This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Link from my blog The media is honest, except when it isn’t in response to Richard Hanania's article about how the media is honest and good.
My main disagreement is that Hanania's argument amounts to a sort of bait and switch: making a generalization that 'the media is honest and good' and then later equivocating that it's only honest in select cases (matters not pertaining to race, ideology, gender, etc.), although even that is questionable such as regarding global warming, which is also highly political despite not being about race or gender. Second, let's assume that the media is honest, but if the reporting is so bad that for all intents and purposes there is no difference between incompetence or deception, then I don't see how this supports Hanania's thesis that the media is also good.
Regarding the NYTs, the NYTs is popular in part because it produces so much content, which is not specifically news-related but includes op-eds, general interest pieces, and such that are of a less topical nature. This is not the same as the NYTs being honest, because it's not news. Reading an article about cooking in the NYTs does not mean I endorse its reporting of foreign affairs.
The financial incentives encourage clickbait. Even bloggers are not immune to this. Clickbait offers very high upside (virality, ad dollars, subscriptions, etc.) and little downside (small reputational loss), the latter which can be mitigated by mixing clickbait with non-clickbait. If people stopped following the media because of getting stories wrong ,even on occasion very big ones, no media company would still be in business. So people trust the media, yes, but this does not necessarily imply it's trustworthy. I think the media cannot be fixed until these incentives change.
For your information, this is what your blog looks like when viewed on a 16:9 PC. There are way more linebreaks and page-scrolls than necessary due to the large text, large line-spacing and massive greenspace; I find it hard to read. I assume you only checked what it looks like on mobile.
/images/16753182265325553.webp
hmm thanks for alerting me about this
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This seems a little ridiculous. I don't think the media ever confidently predicted that Trump would literally try to instigate a coup or something; other than what he did, what else was he supposed to have done that in your eyes would have vindicated the media's position?
There were articles from mainstream publications that entertained the possibility of trump not leaving https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/what-if-he-wont-go/606259/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Hanania's piece wasn't meant to convince you to love the media, it's meant to counter stuff like "the liberal media is evil and lies constantly! I read Rebel News instead!" and point out that conservatives don't have anything close to a good alternative.
The right has the AEI, NRO, and the WSJ, among others. It's not as if there is no right-wing counterbalance to the left that isn't pure tabloid hype
Agree! A conservative who thinks 'the MSM is useful unreliable on a lot of important issues, I prefer wsj/[...] on those' isn't who that article is aimed at. NRO/AEI aren't quite as 'good' as the 'mainstream media' though. And WSJ is, but its reporting isn't that different from center-left orgs, just a bit more conservative, i can't understand the idea that the NYT is trying to eat your brain the WSJ is totally fine.
Hanania's comment on the WSJ in the article is "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.'
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Best I can give you is "all media is evil and lies constantly, so I read no news at all". Except for you lot.
More options
Context Copy link
Anything not having explicit purpose to gaslight me is a good alternative. Hanania's claim that "it is one of the most honest, decent, and fair institutions designed for producing and spreading truth in human history" is absolutely laughable. Well, no, I correct myself - in "media not lying" sense it is absolutely true. It was designed for this exact purpose. Except it has absolutely abandoned its purpose and went all in for partisan propaganda and agenda-building.
OK, maybe the "most" doing all the work here? I mean, what institution designed to spread the truth is actually keeping with its mission? Academia? Gimme a break. We have whole areas of research banned and we have absolute cretins rampaging on campuses seeking - and often succeeding - to expel anyone who dissents from the woke dogma. If any truth-seeking still happens underneath it, it's hard to say academia is institutionally aimed at it anymore. At worst it allows it to happen if it's not too bothersome. Arts and entertainment? You know, writers, poets, playwrights that guide and enrich and elevate the society morally? Nope, can't remember any recently. Libraries and schools? Too busy organizing drag shows for kids and counting pronouns. Religion? They certainly would claim they spread the Truth, but given how many of them there are, hard to rely on their words here. Maybe courts and legal system? Too laughable to even consider, they don't even try to pretend "truth" has anything to do with any of it. So yeah, maybe it's more like "John is the most honest person among this set of 20 pathological liars" kind of statement.
Even then I am struggling to award this humblest of prizes to the media. These are people who repeatedly and consistently tried to deceive and gaslight me into thinking things that not only were absolutely not true - that they themselves knew or must have known if they had any professional integrity are not true. They repeatedly buried stories that contradicted their agenda and invented stories that support it. They are actively and constantly trying to harm me by distorting my model of the world and trying to manipulate me for their own purposes.
Rebel News may have it flaws, but at least they aren't part of the giant machine that tries to eat my brain and convert it to an obedient mush. I mean, if he argued "the press is full of shit, but there are nuggets of truth in there from time to time, and also they publish the sports scores" I could find some sympathy to that, but "most honest, decent, and fair"? nope.
Right. The fact that it doesn't literally tell untruths all the time is true. If selective coverage is enough to accomplish its goals, it will do that. If selective coverage plus out-of-context quotes will do it, it will do that. If maybe it also has to say things which are not literally false but give a false impression, it'll do that. And if there's no way to get the point across but a lie, it'll try to find a source to launder the lie through. If it can't, maybe it'll lie itself. But all that dance is only to maintain plausible deniability; no matter what, it's trying to get its message across, not tell the truth. And I think Trump broke it a bit, and moved it towards more outright lies ("claimed, with no evidence" being a common one; sometimes the evidence was included in the very same speech they were quoting the claim in)
More options
Context Copy link
What does 'explicit purpose' mean here, though? The people inside the NYT are not saying "okay, time to stoke antiracist blood libel and suppress human biodiversity today". They're not even saying "wow, it looks like the science on HBD is more complicated than we thought, we better write a few pieces to smooth that over". They're thinking "wow, those harmful racists are getting read a lot, let's fight back and publish truth!" And the problem with calling this "explicitly lying" is you fail to notice how universal "being wrong, and thus doing bad things" is. Rebel News does it too.
Academia continues to succeed at 'finding truth' in the areas of physics, biology, chemistry, and many other fields. Your claim here has a similar issue - yeah, there are bad parts, but a lot of research done in 'academia' continues to underlie a lot of work in in industry, from algorithms in datacenters to pharmaceutical products to better computer chips. Big chemistry or physics or biology labs are ... 'academia'. There's a lot of shit along with the useful stuff, even in the hard areas. Yet if "academia" was destroyed, in the sense that all the people in it simply ceased to exist, that'd be a massive harm to the functioning and improvement of society, even if we wouldn't miss the social sciences / diversity parts.
This is absurd. What do you think (time/money spent on drag shows) divided by (time/money spent on other things) is, on average, for all american libraries? Or (pronouns) / (other things) for american schools? It's < .01%. Schools spend much more effort on teaching math, science, english, history, and libraries spend much more time on organizing and handing out books. I don't love schools, and libraries are just less important now that things like libgen/scihub exist, but these do not matter. Even worse, drag queen story hours or school pronoun events are <.1% of exposure to gay/trans/queer sex stuff for children - almost all of that will come from the internet or tv shows.
The media isn't 'the machine', the media is made up of a bunch of 'genuine people who care' who are still wrong. Most progressives are doing the same thing without being part of any institution. And ... most conservatives are also doing the same thing. Rebel News might be part of a related but different machine that also tries to convince you of dumb stuff. https://wefreports.com isn't doing honest reporting, it's significantly dumber than anything in the NYT. Part of the first chapter of the open letter to open minded progressives is about how Virus X and Virus Y are both wrong and both trying to own you.
No, I'm sure they don't say it. But they behave in a way that they might as well say it. Well, actually, in a way they say it, if not that openly. But something like this: https://archive.ph/Lxs2a
as the same kind of vibe
OK, maybe "explicit" is not the right word here. Maybe "obvious" or "definite" would be better. What I am trying to say it's not a set of random mistakes because they are bad at their job. It's a pattern of behavior.
I am 100% sure at least for some of the falsities they publish they know or suspect it is false, and for even more of them they don't care if it could be false as long as it serves their goals. For some falsities they may think it's true, but definitely not for all, and definitely it doesn't matter much anyway. At least beyond very narrow technical sense, as in Scott's "media never lies" argument. They know what they are doing, and why they are doing, and they aren't exactly hiding it, not anymore. If their professionalism allows them to achieve it without making statements that can be proven as technically false - great for them, more reason to argue "media critics can't provide any evidence to back up their claims".
I don't think it does. I mean, Rebel News surely could be wrong, and probably is at times. But I haven't noticed them putting agenda first (I know media on the right that does this, btw, e.g. Tucker Carlson does this sometimes, not always, but enough to notice) and truth somewhere in the back where it can be barely seen, consistently, for years.
Yes, the rot in exact sciences only started recently. Notice you didn't include the softer parts that are already thoroughly rotten. Yes, the exact sciences still finding the truth, mostly, but I expect this to diminish significantly in the next decades, as more and more topics be politicized and infected by Lysenkoism, as academia turns from searching the truth to serving the politics. It is a slow process and we're in the middle of it. Medicine and biology probably would be the first to fall. Physics and abstract math will survive the longest, probably because the truths they find are completely incomprehensible to the general population. But as an institution whose direction is to seek the truth, academia has already fallen. As I said, it's not that it's not happening, it's that it's no longer considered the primary purpose.
Whole academia? Sure. Some parts of it, like victim studies, or parts of it that rewrite history and organize witch hunts? Well, I have strong aversion to people ceasing to exist, so let's replace it with "people that are involved in it magically become involved in something else", and you've got yourself a deal.
For other rotten parts, as psychology or economics or sociology, they certainly find some truths, but I am not sure by now they aren't buried in the noise enough to still be net positive. Maybe still yes, but it's getting worse.
We're talking about seeking and spreading the truth, not all other things. Of course, not only drag shows, but also other woke activities. I am not convinced it's less than 1 by now. Didn't make my own research, of course. Well, tbh schools never were a particularly good place for looking for the truth anyway, except in the most basic sense like multiplication tables and melting points of metals and so on - but now many schools even fail at that, or even at teaching the students to read and write. But I don't think school is a place where you expect the truth to come from. I mean, I'd like the stuff being taught in school to be true (even if I know it's not always is) but it's not where it comes from - they are teaching things that come from somewhere else.
I admit I'm not basing it on any solid research but I doubt an average child would seek out the gender theory of pronouns or a drag show on their own on the internet. It's just not what would interest them (there may be rare exceptions, as there always are, but I'm talking on common case). That's why it has to be pushed by an authority figure - i.e. the teacher. Nobody needs to push boobs on horny teenagers - they'd find them by themselves and will overcome any obstacles on their way. But things that do not come naturally need to be pushed - and are being pushed. As for how much - I live in a rather conservative place, and I don't have kids of school age, and I already heard about several local attempts to expose children of school age to such content last year. TBH, in decades before that never heard about it, it's a new thing. But it seems to be happening often enough that I hear about it locally, not a story about somewhere on the other coast.
You're saying like it's two incompatible things. Nothing could be further from the truth - the worst and most terrible machines are made of people. One of the most terrifying and deadly machines on our recent historical memory - the Nazi Germany - was made of people. Some of them undoubtedly loved their daughters, their wives (or husbands) and their dogs, and cared about their cause. Soviet Russia - an only marginally less terrifying machine - had lots of beautiful people that cared. Yet as a whole it was unspeakably awful and deadly. There were many more in 20th century alone, and uncountably many before.
Of course, thankfully, NYT is not as evil as any of those machines (and they are a cog by themselves rather than the whole anyway), but they are part of a lesser, much less evil but still a harmful one.
Might. Yet I haven't seen it so far. About NYT, WaPo and such I am completely sure they are.
This site fails to open for me, so I can't say what's there. But I seen some of what Rebel News guys did in Switzerland, and I don't think it qualifies as particularly dumb. Maybe this site contains some dumb stuff, I am not exactly surprised that there are sites on the Internet that contain dumb stuff. The thing is most NYT stuff it not the dumb stuff. I wouldn't be so disgusted if it was just dumb stuff. It's the evil manipulative lyings stuff - and not just once or twice, but continuously, consistently, for years - that makes me make conclusions that I do. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. How about a hundred times? A thousand? Can it be called a war? What am I supposed to feel about somebody who is waging war against me?
[man, this is long, but it seems about as long as yours]
@ the wapo article you link, while that is bad and woke, that postmodern wokeness stuff is not the cause of journalistic bias. Bias and incorrect reporting were just as present in print news 100 and 200 years ago. And avoidance of 'white objectivity' are not at the root of e.g. 'media bias' in climate or race today (seeing as the media was similarly biased on race and IQ many years ago). Some of the quotes from it suggest this isn't a universal phenomenon in the media either:
This isn't universal media abandonment of 'objectivity'. And it's arguably better than john reed. The pattern is that they genuinely believe in antiracist and similar things for poor reasons, and write stories to 'help those hurt by racism'. They (in the NYT) do not think they are lying, any more than Fox thinks they're lying. (Compare this to something like a political campaign, where "crafting messages to appeal to audiences" is a lot closer to "explicitly and intentionally lying").
Know and suspect are different, in this context! It's one thing for a few journalists to have suspicions they can't really follow up on due to political pressures. It's another thing for a majority of writers on the topic to be aware they are lying and write it anyway. The former is clearly true, and happens in many progressive spaces about it. The latter isn't! If you have an example of something woke that was published where people involved knew it was false, that'd be useful.
The softer parts were thoroughly rotten a century or more ago. Psychology today has a veneer of empiricism that was then entirely lacking. The replication crisis wouldn't matter with no data to replicate! Age-regression hypnosis research got published in Science! Marxism was a strong intellectual current! And despite all of that, the hard sciences plowed onwards, as they do today.
Well, medicine and biology still seem to be advancing rapidly. Yet-higher-resolution imaging techniques continue to be developed, new mechanisms discovered, new drugs released. So I don't see it. Elaborate on why?
On libraries, I went to my local library yesterday, and there were a bunch of people looking at books, nobody was talking. Some signs were on the wall for book clubs and reading events for children. Nothing about drag queens. Vaguely remember a few left-leaning flyers, but nothing about trans. This isn't a conservative place. Same for schools - there are gay/trans clubs, but there are lots of clubs, and most of the resources at schools go towards poorly teaching stuff.
I didn't say 'seek out', I said 'exposure'. I looked at the top 100 of /r/all for me, and this post was in the 50-75 place. ... it's not like this was forced on anyone, or had its upvotes manipulated or anything. So if you're a random kid who reads reddit, you're seeing that. Tiktok or snapchat aren't better. Twenty videos of scrolling in (browser, no account) gave me this, a guy doing his nails and makeup. Exposure to it is everywhere! It's "organic", this guy just likes doing that, and millions of people decided to watch it. Sure, it's a confused simulacra that has nothing to do with 'the female appearance' anymore, but it's not forced on anyone.
Er, I wasn't saying "the media isn't part of a bad tendency among people", I was saying "the media isn't the machine - if something is a machine, it's the entirety of progressive culture, not the media specifically, the media is a meaningful but small part".
WEFReports.com is a redirect to Rebel News's WEF section. They are lying and misleading about all sorts of things - The Great Reset, Covid as a conspiracy, the vaccines not working, digital identity and tracking as a globalist plot, etc. (not that any of digital identity / vaccines / WEF aren't bad in some ways, that's a separate issue). They're doing the same thing the NYT is - just saying a bunch of stuff to push readers in a certain direction without too much care for what's accurate. This video, 145k likes on twitter involves them screaming at the pfizer CEO for three minutes, incorrectly conflating 'the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission' and 'the vaccine is ineffective', bringing up the dumb 'died suddenly' theory, etc. If I'm taking that or the NYT... And that's what prompted hanania's article. He's seeing a lot of conservatives lambast the lying, useless media, and smoothly transition into promoting equally biased RW media, talking about schools transing our children and people dying suddenly. This isn't an improvement, and it won't lead to significant cultural change because smart libs just bounce off the 'obviously wrong' stuff.
In a consequentialist sense, yes, progressives and NYT contribute to a set of ideas that goes against beauty, will, understanding, and life. But '[the media] are an enemy and are at war with me' isn't a useful way to oppose this, because every progressive and conservative are doing the same thing. If you bring up "black people are, genetically, lower iq than white people" (or "being a is bad") at the dinner table and you get disapproval, that's the same thing the NYT is doing, borne of the same beliefs. And you'd get kicked off Fox for saying the former! If everyone's an enemy, fighting them like you would an enemy isn't going to work.
We're not talking about "bias". We're so far beyond that we don't see "bias" in the rear window anymore. We're talking about deliberate - and, according to authors of that screed, open and conscious - coordinated propaganda effort to distort the worldview of the society in order to subvert it to the goals that the media handlers think is necessary to achieve. And they openly admit they can not achieve it by just giving us truthful information and letting the best angels of our nature to do the rest of the job. They need to manipulate us and to suppress the information that hurts their cause. And also, evidently, lie.
Joseph Kahn is lying here. They do throw labels like "racist" and "lying" around willy-nilly, as long at it serves their purposes and promotes their agenda. And since it also serves their purposes, they then turn around and claim that they do it only in the most proven cases, where the proof is stacked sky-high - despite knowing perfectly well it's not the case.
And yet, not only you can but many "journalists" are exactly that. Maybe for some of them their activism is now on Twitter but on other venues, but honestly, who cares? I'd prefer a journalist that is Antifa-lover on Twitter but strictly objective in her professional life (if that were ever possible), to one that is silent on Twitter but puts all her activism into her articles.
It's way beyond that. They believe it so much that they think the whole society needs a fundamental overhaul, the whole societal system is hopelessly tainted and needs to be dismantled and rebuilt according to their ideology, and that should happen by any means necessary. So all niceties of the olden days, like objectivity, civility, neutrality and so on, should be abandoned and anything that serves the cause is good.
It's not about helping people affected by racism, it's more about rebuilding the society that made it possible, along the lines that they see correct by their ideology.
Not really, not for a journalist. If you say "X is true" while you reasonably suspect it is false, you are a liar. If you say "I had information that X is true, but for reasons A and B I suspect it is not actually true", then it'd be honest reporting.
That's what has been happening again and again recently. On Russian collusion, on Biden laptop, on Covid, on many other topics. Of course, I can't conclusively prove they knew - that'd require access to their inner thoughts and private communications - I mean, maybe they are complete idiots, on the "Omg, Nigerian prince just promised me a billion dollars, I have to run to the bank" level, but I don't believe they are. I believe they are smart, and are liars. But I may note, then we do get access to private communications (see Twitter files, or Alfabank hoax, or Durham revelations) - then we do find out, that everyone involved knew what they are doing, and did it anyway. And why not - they are The Army Of Light, who fights the dark forces. Why limit themselves by some patriarchal rules?
Is it actually true? Did you hear about the Eroom's law? Do we know the cause of COVID - and will we able to ever find it out without politicians meddling? Can we prepare for the next COVID if the researches are prohibited from freely discussing the genesis, qualities and consequences of this one? There are many proposals where scientists and practitioners that voice opinions not approved by the state are going to be excluded from further scientific pursuits and practice, for "misinformation" and "causing harm". Do you think it's possible to search for the truth this way?
Sure, with combined efforts of the Reddit team, and other woke Big Tech teams, there would be some exposure. Which - for everyone except 0.01% of kids suffering from dysphoria or similar conditions - would be thoroughly ignored. Just "exposure" does nothing. They need to be convinced by multiple authority figures that this is not some weird things among many weird things adults do, but actually laudable, stunning and brave thing that elevates them above the mundane masses.
Well, if there was any other way to talk to Pfizer CEO beyond screaming at him, that'd be preferable, but we all realize there's no such way - he would never submit to the interview with an unfriendly outlet without having all questions and answers per-vetted by the legal and PR teams. And the media like CNN or NYT - who has more power to pressure Pfizer CEO than Rebel News does, to agree to such engagement - would never do that. So this is the only way there is some engagement possible. Or maybe the only way of reminding our reptilian overlords that we plebes do exist.
As for conflating on the vaccine matter - I am not sure why you are laying this on RN's lap. This confusion has been pushed on us for two years on all levels from the President down. The President himself told us, by his very own lying lips moving, that the vaccine prevents infection and transmission, and that only taking it may rescue us from gruesome death. If he was wrong - did Pfizer CEO - or any of the legacy media - correct him? Did they call him out and force him to correct and admit the truth? Nope. They repeated and amplified these claims. Then, when they proved to be false, they turn around and claim it's not that they lied (or, charitably, were mistaken and very undeservedly overconfident) - it's that the rest of us were "confused", but not to fear - they'll be happy to explain the truth to us!
Ad then when people are not inclined to believe them anymore, it must be because they are dumb and Rebel News is misinforming them with their dumb stuff.
Actually it is. They are asking questions that nobody else dares to ask. They may be wrong in their conclusions (or not?) but at least they are asking. If other "journalists" were willing to ask such questions and report conclusions, whatever they would be, without preconceived agenda or prejudice - then we could judge, who is doing it best, and if RN turns out doing it wrong, we can ignore them. But if they are playing alone on this field and the rest is screaming government-supplied propaganda in unison and demand the government to shut down all dissent - then yes, one flawed player on the field is better than no players at all.
I don't think so. I think Rebel News want to find out the truth and inform me about it - even though they may be very well wrong about what the truth is (or not?), and even though they may not have better means than confronting Pfitzer CEO and screaming at him. But I think NYT and others want to cause me to behave in a way that they think I should behave, for their reasons that have nothing to do with me - and with that purpose, they feed me any information or any lies that they think may cause me to behave as such. That is not the same thing at all.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This chain was started by Scott's series of posts like Bounded Distrust and The Media Very Rarely Lies, right? Amazing how much yarn was spun out of such a trivial thing. I have to say that, generally,
The «pro-media» guys here are right on almost all counts, and conservatives who get fixated on provocative titles and plug bananas in their ears are being wrong and behave ridiculously.
Nonetheless, conservatives have got the more appropriate gut feeling; liberal media dominance constitutes a terrible state of affairs, for a very simple reason that nobody is mentioning. Media is being honest and good to have you believe it's honest and good when it's actually deceptive and bad – and those few issues are central to its mission.
Hanania says:
But also:
And:
Why oh why would somebody not already fanatically committed to socially costly, «heterodox» views on race, gender and sexual orientation (topics which are, as Hanania says, the dead center of liberal moral universe, the screaming empathetic abyss that undergirds all this nice, edifying professional reporting on cougars and Myanmar in MSM) – make that exception? And without that exception – what would MSM lead such a reader to conclude about any civic matter that has impact? From «fake news» and censorship and misleading allegations like Russiagate to vilify the competing party, to the role of government and education policy, it's pretty much all downstream of reasoning that uses cleverly disingenuous or pants-on-head stupid MSM interpretations of identity problems as ground truth.
Small correction: the MSM keeps showing you that there are massive racial and gender disparities, and it explains them with bigotry attributed mainly to white cishet males, with propaganda of redistributionist and affirmative-action policies informed by this culpability. This is like if Pravda kept showing you the economic data proving that capitalist countries are rich and the Soviet Union doesn't have enough grain to feed itself, but encouraged its readers to sniff out kulaks and bougie wreckers who are hoarding the grain for themselves, and suggested coping with the deficit by means of Prodrazverstka. Doesn't sound so innocuous now, does it?
Wew. dril said it better than I can.
This isn't about respect or principles. The MSM wield truth as a weapon. Even when they do not outright lie, do not mislead with interpretations, do not do anything objectionable at all, they are doing it with the agenda in mind. The NYT is particularly guilty with their top-down «narrative» thing, but the whole blob is this way. They are earning credibility points in the minds of their readers, and a sufficient quantity it turns into suspension-of-disbelief points. What for? Bryan Caplan gets awfully close with his Big Picture framing, but he doesn't make the final step. Neither do you: «A serial killer is indeed a good person the 99.9% of the time he is not killing people». Let me propose a better analogy: Sam Bankman-Fried is a good guy who runs an advanced and feature-rich financial platform 99.9% of the time, lobbying for regulations against his competitors and expanding his control over crypto wallets of Americans. Then he collapses it, wiping his clients' livelihoods, and it turns out they were always but fuel for his Effective Altruist power plays.
This is the problem of Ponzi schemes, exit scams, rug pulls, commodification-of-your complement business relations, «good old law and order» autocrats who turn into rabid dictators, monopolies, startups, Trust Games with rising stakes, and a ton of other scenarios where you benefit maximally from getting the other side to invest enough power in you, then defecting. And you get there by providing value. No shit the NYT publishes a ton of decent high-quality content. So does Netflix. It's bait to make you lower your defenses, and simultaneously a vehicle to deliver the payload – seeing as we're talking vaccines and viruses.
Here's a good rule of thumb: you do not get let people who hate you inject unknown bioactive substances into your veins, even if you're very sure the solvent itself is harmless and indeed good for health.
I think this is what makes conservatives so rigidly untrusting – both of the MSM and of mandatory vaccination. Sometimes they overreact needlessly. But in the case of the MSM, this is the least they can do in response to obvious and systemic bad faith.
I feel this point on a spiritual level. I wish I could treat most interactions as if I live in a high-trust environment, but instead it feels like virtually every person I don't have a personal connection with is trying to suck me into a sales funnel which has some ponzi-like aspects at the other end of it.
The entire concept of trust is based around believing that it is costly for someone else to defect against you, or that the person simply has no major desire to defect and will maintain a stable status quo because it's easy.
And humans have multiple inbuilt skills and learned techniques for determining how much to trust someone. But I think most of these are assuming a linear increase in the 'reward' for defection, when in reality, due to asymetric information, the payoff for defection has increased exponentially outside of the individuals awareness.
i.e. with crypto rugpulls, most of the individual investors are probably not dumping their life saving's into a given shitcoin all at once. Oh some individuals certainly are, but most of them will probably put in a little at a time, see a positive return, add some more, then some more, all while hearing reassurance from the project devs that things are on track and the price increase is a sign of strength.
What isn't obvious to an individual investor is how many other rubes are being pulled in over time which means the reward available for pulling the rug is increasing faster than any individual investor's stake is increasing.
So while each individual investor feels like they're logically incrementing trust in the project in a linear fashion, the other side sees something like exponential growth in the pot, which eventually crosses a threshold and they disappear with the funds.
And this applies to many 'edge case' situations where the individual believes there's a 'mutual' relationship occurring (I give you X, I expect Y in return), but the other party's goal isn't so much to provide Y, it's to get lots and lots of people who want Y to come to them so they can increase the amount of X they receive enough that their relationship with any individual customer doesn't matter.
Incidentally, this is why I tend to vastly prefer working with local, small businesses when I am spending a significant amount of money on an important project where the incentive to cut corners would otherwise be quite high.
As you say, Media companies are at their most valuable when they have a high amount of built-up trust. But the same principal as above applies. Someone may 'invest' increasing trust in a media company in small increments. So they think "well I've read 40 stories from this company that were accurate and useful, perhaps I can rely on their reporting after all!" But if the actual number of people investing trust increases, from the media company's side they see it as having 3 million people who are likely to accept their story as true without much skepticism. Which presents a way more valuable opportunity than any individual reader is aware.
And so they may switch over to a mode that exploits that trust. Especially if they can offer this service to a third party. "We can publish a favorable PR story for you/your company and expect 3 million people to uncritically believe it!"
Maybe they only have to throw in a puff piece for every 1 in 50 stories, maybe it's 1 in 15, but the point is that they don't have to immediately start publishing constant lies in order to take advantage of a trust relationship built up over time.
More options
Context Copy link
Trust games are a fascinating construct. Seems like with the levels of power getting thrown around in modern society especially we need a binding compact more than ever.
Unfortunately the ruling class is more instrumental and sociopathic than ever. Do we need a modern religion to bind us all together in fear of hell or something?
Attempting to reduce how many people do some behavior by applying social pressure will have two main effects
Reduce the amount that behavior does (as people respond to the social pressure).
Shift the population of people who do the behavior more towards people who care less about that form of social pressure (as the people who are more likely to change their behavior in the face of social pressure end up changing their behavior more when said social pressure is applied).
So the danger in that sort of approach is that, if the behavior you're trying to disincentivize through social pressure is individually helpful but collectively harmful ("burn the commons for personal gain"), trying to reduce that behavior through social pressure will result in specifically people who do not care about social pressure doing the thing, and benefiting thereby. So in the short term it appears to work, but in the long term it provides an advantage to exactly the sort of people you least want to provide an advantage to.
A better long-term approach would be to make it actually costly to burn the commons. How that might be achieved in practice is left as an exercise for the reader (because I personally have no clue, and I suspect that any robust solution also would function as a solution to the principal-agent problem).
In my opinion smart contracts on the blockchain are an interesting answer. I expect them to become more relevant as more and more of our useful work happens in a digital environment.
I'm still not entirely clear on how one makes a smart contract meaningfully reference something in the physical world (outside of a few cases like filecoin where the part of the physical world we're interested in is online storage.).
This may be more of a statement on my knowledge than on the viability of smart contracts in general -- if you have some good sources on how that problem is addressed, I would be interested.
The main answer to this has been with NFTs. The challenge is convincing people that an NFT is tied to a certain physical outcome or object.
If everyone agrees that to have legitimate ownership over a piece of land you need a corresponding NFT, you can incorporate that into a smart contract. The hard part is getting public buy in.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The NYT is also one of the few publications that still actually produces news content. News gathering is expensive, and a lot of publications are cutting back on anything that requires more work than paying a 24-year-old 35k/year to sit in an office and and of course their main office in New York. CNN has 19 domestic bureaus, 49 international bureaus, ant their Atlanta headquarters. NPR has 18 domestic bureaus and 17 international bureaus in addition to their DC headquarters, plus the news departments of the various member stations. The only conservative news organization that even comes close is Fox News, but at 9 domestic and 3 international bureaus plus the New York headquarters they aren't quite in the same league. Most conservative outlets have nothing that isn't local. The reason the "liberal media" continues to dominate is because the reputational advantage gained by having real reporters writing real stories is difficult to match. Any hack can paraphrase a wire story but it takes actual journalistic skill to spend time developing sources and going through the drudgery of, say, sitting through court proceedings or city council meetings and coming out of them with an interesting story. So I'm inclined to believe that these news organizations are "mostly right" because they have entirely too much invested in being mostly right. Fox News can certainly afford to spend as much on actual news gathering as its peers but it won't because it doesn't need to; people who turn to Fox do so not because they expect it to be right but because they expect everyone else to be wrong, and aren't looking for news so much as invective. That being said, their news department still invests enough in actual journalism that they're mostly right. The other conservative outlets are purely bush league or worse, almost without exception. They don't have the money to actually invest in real news gathering, but either way no one is tuning into OANN for news anyway.
Hard disagree.
Have you seen the recent CJR reporting on the Press' coverage of Russiagate? https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-ed-note.php
If you listened to and believed those news organisations you were not just uninformed about the state of the world but actively misinformed. They lied about Trump, they lied about Biden (and his laptop), they lied about Russia, they lied about Syria, they lied about Iraq. I cannot point to a single period of my life where those mainstream news organisations have not been staking their credibility on claims which have later been proven to not just be false, but so easily demonstrable as false that ignorance cannot be an excuse for their coverage (unless you wish to make the argument that all those journalists are extremely incompetent). Beyond that, there are even multiple instances where journalists have spoken about how their political mission is more important than actual journalism.
Even now, I can just go and compare the NYT's reporting on the Ukraine war to the reports recently put out by the RAND think tank, and the observable gulf between reality and what is reported in the NYT is so vast that I cannot understand how you can believe that the NYT is actually practicing journalism and not manufacturing consent. It doesn't matter how many bureaus they have when on any issue of substance it is nakedly obvious that they are lying to you.
The idea of the piece is that they're right and honest about most things, not that they're right and honest about every thing. Yeah, wrong about russiagate, but right about most of the ukraine invasion, 'who won the presidential elections', TSMC's american investments, china's lock downs, and tens of thousands of other things, small and large.
Since the media reports on many things during year-long time periods, this is entirely compatible with 'most'.
From Hanania's original article:
Someone who wants to "reform" the media to fix their blindspots on race, right-wing politics is not endorsing those stances.
And can you give an example of NYT/Rand differences in ukraine that are so 'vast'?
But this is meaningless - the actual importance and weight of their "mistakes" (I am honestly unsure as to the precise blend of incompetence/malice responsible) vastly outweigh their accuracy when it comes to talking about how the fire brigade rescued a kitten or a dog was trained how to surf. If a financial manager made a thousand trades which earned one or two dollars in profit and a single trade which lost seven billion, "they were right most of the time" is not an argument that would convince me to give them my money or support.
Additionally, I don't think they have been right about some of those things - their coverage of the Ukraine war at the very least is something I'd consider highly misleading, but that would be a separate topic that multiple essays could be written about and I won't go into it here.
I do not want to reform the media - I want to replace it, and that replacement is currently ongoing. There's a huge variety of alternatives to the media that don't just try to target a different segment of the market but actually outcompete them on the quality of their analysis. Ultimately I don't think it is possible to reform the media without effectively destroying it - the existing incentive structures and culture ensure that the media cannot actually do the job they claim is their raison d'être. Of course, the Hanania article doesn't apply to me anyway - there's nothing blind about my distrust or hate of the media, nor are my complaints hysterical.
Sure. Read this report https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html and then go read the NYtimes coverage of the war - I cannot give you any specific articles, however, because I have hit my limit of "free" articles from the NYtimes and hence cannot actually do the due diligence required to make sure I'm not sending anything particularly egregious. As I'm sure you can probably guess, I'm not interested in paying them any money, so I'm not going to be subscribing any time soon.
you can bypass a nyt paywall by prepending archive.is/ to the ur fyi
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a saying, not an ironclad rule to build your life around. If you're expecting perfection all the time you're going to be sorely disappointed.
More options
Context Copy link
Sorry, not buying it. That's like the Gell-Mann amnesia squared. We know they purposely and knowingly lied in many topics, but we're supposed to assume that in topics we haven't caught them yet they wouldn't lie to us, and not only that, but praise them for it as the best truth-spreading vehicle humanity can offer? That's like telling a battered woman "well, he doesn't beat you all the time, right? Only occasionally, maybe once or twice a day? So he's actually a great guy, what is to complain about?!"
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that sounds reasonable. If there is a wildfire, for example, I will assume that when CNN reports on it they are telling the truth of the existence of a wildfire. But taken at face value, that is like saying the SPLC exists for fighting poverty in the south, but overlooking everything else.
Does it? Fox News' ratings are equal to cnn+ msnbc combined.
https://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2014/03/1-cable-tv-viewership.png
CNN dominated in the 90s but not anymore
They probably would also spend a lot of time on how it is caused by global warming (and maybe racism), and how some Republican is at fault for it.
More options
Context Copy link
Neither CNN nor Fox News are really news stations w/ reported, at least during primetime. They're opinion states.
Also, the liberal media does dominate in someplace people forget about - the nightly news. Twenty million people still watch the nightly news daily. Yes, most of those people are over 55, but even w/ that 3.4 million in the demo (25-54) still watch it daily averaged, which dwarfs even Tucker's 25-54 ratings.
(https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/week-of-jan-16-evening-news-ratings-world-news-tonight-continues-to-outpace-competition-despite-week-to-week-losses/522615/)
Throw in newspapers, and the fact the conservatives just can't create a right-leaning version of the NYT (or frankly, considering the actual make-up of the reporters there, the Wall Street Journal's news pages, as opposed to it's opinions pages), I think that's going to continue, until conservatives can learn how to write-up news stories to sound even to the normal person, but be biased as we on the left have.
++
There are lots of things on top of that that lean overwhelmingly liberal. My go to example is the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes is a boring show that almost no one would watch...except that it is on CBS directly after the CBS football broadcast, so it averages 10 million viewers.
More options
Context Copy link
As one of the 25-54 wierdos, I encourage people to try it sometime. The morning news is even worse.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link