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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31017 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.

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.

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