How media bias works
readtangle.com
readtangle.com
For two decades, the complaint from "the right" has not been media bias, but media agenda. This terminology has been widespread in circles that most here would never have considered, and I believe it is telling this distinction is not made in the article.
There is a distinct difference between even editorializing vs reporting and that of media control of "narrative," a term anyone who has a liberal arts degree knows is something distinct from the idyllic "just the facts" view of journalism.
Post-Woodward & Bernstein and the mythos surrounding that event, the journalistic class took it upon themselves to be agents of social change. This idea that neutrality shouldn't be approached, and that journalism as a class were supposed to be agents of change, created the forcing function for the rise of Fox News in the first place. And that's where we are now: a world where Dan Rather can make Times New Roman printed pages and act like it was historical documents, Journolist can induce "epistemic closure" amongst hundreds of journalists, and where an entire social class can feel empowered to shut down speech of which they are critical. (The publication that broke the Journolist scandal was founded by someone who is now quite famous, and it mirrors the reaction indicated in the article.)
Narrative, a euphemism for agenda, is the core distinction driving this conflict. It is also deeply imbued in the soft postmodernist philosophy encountered by the (well-off) journalist and tech class now in power. Until narrative goes, the brief period of respect for facts will not recover, and we'll have the norm that has been American press for most time: yellow journalism.
I think there's a long chain of conditioning that we undergo, and I think it presses people into a genuinely inhumane sense that rationality must be prioritized, that you have to justify everything with some rational argument. The thing is we're human, and there's sort of two sides to every truth[0]. And there's autonomy, viewpoint, personal ethics, emotions, and all sorts of confounding processes that go on that simply can't be explained, but the conditioning compels one to explain it anyways, thus we seek confirmation, without regard for truth. To some extent I think that's what feeds the "misinformation" and "disinformation" markets. Society makes little room for the abstract man, society needs exact predictable units for its theories to function in practice. No free radicals.
[0]Quashing infant mortality appears to be good, but there's the argument that it has effectively manufactured population booms in societies that aren't organized for the mass of people, viola, you've got a developing world population that suffers extremes of poverty on a totally unprecedented scale. But that latter argument would probably be discounted, right? It's a little indirect, correlation rather than causative, it presses certain intractable things like the concept of suffering, economic wellbeing, comparitive analysis with historical human condition shit...
It could simply be that sensationalist headlines get people’s attention. As one data point I certainly don’t want biased information I’d prefer facts, including those that contradict my current worldview, so that I may be better informed.
I see your point, and I do sometimes see people unwilling to be challenged in life, I just don’t think you can draw a conclusion that people want biased information from the media.
They’re actually both right-wing by global standards, and the distinction looks from the outside like a pissing contest into only one side of the pool. Furthermore the binary status quo appears as manufactured tribalism to keep the American masses busy with minute shades of policy difference.
The continuing appearance of articles like this on “Hacker News” indicates not just the large US readership, nor even the confluence of media and technology (something politicians have understood for millenia), but also that even a group skewing thoughtful and analytical can be hijacked by memetic engineering.
Depends entirely on the issue. On foreign wars, tax policy, or gutting the social safety net, they're both right-wing. On immigration, they're left or extreme left - the Republican party, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, continues the current record-high levels of legal immigration, while the Democratic party doesn't want to enforce any immigration law, and is even giving non-citizens the vote:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/noncitizen-votin...
> the Republican party, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, continues the current record-high levels of legal immigration
What about those murderous caravans from South America Fox News keeps telling us about every time we have an election? GOPs paving the road for those?
> while the Democratic party doesn't want to enforce any immigration law, and is even giving non-citizens the vote
This is completely false. Democrats are enforcing immigration laws, for better or worse. They're just not doing it as inhumanely as Trump was. And New York City is not the Democratic Party.
Rhetoric. Look at mostly-absent-from-media immigration numbers, and see if you notice any dramatic drops during Republican administrations.
> Democrats are enforcing immigration laws, for better or worse.
What are sanctuary cities if not deliberate impediments to enforcing immigration laws? And it's not just sanctuary cities - the number of areas where immigration law isn't enforced is rising: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/politics/biden-immigra...
Sanctuary cities are not impediments to the federal government enforcing federal immigration laws, they are cities that decline to expending limited local resources to make local law enforcement and social services jobs harder by alienating local immigrant communities by actively enforcing federal laws that it is well established that it is not the responsibility of state or local officials to actively enforce.
The center-right wing of the Democratic Party is. The leftmost wing, the AOC side, is center left.
> Furthermore the binary status quo appears as manufactured tribalism to keep the American masses busy with minute shades of policy difference
This is a very popular take right now, has been for decades among young people, and it is absolutely wrong. Ask any woman or person of color or LGBT+ person. Ask those of us who lived through the 2000 election and 9/11.
Also, the Republican Party's official policy position at this point is whatever Trump says, so even assigning them a place on the right/left spectrum is probably a category error. They want the USA ruled by a weak, incompetent dictator.
This seems a matter of constituency, not policy. The structural discrimination against black Americans remains starkly evident. To me, assessing “slightly less persecuted” as evidence of major policy distinction is buying into the false dichotomy I complained of further up.
> They want the USA ruled by a weak, incompetent dictator.
I have to suggest that both parties were enabled by the Trump administration.
One way I’ve seen it couched is that the liberals have always owned the cultural high ground by having a preponderance of left-leaning, highly educated individuals in the ranks of the news media and in Hollywood - and that Fox News, Limbaugh, Bongino are an aggressive response to that.
When I talk to my own family members who skew right they talk pretty negatively about the media in general and particularly the NYT or WaPo - but they know and trust me. So I try to explain that many of the folks who work at these places are very similar to me (education, background, thinking) - and that they shouldn’t wholesale discount whatever they publish.
From: https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/bari-weiss-on-why-she-left-the...
"What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it."
I should note that I probably disagree with Bari on most political issues, but she seems to have the intellectual honesty to notice corruption and also the courage to refuse to give into it.
This was my previous position, but in recent years, I wouldn't recommend this anymore. I believe that in the past at some point, there was a time when these mainstream media were more right than wrong, and more useful than useless if not harmful.
If you are an academic or someone who has time or interest to discern what mainstream media says is right or wrong, by all means, use them. But for average people, these mainstream media being sources of information doesn't pass usefulness or correctness than any other sources of information.
Another gripe I have is academia. You ship the bulk of "educated" people from one institution to the next, and they're wholly clueless as to how the world actually works when they finally get out, but they have all the pretensions that they've got a clue. My friend, a Pharm.D., chatting about business exposed his naivety to me and another friend, whinging about how some minutiae got its corners cut, and general incompetence. This is stuff me and my partner had been exposed to since we exited high school. Whats worse is this pattern is almost certainly occurring inside the institutions themselves, where kids never having been met with the real world are shoehorned through programs and eventually given license to teach. It comes to mind that a large proportion of these people are living inside a bubble where theory is practice. Yes, it's a generalization, but from my own first-hand I think it does possess a kernel of truth.