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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29778 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'.

I've seen people make this kind of distinction when talking about honesty in general as well as honesty by journalists specifically, and I don't really see how there is a distinction. Making unintentional mistakes or using poor socially influenced reasoning is how a motivated person acts on their belief of "wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!" Almost nobody likes to think of herself as a Machiavellian amoral manipulator and so most people's brains have mechanisms to protect them from such a belief while still enjoying all the advantages of getting to act like one. Making unintentional mistakes (that inevitably follow a pattern of bias in some direction) or not activating one's skepticism towards and protection from the social dynamics that influence one's reasoning is one such mechanism that allows someone to (honestly convince themselves that they) have the cake and eat it too.

For the layman, one might be able to generously extend them enough charity to acknowledge that they're just not to be expected to understand their own biases and how to properly account for them. I don't think we can extend such charity to self-proclaimed journalists. Such people have an active responsibility to convey the truth that they themselves volunteered to take on, and step one of that must be accounting for unconscious mistakes one will inevitably make in a way that confirms their own biases and flatters themselves and their in-group while denigrating their out group. If they haven't taken steps to proactively counter this bias within themselves, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that they are being dishonest, just in a clever way that allows them to honestly convince themselves that they aren't being dishonest.

From one perspective - it has the same outcome, and you need to treat it the same way, and it's still actively harming other citizens, so you're right.

But my point is that, because people who aren't journalists participate in the same dynamics, it can't be a reason to trust non-journalists more than journalists. Right wing twitter users lie more, not less, than the media! And I think right-wing mottizens are substantially wrong as a result of social media dynamics at comparable rates to the media, when we consider the full range of things the media reports on. There are individual domains where one group is clearly more wrong than another.

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