would be one that spends less time fighting the left and one that just reports the facts. They could even have a travel section and talk how they spent a lovely three days in Mexico with nary a mention of politics.

I don't think such a thing exists.

and sometimes they can even leave their woke bullshit out of it.

Can they really? I heard a piece on the radio this morning. It was about a local woman making her debut with the local opera. It was strange, I thought, to feature such on the news, until I heard her name, and heard her speak.

She's black. That's why she was on the radio. A black woman at the opera is news, a white woman at the opera is bupkis. Now the interview didn't mention race at all. It didn't ask about difficulties overcome or racism faced. It was just a nice puff piece about a local girl singing for the local opera. You might not consider this grinding the axe, but I do.

When every single thing on the radio is, "but what about the women," or, "but what about the gays," or, "but what about the blacks," or, "but what about the trans," then yes, I'm going to consider it an axe to grind, and I can't unsee it anymore.

The radio? My understanding is this is a medium dominated by the right wing besides NPR. Mostly because Blues don't listen to talk radio, besides NPR.

When every single thing on the radio is, "but what about the women," or, "but what about the gays," or, "but what about the negros," or, "but what about the trannys," then yes, I'm going to consider it an axe to grind, and I can't unsee it anymore.

I just don't think this is fair representation of mainstream media. If we take the BBC, as just one example, surely the most mainstream of all mainstream media, and looks at the current headlines that just isn't true.

The current top stories on the UK home page are in order Sunak's fine, the nurse strikes, Zahawi's tax affairs, the new NZ PM, the compensation being set for a patient whose limbs were wrongly amputated, a feel-good puff piece about a man donating to his local pharmacy and Germany's tanks to Ukraine, or lack thereof. If you won't any article with a culture war article, there's only two out of the dozens on the front page, one of which is just a report about the Archbishop of Canterbury's commeaents on the recent gay marriage debate in the C of E, which is completely neutral and probably a worthy topic for coverage, and one about Andrew Tate. In the World section there are no pieces with a culture war angle, expect the Andrew Tate article which reappears here but not very prominently.

But fair enough, that's not American. NYT? The top article is about layoffs in tech, 2nd on military support to Ukraine (tanks), then others on Haiti, NZ, AI, David Crosby and George Santos. The only one of the main page that could be considered to have a culture war angle is the one on March for Life, but I don't think that's unreasonable.

The point of all this is if all you are hearing is about 'marginalised' groups that is probably what you're listening for.

I think this is useful. Just to contribute, I opened the website of German newspaper Die Zeit. Ten years ago, they were known as being slightly left-liberal but overall pretty boring.

Headlines on the front page:

  • Report about a reporter bringing 4 Afghan refugees to his home

  • Accusatory article about German companies exporting to Russia

  • Article about the Polish MP to bring together a coalition of countries to send tanks to Ukraine if Germany won't

  • Russian "occupiers" having to use their own cellphones to communicate with each other

  • A reporter naval-gazing about being addicted to nasal spray

  • Piece about a self-employed designer only earning 400€ per month

  • Banks pay too few dividends for personal accounts

  • The evolutionary explanation for the meaning of life

  • Sympathetic article about people gluing themselves to the streets to protest climate change

  • (Sober, non-editorialised) article about the rising number of asylum seekers from Syria

  • Accusatory article about companies not doing enough against climate change

(I stopped here)

I have to say, I am extremely surprised there is no fluff piece about feminism. Them being the reason I stopped reading them some years ago.

There's always a comment like this whenever media bias is brought up, and I still don't really know how to bridge the gap between your viewpoint and the OPs. I feel like you could make the same argument about a hypothetical issue of Pravda in 1950.

"Comrade, you say that everything in the news is about Marxism, or praising the Supreme Leader, or rooting out counter-revolutionary forces, but it is not so! Look, here we have an article about a town collective that exceeded their monthly ditch digging quote by 225%, here there is an article about new libraries being built using funds seized from wreckers, and another about the Mayor of St. Petersburg providing commentary on the liquidation of kulaks which, as far as I can tell, is completely neutral. Then there's a simple factual article about a former KGB lieutenant getting appointed as governor of an oblast. Sure, there's an article about Pavlik Morozov and how we need more patriotic children like him, and there's an opinion column about how wreckers are undermining the socialist state and ought to summarily executed, but really, you're only going to be upset by that stuff if you go looking for it. Perhaps you have some sort of complex?"

That last line, the psychoanalysis angle, has always been unproductive, IMO and is more of a veiled sneer than anything. Anyway, my point is that if you're a liberal sea creature swimming in liberal water, you might only notice that there's water at all when there's a particularly strong current. But a conservative land creature under 20 feet of water will feel a.quite justifiable sense of weight and oppression even if the waters are perfectly still.

Yeah but looking at one random 1955 edition of the Current Digest of Soviet Press, which collated the top stories in newspapers such as Pravda the bias is way more obvious and prevalent than you suggest. The top story is on 'The profound treatment of Leninist philosophical heritage', then we have an article on Jazz, but this is used to attack Western racism, then one on 'gross provocation by French police authorities', another praising Soviet foreign policy, one criticising the reception of a Soviet delegation in the US, a discussion of Marx on religion and countless others. Almost the only one without an overt Marxist, anti-Western or pro-Soviet angle is one article on sheep farming. The bias is obvious and everywhere.

That's because you're looking at it from the outside. You weren't raised in an environment where articles on with those themes and topics were considered "normal" and "non-controversial." That's the whole point of my post. If you had been born in 1915 and grown up reading nothing but that stuff in newspapers it might not seem very ideological at all.

I will concede that Cathedral propaganda is much more subtle, but that doesn't make it any less effective. Quite the opposite, in fact -- the Soviet framework was less totalizing, less all encompassing than the liberal framework (see Legutko's Demon in Democracy).

I feel like we're running fairly close to an unfalsifiable argument, where if there doesn't appear to be any propaganda or bias in MSM that must simply be because the observer is inoculated to it or because it's so subtle.

The comment near the top of this chain said everything they heard would invariably have an angle about a marginalised group; while I can't speak for American radio, this just doesn't seem to be the case in prominent MSM outlets.

I feel like we're running fairly close to an unfalsifiable argument, where if there doesn't appear to be any propaganda or bias in MSM that must simply be because the observer is inoculated to it or because it's so subtle.

I think this is self-evident. The question is not whether there is bias, only how much, because there is no such thing as a neutral viewpoint. To get a bit pedantic, the most mundane dog-bites-man story will have some sort of philosophical framework baked in consisting of basic assumptions about reality, such as what a dog is ("a mammal often kept as a domestic housepet," "a ritually unclean animal," "a harbinger of evil," "a symbol of wiley cleverness," etc. etc.) and what a man is (well, in $CURRENT_YEAR maybe this is a bad example). Articles about mundane topics written by ancient Greeks are far enough removed from us culturally that they are laden with bizarre assumptions that make no sense to us unless we read up on ancient Greek culture and society beforehand to understand their framework.

We can easily see the unique assumptions (the bias) of the ancient Greeks because there is so much cultural distance between us and them. American leftists and rightists are not yet so far removed from each other, so we can find "unbiased" stories that both would probably agree are "neutral." But as we move to topics where the left and right have diverged more, the distance between the two frameworks reveals (usually leftist) assumptions which, yes, are often very subtle. As I have stated elsewhere, I am a "reactionary" Catholic so my framework is much more distant from the leftist framework than the average American conservative (who I believe is rightly described as "last decade's Democrat") and so I can see the left/liberal/Enlightenment fnords more clearly.

Edit: To get off my soapbox and back to the claim under discussion, I don't think that literally every article or radio segment has a claim about a minority group, but a whole lot of them certainly do, and even a mundane piece about an opera singer has a subtext that might be invisible if you're thoroughly immersed in a 21st century American context.

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Tablet is the closest thing I can think of, and it's a Jewish interest magazine that happens to have some conservative views rather than a general magazine like the Atlantic.

The Cato Institute used to pay P. J O'Rourke to do this. I am a British /r/neoliberal-style neoliberal and I read it, because it was funny.

It's strategically dishonest, he is angling for mainstream acceptance.

Conservatives should take note and build their own institutions, but mainstream media needs to go just because of the pro-regime anchoring effect it induces in normies.

"Strategically dishonest" - I don't think you can read his entire body of recent work and come to this conclusion, if you have any exposure to American progressives, or even the mainstream.

For example, the first paragraph of another recent article, "Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down 'Meaning'" ends like this:

Me and the boxer became friends after that (last I heard he had impregnated some black girl in Chicago).

This is not how someone that cares about respectability writes in the USA 2023. The fact that he would include the impregnated girl's race at all will stop most left-of-center readers from going any further. The fact that he doesn't think her race is gratuitous opens a chasm of inferential distance between Hanania and the mainstream media, and he, as a self-confessed occasional troll, knows it.

It's strategically dishonest, he is angling for mainstream acceptance.

I've also gotten that vibe from his recent work. He used to write more as a dissident left-winger kind of like Scott, but now it seems like he's trying to downplay his dissident views to move upward in the establishment.

Angling for that column in a mainstream medium, yeah, people have said.

The other thing about Richard H. is that he has always made me uncomfortable with his whole visage. I chalked it up to him being Palestinian and hence likely a product of cousin marriage. I've said this repeatedly elsewhere, but he always made me uneasy. Good essays, dude made me nervous, hated watching any videos of him.

Then something really weird happened on twitter.

At one point, on twitter during some heated debate, he posted a screen cap that was really rather surprising. It showed his screen, whatever article he wanted to showcase, and also 'context ads' he ..crossed out? Instead of blacking them out by cutting what's there - what I do when posting screencaps he just doodled over them or something. Probably a stimulant user. (do dumb shit faster, more efficiently).

Now, this might just be me being overly suspicious - but as a single guy, the context ads I get are usually of the type of 'hot girls down to fuck / hot milfs / shitty web war game / world of tanks / war thunder / weight loss gimmicks / lingerie. Some other innocuous fairly generic bait.

His screencap, on the other hand, was showing ads for swimsuits. But not just any swimsuits. Swimsuits for female children. Now, this could be nothing, but together with his whole weird looking yet fiercely intelligent bachelor (thus no wife or reason to look up children's swimsuit) does make me wonder whether he belongs in the ranks of people who are very easy to blackmail.

Because I have never seen a context ad for swimsuits for little children, ever. Female lingerie, yes. Kid stuff? Never. And I've heard that if you got to web stores, and look up a certain kind of product, it's going to show the same sort of product in your context ads then all the time. E.g. a friend was buying dioptric swimming goggles. Bought some, her context ads full of ads for dioptric swimming goggles for weeks..

People probably saved him posting this. He only left it up for a maybe minutes, I regret not saving it because the whole episode is so bizarre I've been wondering whether my memory is playing tricks on me. But that has never happened to me to the best of my knowledge, so I think he probably has .. a problem.

I get ads about Grammarly despite being excellent at spelling and grammar - I think the Google AI is pinging off me being a Grammar Nazi and doing some word-association.

It's possible Hanania's said something somewhere that associates with that in the AI's inscrutable brain. Or it's possible he has friends or family with a daughter and bought one of those as a present. I'm pretty sure the incidence of bad ad targetting and the incidence of family with kids are both higher than the incidence of paedophilia.

Good points!

I got the same ads, on youtube. I think everyone did, no ?

Maybe my brain was uncharitable.

However, why would he stay single ? I know he's ugly as sin, but he's very smart and very driven.

These are very attractive qualities for women!

I mean, yeah. I'm not 100% on this, maybe 40%, which is however fairly serious as I don't see pedos behind every corner like some people.

I think the Google AI is pinging off me being a Grammar Nazi and doing some word-association.

Well, I suppose better that than having ads for Mein Kampf and swastika banners follow you around to every website, in case it took that word-association a bit too far.

Who would be advertising Mein Kampf? It's out of copyright, and it's well-known enough that anyone who wanted a copy would go looking.

Not to mention, I don't think Google lets neo-Nazis buy Google ads, so even if it thought I'd respond well to neo-Nazi ads, there'd be none available.

I can't actually find any info online about whether he has kids. I know I've searched Amazon for "toddler panties" . . . because my daughter needed some. Entirely possible he was just buying stuff for his kids.

He's also written about why you should have kids, and "guy who thinks people should have kids does, in fact, have kids" seems like an expected outcome.

Seems like a link to Neutral vs Conservative is in order.

If even the right reads left-aligned MSM, how is a right-wing equivalent of the MSM ever supposed to get off the ground? It'd be disadvantaged on every axis. Right-wing media is the way it is because it has to compete and win on ideological adherence to get any marketshare at all.

To me, this is a strong argument in favor of burning down institutions in general: sometimes, probably often, you can't build better ones while the old ones still exist. Not because they'd actively prevent you, but because they're already occupying the neutral space.

Right-wing media is the way it is because it has to compete and win on ideological adherence to get any marketshare at all.

That's a very good point. There's also the case that a lot of right wing people are of the conservative/loyalist/traditionalist mindset, which isn't that motivated to pursue the badly paid journalistic path as much as people who believe themselves to be rightful agents of bringing about a better future are.

Some sort of structure that'd incentivise all the ill-tempered semi-autists and harness / collate their investigatory efforts could work nicely. But how to do it ?

There's also the case that a lot of right wing people are of the conservative/loyalist/traditionalist mindset, which isn't that motivated to pursue the badly paid journalistic path as much as people who believe themselves to be rightful agents of bringing about a better future are.

I've never been fully convinced by this. Once upon a time I was an idealistic young traditionalist. If I could have, I might've joined a religious military order, or a very socially conservative think tank or news outlet, or worked in the administration of a paleoconservative or reactionary state. But almost every institution I could've joined was left-leaning or explicitly leftist/liberal, so I figured that the best way to follow my moral compass was to avoid joining any existing institution at all. I work in private sector partly because I think it gives my ideological enemies the least amount of succor. If there were a conservative Catholic software company out there I would probably take a pay cut to work there.

The "take a pay cut to serve a Great Cause" options are far, far fewer for right-wingers

In the same boat here, but I'm going a step further and may eventually see what I can do to start some institutions more closely aligned with my values.

PM me if you think we'd be ideologically aligned.

His argument has a few parts but the major thrust of it is that there is no better alternative--when everything is tallied up the MSM is far more truthful than competitors like Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Berenson, etc.

Yes? And? So what?

This is not an argument that the media is honest or good. This is an argument that the media is more honest and better, but without making the case that it's good enough. This matters, because in a great number of things 'better' is not 'good enough'- a runner with only one broken leg, only an ounce of sewage in a bottle of win, a teacher who usually wears a condom when tutoring a student one-on-one. These may all be things that are strictly preferable to alternatives, but that does not mean that a lack of alternatives means any are acceptable, or not worse than going without.

To quote the article-

The problem with taking a nihilistic posture towards the MSM is that there’s nothing to replace it with. If someone spends all their time complaining about capitalism without making the case for a realistic alternative, what they’re advocating for is chaos, or more likely, socialism, which is much worse. Likewise, simply trying to discredit the media when it’s in many ways the only means we have to acquire accurate information about the world should be understood as advocating for making society dumber.

To which one might as well respond- and where are you going to start describing what's the problem with nihilism?

Setting aside that the Hanania doesn't identify how society is actually being made smarter by the current media, he also doesn't identify what society being 'dumber' even means. He raises the spectre of nebulous chaos as bad not because chaos is bad, but because of what the effects of chaos can do to a healthy society... but if the society is already sick or insane- and Hanania pre-emptively concedes that the other side has 'lost their mind' on extremely fundamental issues on social composition- this doesn't actually mean it's getting worse. 'Not having any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics' is not a loss when the the superfulousness of words to describe them is already bringing about the bioethics of queer studies to the applause of the media that is being defended.

If the consequences of a dumber society with no common media environment are different than the consequences of the current media environment, that doesn't mean it's worse. Hanania presupposes that everyone accepts the current dynamics as good enough and that an alternative is worse. While this is a fundamentally status quo bias that's understandable for how Hanania himself has personally benefited, it makes no such appeal to those who have not, or who have been harmed, or who see their long-term interests of the trajectory as being threatened by the very institutions supporting positions Hanania himself calls crazy.

Yes, a lack of common shared vision of the world will create a low cohesive society. This is not the same as making the case for why people should commit to a cohesive society that disagrees with them on a fundamentally cultural level.

As with Scott's attempt awhile ago, this falls into the trap of 'we must have something common and good to all believe in.' Hanania frames it as a resistance to nihilism, but it's really not. This is just the rationalist tendency to want other people to support social cohesion for its common good effects, without grasping on how dynamics like social cohesion come about. People do not subscribe to common beliefs because social cohesion enables good things- social cohesion comes about when people subscribe to common beliefs, which define what good things are. Appealing to people to submit their view of what is good for the sake of maintaining the benefits of social cohesion is fundamentally missing the cause and the effect.

Hanania wants people to separate the insanity he admits is fully present in the system. The system is broadly comfortable and profitable for him. It is not broadly comfortable or profitable for others, who he makes no case are being well served by the current institutions that 'only lie a little', and the fact that the lack of a superior alternative will make the lack of a single information sphere less comfortable for a lot of people is not, in fact, a compelling reason for others to defer to the established institutions who see them as the problem.

Curious what you all think.

I think he's self-centered and blind to his own mediocrity. No one so self-flattering of their own IQ should be making so many basic mistakes of argument, history, or social cohesion.

He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation.

This is very Gell-Mann Amnesia of him, and you can tell because the parts he cites as good:

if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation

...are the parts that you can't see with your own lyin' eyes in order to discover that the leftist media is ALSO bad on those topics. How can Hanania tell me that the Atlantic's reporting on Myanmar is accurate, if he hasn't been there to see it himself? Did he visit CERN to check the fusion power stories?

We know that Blue Tribe reporting on race and sexuality is trash because we see those things when we go outside, and thereby realise that what happens IRL is not the story portrayed on the broadsheet page. It is then credulous to the point of stupidity to assume that the Myanmar reporting is good, in the absence of our own eyeballs' testimony on Myanmar to back the reporting up. Why would you assume good reporting as the baseline on these topics, when every topic you CAN check has bad reporting?

I mean, he tries to cover his ass a little against this line of objection with a one-sentence

When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says

...but I feel like this is a fig-leaf of a defence in that it only covers the sort of technical, sedulous, grist-for-the-mill topics where they're copy-pasting the press release (so it's not really journalists writing), and ideologues don't have a dog in the fight. But you never know whether a dog will appear - maybe the Myanmar article writer is a seething Rohingya partisan, which would surely lead to distortion. And the dogginess of the fight can change on a dime: as Hanania says, COVID reporting is shit, but I bet vaccine research reporting was a whole lot less shit before 2020, when it became The Current Thing and therefore political.

"The liberal news can be accurate when reporting unimportant things no-one really cares about" is a statement I might be more willing to agree with, but it's not really NEWS at that point, is it?

Then his point is dumb. The media gets everything important wrong and everything unimportant right. The media isn’t that bad!

It would be like going to a doctor that can correctly diagnosis the specific variant of cold you got but misses easy signs of the cancer growing in your body until it becomes terminal.

Or to borrow from finance it is picking up pennies in front of a steam roller.

If Alex Jones starts reposting AP press releases, while keeping his usual material, will people start writing articles about how he's "honest and good"?

When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says

I agree that this is absolutely wrong. It is constantly wrong in the scientific and legal fields I specialize in. In addition, when it is correct at reporting sorta what the paper says, the paper is usually trash itself! Well guess what!? Most of the papers that receive the most media attention are from the fields that are the most prone to bias and capture. "Objectively" reporting a psychology result is typically akin to misleading your entire readership.

Yeah agreed. I am an expert in a certain narrow legal field. Whenever it is discussed in the broad media, they get things about 90% wrong.

I'm guessing it's harder to be biased with science reporting (save for global warming, climate change). An article about fusion cannot be viewed through a political lens like anything to do with race.

I wrote an advocatus diabolus back in The Old Place about how "hard science academia is mostly taxpayer funded adult daycare for Israelis and Chinese stealing bread from the mouths of black bodies on whom that money could have been better spent". Fusion power especially: the meme of "we'll have it in 5 years" for the last 50 years is not just funny, it also represents a tremendous quantity of spending without results - aka grift.

So the fact that journos don't leverage rhetoric against it is a failure of their imagination, not because there's no political hay to rake.

It is interesting that funding is almost always through government.

If fusion were developed, it would represent the single greatest achievement in human history and would create tens if not hundreds of trillion in value to the inventor. If there was a 1/10,000 then a 9 figure figure investment doesn’t seem unreasonable. Why don’t we see it in the private sector?

Why don't we see it in the private sector?

We do. There is even a trade association for private fusion companies. Of the ones on that list, Tokamak Energy, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Helion are all serious operations that have raised nine-figure sums of money from private-sector investors. I suspect some of the others are as well - those are just the three I am familiar with.

The last time the US built a nuclear plant it took 40 years. That's an outlier but even in other countries it's frequently over a decade. By the time you were able to make any money off it the patents would be expired.

Fusion power especially: the meme of "we'll have it in 5 years" for the last 50 years is not just funny, it also represents a tremendous quantity of spending without results - aka grift.

If only.

"Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research"

See http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/ for sum total of this "tremendous quantity".

I'm guessing it's harder to be biased with science reporting

Science reporting is hilariously bad, falling for every pseudo-scientific scam you throw their way. The fact that it's easier to verify these stories only makes it worse.

The state of fusion power is one of the worse examples he could have picked.

An article about fusion cannot be viewed through a political lens like anything to do with race.

I mean, it can, but more importantly an article about fusion can be easily viewed through an “I have no idea what I’m talking about” lens. This usually manifests as asking and answering the wrong questions rather than providing flatly incorrect information.

Regarding fusion in particular, I'm not an expert but I'm pretty sure that the prospects for fusion being much of an improvement on fission are very low with most current designs (because they'll still have similarly high capex costs), but this is almost never mentioned in articles about fusion power.

Perhaps one way to test this would be to check how the NYTs reports on non-political stuff compared to sources which are presumed to not have a political agenda, like science websites.

Perhaps one way to test this would be to check how the NYTs reports on non-political stuff

Non-political stuff? Hard to find something like this in the current year. If NYT decides to give space to something, it must have some political importance.

compared to sources which are presumed to not have a political agenda, like science websites.

As others in this thread said, mainstream science websites and magazines have the same agenda as NYT.

So, how can normie noobs check whether NYT coverage of, for example, Australian cockroaches, is accurate (without spending few years of their lives studying entomology)?

Well, they cannot.

Best hope is to find some world class cockroach experts (fortunately, in the age of twitter, you can find genuine experts on every conceivable topic here, broadcasting to few dozen followers) and ask.

Do not ask directly "Is NYT article about cockroaches scientifically accurate, or as accurate as usual?".

Just no not mention NYT at all, just write that you are interested in cockroaches and want to learn more, ask curious questions about their life, and among these questions send some about topics covered in NYT.

"Is it true that North Australian giant cockroach regularly changes gender?"

I would assume most science websites have more or less the same agenda as the NYT.

+1 Pop sci websites share both the biases and incompetency of the NYT.

This is a good essay and I have shared it with people. While I can treat the doxing incidents as outliers, as Hanania has instructed me to, it still troubles me that the people who do these things continue to find employment in an industry that allows them to do such things. Taylor Lorenz may be best-known for doxing LibsOfTikTok, but she also doxed Pamela Geller's kids in response to hate speech committed by their mother, which they were obviously not responsible for. Until Lorenz apologizes for going after Geller's kids, I can't think of the Washington Post as a good institution while they employ her.

Also, I'm not convinced that Trump playing "QAnon music" was a signal to his base like Richard thinks it was. That was stock music that QAnon followers had been using in their videos. For all I know, they started using that stock music because they heard it at Trump rallies.

If I write off every outlet that's been used as a platform for bad things, then I don't think I'll have any news outlet left other than fringe right stuff that would (and did!) radicalize me. So I'm going to forgive news outlets that at least don't employ people whose claim to fame is doing this stuff repeatedly.

The claim that Taylor Lorenz's coverage of the Oshry sisters was unethical doxxing depends on an understanding of "doxxing" which is not universal, even among online communities (which have a much stronger rule against doxxing than IRL ones). The Oshry sisters were running a social media influencer operation which made minimal attempt to conceal their legal names and very much traded on their family relationship with each other. Taylor Lorenz did not unmask an actively-protected pseudonym, and she did not share non-public contact information, which are the central examples of "doxxing". She signal-boosted the true, publicly-available, fact that public figure X was semi-public figure Y's mother.

If you wanted to defend Taylor Lorenz using the traditional rules of journalism (which I won't - the article was clickbait), there is a very obvious argument to make that she was unmasking hypocrisy - the Oshry sisters were making a big deal about how important family was while cutting out their mother.

The claim that this article was so unethical that Taylor Lorenz should be unemployable is the claim that there should be some kind of ethical rule against signal-boosting true but embarrassing publicly-available information about public figures - in other words it is a claim that journalists should not do journalism. The claim that it was a trashy article because it treated an Instagram influencer as if they were an important public figure is valid and accurate, but that isn't and shouldn't be a career-ending offence.

Does the Daily Beast even count as mainstream media anyway? The Wapo not holding it against Taylor Lorenz that she did tabloid shit when she was working at a tabloid is normal business ethics, even if they do think it was a trashy thing to do.

I'm under the impression that the connection between the Oshry sisters and their mother was not publicly known prior to Lorenz's article, which outright brags about how much effort the two put into hiding their mother. I may be missing context because I never even heard of them before I saw this article. With that said, nearly all dox can be described as publicly available information. It's connecting the dots with the information that's the threat to people.

I think with Taylor the bigger issue was Libs of tik tok AND Taylor being a cry bully demanding that any criticism of Taylor is evil misogyny.

I agree with you that women who start public fights (both verbal and physical) and then cry misogyny when a man fights back are beneath contempt.

He's doing the same formula Scott employed in his viral article about the media, which is a recuring and somewhat annoying trend to get clicks: make an overreaching claim in the title "The media is honest! The media does not lie!" and then hedge and walk back on it in the article, or when people find obvious counterexamples. It's more like the media is honest about science reporting but dishonest about race, unfounded rape accusations, foreign policy, politics, etc. So this does not prove the media is honest, only that it is selectively dishonest. It's like a saying a serial killer is a good person because 99.9% of the time he is not killing people.

The incentives are aligned to favor clickbait, which is why the media tends to be so bad. Each click is money in the bank in terms of ad revenue. Only later can you issue a correction, but who cares, you already profited.

The incentives are aligned to favor clickbait, which is why the media tends to be so bad.

I'm not entirely sure the incentives of clickbait explain this as well as is theorized. Let's look at NPR which is funded by the government and donations. They don't have the same incentives, but I think NPR is even worse than many or even most MSM outlets when it comes to political slants. So while clickbait incentives may be driving part of the problem I don't think it is sufficient or even a necessary element for why the news media is so bad.

NPR does not need to compete for page views and ad dollars, hence less need for clickbait.

The clickbait era is over - the economic model that supported it (CPM ads) is now non-viable if you want to fund actual journalism. The media operations who are making money are doing it with subscription revenue from a smaller number of more committed readers - which is why everything is paywalled nowadays. The same is true of alternatives to traditional media like Substack.

What would Deceitful and Bad Journalism look like, in the abstract? Can such a thing exist? If so, what properties would we expect it to feature, and what results would we expect from its influence?

Before starting an argument over whether some existing institution's record is "good" or "bad", it might help to establish whether "good" and "bad" are, in this context, descriptors people can actually find agreement on.

It'll take me a while to come up with a full response, but it starts with wildly gesturing at the "latest news about fusion power" being almost as misleading as their race and sex coverage.

I've seen plainly wrong information from associated press reports copy-pasted hundreds of times across different media outlets that just rearranged the sentences and added some fluff. Google "first with 25 mm shells, then a few hours later with ammunition twice that size" for a basic, non-culture-war example of copy-pasted bullshit repeated by every trusted news source. (Some intern at the AP got "50 caliber" mixed up with "50mm." I only remember because I went "wait, the coast guard have 2" guns now?", searched, and found every article serving the same pasta.)

That kind of thing happens all the time, but it only really gets noticed or called out when it's something Conservatives Pounce on: race, sex, gays, guns, etc. For things like biology, history, or climatology almost nobody notices except a few depressed scientists (and surely Hanania should have added guns and "the climate crisis" to the insanity topics list!)

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