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I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside

I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio). There are a number of studies that back up this claim. A 2008 study[0] found that 88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party. Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed). For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race. The study did so by reproducing a landmark study that demonstrated the existence of unconscious racial bias (the implicit association test), but instead using political indicators. They found that partisan political positions triggered implicit associations 50% stronger than that of racial biases. There is also a recent book called "Passing on the Right"[3] which provides some personal narratives of conservative academics. If you're relying on academic knowledge to provide you a sense of reality, you're viewing reality through a lens that is biased to a 93% degree towards one political pole, and then receiving that knowledge through a media system which is biased to an 88% degree towards that same political pole. Even if you, like me, generally believe that the liberal political position is correct, ideological conformity of this magnitude should frighten you. [0] http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/130902 http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/130902 [1] http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-political-diversity/ http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-... [2] https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-polarization.pdf https://pcl.stanford.edu/research/2015/iyengar-ajps-group-po... [3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/30/new-book-details-realities-being-conservative-professor-humanities-and-social https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/03/30/new-book-deta...

Grishnakh 10y ago
What's bad is that it doesn't help reinforce your feeling that your position is correct when the other side is being actively suppressed. I generally agree with many liberal positions, but when I hear about stuff like this it makes me want to reconsider my opinions of conservative positions. It's exactly like the Streisand Effect.
- basch 10y ago
  at the same time, how do you feel about creationism and intelligent design being suppressed instead of given equal airtime with competing theories. what constitutes "fair?" if one group is twice as loud while delivering the same amount of content, is it unfair to turn their volume down by half? how about something like snopes or myth debunking? does dr oz deserve equal placement to more credible nutrition science? what is worse, attempting to surface more legitimate sources, or letting your site turn into a free for all shouting match? for anyone downvoting me because they think I approve of censorship if my side wins: quite the contrary. I think from a purely theoretical standpoint, signal to noise is a complicated problem, and the people who reject the idea of filtering or ranking in totality are being unrealistic. allowing the loudest speakers to unabatedly monopolize collective attention is a problem.
  - Grishnakh 10y ago
    Quis custodiet ipsos custodet? (Who watches the watchers?) To have some kind of filtering or curation, you necessarily have to put some people into a position of power where they have the ability to censor this noise. On a forum where it's explicitly known that such "moderators" are present, and even better if their biases are known, this is perfectly fine. If I'm on a science-oriented discussion forum and it's advertised that the moderators of this forum will ban anyone who attempts to spread pseudoscience or anti-science religious junk, that'll help attract me because I don't want waste my time looking at that crap. There's also forums where there's very little such curation, and instead community moderation is mostly relied on: users are given moderation points to boost or suppress other posts. That's fine too: you know going in what the deal is, so you just have to see if you mesh with the other members or not. However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. If you're going to push a bias, then you have to at least inform users of this. As it relates to Facebook, which is supposed to be for everyone and not just people of a certain political persuasion, they shouldn't be censoring anything unless they're going to make this known up-front (which they haven't). "Trending topics" should be anything that's highly popular. If some completely wrong and debunked BS is the most popular new story among your site's users, then you need to show that at the top, or else you're not serving your users. If you don't like that, then you either need to inform them of how you're going to censor and slant things, or you need to get rid of users you don't like. Or maybe just get rid of the "trending topics" section, and replace it with something more fine-tuned so that one group of users doesn't get annoyed at seeing junk they disagree with that another group of users really likes. The simple fact is that you can't please everyone. If you try, you're going to fail. Sites like Reddit avoid this by having tons of different sub-forums, each with their own rules and moderators. Some far-right conservative wackos can co-exist with far-left liberals there because they're on separate subreddits.
popmystack 10y ago
In the specific case of conservative politics, why does it matter that it's so skewed? I have absolutely no issue with, in this specific case, conservative politics not receiving much attention. I would liken it to not giving "flat earthers", blatant racists, and charlatans air time (excuse the hyperbole, hopefully the point was understood). While I agree that ideological conformity is a problem, I think it's a symptom rather than something that needs to be fixed itself at the moment. You would probably see more distributed alignment within certain communities if there wasn't so much "noise" elsewhere.
- tynpeddler 10y ago
  The concern is that you may be equating the conservative position to flat earthers bases on biased information. It's the classic epistomological dilemma, how do you know what you know? Maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Maybe it's just the loudest people who have a liberal bias.
  - popmystack 10y ago
    I am highly unconvinced that at this point there is some piece of information that will add credibility to conservative rhetoric, economic, or social beliefs. Sure it can happen, it's just unlikely to. Positions do not gain credibility by "what-ifs". What biased information am I acting on exactly?
  - Chathamization 10y ago
    We might also be equating anti-vaccine individuals to flat-earthers based on biased information. This is pretty much true for just about anything we filter out. Sometimes the fringe stuff turns out to be correct, but often it's not. The National Enquirer broke the John Edwards scandal, yet most people don't take it as a reliable source since most of it's stories are still bogus. From the story: > Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories. That doesn't seem too terrible to me. If something from a untrustworthy source known for political agitprop is trending, I wouldn't mind Facebook waiting to see if the mainstream press picks up on it. If they were letting through stories from places like AlterNet through that would show bias, but being generally cautious with biased sites that have low journalistic standards isn't the worst thing in the world.
threatofrain 10y ago
But what is the conservative perspective? Have you checked out the party platforms for conservatives for major states like Texas? What are the most oft-used conservative, energy-tapping, get-out-to-vote talking points? Conservatives are now the minority of this country, but due to bad districting, they have disproportionate electoral power. And you know, it's not like the GOP needed to be enemies with the scientific community, but that's how they've positioned themselves. The conservative narrative is: scientists lie about global warming, fracking, coal, and other ecological points. Scientists lie about homosexuality. Scientists lie about the efficacy of abstinence, and they lie about condoms. I think conservatives have been toyed with the GOP repeatedly, and I think it's no coincidence that the GOP is having a crisis, and I think it's both surprising and unsurprising that Donald Trump barely plays the Christian card. The top and only Christian consensus issues are (1) abortion, (2) homosexuality, and (3) sex education in schools. Distracting issues.
- sremani 10y ago
  The party establishments play the Culture card, you can see Hillary Clinton playing the Culture card all the time. If you really observe, its the Rebels (Sanders and Trump) talking economics, and Establishment(Cruz/Clinton/Bush) talking about Gays, Guns and God.
  - threatofrain 10y ago
    I think Clinton's main social points in terms of get-out-to-vote issues are abortion and immigration. I don't think Gays, Guns, and God are get-out-to-vote issues for Sanders, Clinton, or Trump. Those votes aren't easy to secure for these candidates. My point is not that Democrats or the GOP have social issues as part of get-out-to-vote drives. My point is to look at the content of the GOP points, whether on scientific policy or social issues.
    - sremani 10y ago
      Abortion is a cultural issue, and which ever politician talks about Abortion for or against, is playing the classic textbook cultural partisanship game. Immigration is a bit complicated, but can be boiled down to both culture and economics. Clinton talks about tolerance(cultural), Trump talks about jobs(economics) being lost to immigration and open borders. In my opinion Trump is not about 2016, but we will likely have a President in 2028 who runs on the Trump agenda of Native Populism, in a world of automation and globalization, his message is only going to get popular.
imgabe 10y ago
Having a certain set of political views does not necessarily imply that one deliberately manipulates or corrupts information to support those views. Who cares if journalists donate to the Democratic party? Does that mean that they are omitting information or lying? If they are, show evidence of that, not that they donated to a particular party. Conservative sources like those mentioned in the article have been repeatedly shown to distort the truth or even outright lie when the facts don't fit their agenda. Facebook is right to omit them because they are not reliable sources of information. The idea that we even need to know if something is "trending" is ridiculous to begin with. How many times has a celebrity been declared dead on Facebook only to find out that it was a hoax? How many times have we been told we have to declare our copyright in a Facebook status or Mark Zuckerburg will personally steal all our photos to reprint for profit? The fact that a bunch of people are sharing something is practically useless in determining whether it is a valuable or true piece of information.
golemotron 10y ago
> Even if you, like me, generally believe that the liberal political position is correct, ideological conformity of this magnitude should frighten you. What it does is make people whose views fall out of that bubble feel disenfranchised. This is no small part of the Trump phenomenon. I was watching a documentary about South American politics yesterday and there was a globalist establishment candidate running against one that was a protectionist populist. It was strange to see that the globalist was on the right and the protectionist was on the left and that is exactly the opposite of what we are seeing in the US election this year. After decades of people on the left lamenting that working class Republicans don't vote in their own interest the left is in a panic now because they are. No one saw this coming and the media lock down is the reason why. When it's easy to smear anyone who does not take a globalist position as a racist that part of political discourse goes underground until it pops up in the voting booth.
- mc32 10y ago
  I think it also helps to have someone "legitimize" what are relatively to mainstream news "outcaste" views. It also helps when you have a charismatic person personifying those ideas. Palin, for example may have had similar opinions but was not charismatic. Trump on the other hand sounds like your regular blue collar worker --I've known black as well as white blue collar workers and they speak just like that. When they make a mistake, they don't try to explain it away like a Clinton or a Bush. Nah, they just come out and say, yeah, I was probably wrong and this is why and offer some plausible support for the argument. Also, I think lots of working class people have felt funny about politicians tiptoeing around issues rather than just being a bit "vulgar" about things and that appeals to some people. If you ever listen to how people who take buses to the poorer areas of town talk, just sit at one of those stops long enough you'll know what I mean. They are unfiltered and speak as they feel without any affected tiptoeing.
  - twoquestions 10y ago
    Wow, I never noticed this until now! I come from those blue-collar places you talked about, and I can't stand people who try to run away from what they've done, as it feels like they're trying to dodge responsibility for what they've done! Better to screw up and apologize than screw up and deny screwing up! This irritates me with corporate management types too, trying to tell you what to do without telling you, and therefore avoiding responsibility for their guidance. I'll have to think about this more, thanks again!
trhway 10y ago
> non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative isn't it so for every science? I mean it is only natural that the conservative views are displaced by education and scientific knowledge. That is almost by definition.
- throwit992 10y ago
  One of the fascinating things about that article I linked to is that it shows that this extreme bias has only existed since the 1990's. Before that time academia was moderately slanted to the left (a ratio of 2-1 or 3-1), but not to the severe extent. It's important to note that while conservative positions on some issues are objectively at odds with science (global warming comes to mind), there are plenty of liberal viewpoints that are also at odds with mainstream scientific research (think research in genetically modified organisms, or mandatory vaccination policies). This article is a good example of how liberal viewpoints can also conflict with science: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-social-science.html http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-so...
  - morgante 10y ago
    It's hard to draw the line of causation though. Maybe the same kind of people have always gone into academia but the Overton Window has shifted. I generally agree with older conservative agendas (smaller government, efficiency, equality of opportunity) but would never ever call myself a conservative today. Doing so risks lumping yourself in with an ideology which denies reality. That being said, I'd also hesitate to label myself a liberal due to some of the less rational aspects of liberalism today (knee-jerk anti-capitalism, safe spaces, GMOs).
  - chiaro 10y ago
    You may find it interesting that opposition to vaccines (to the degree that it exists) doesn't really have a left/right association outside of the states.
- rhino369 10y ago
  Can you really not see the extreme bias in that statement?
pj_mukh 10y ago
This "seems" like an American phenomenon. As a liberal, I can have a fully formed debate with a British Conservative, A Canadian conservative, a European conservative (sans latent Nazism), however the dominant American conservative seems to be operating on a completely different plain and set of assumptions. I find it extremely difficult to relate to and debate the American conservative. In general, if an american <insert institution here> (college, newspaper etc.) seems uber-liberal in America, it is just run-of-the-mill centrist in most other countries. Not because of any stated or unstated institutional biases, but simply because its been labelled so by a relentless, uncompromising, hyper-focussed and hugely disciplined conservative media looking for easy answers. P.S: Also the predilection to openly say "Compromise is impossible", esp behind the scenes, also seems to be a unique attribute of the American Conservative.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  >>> I find it extremely difficult to relate to and debate the American conservative Yet, the topic here is that conservative-related news items appear to have been suppressed or down-scored on the influential Facebook trending box, presumably by liberal or liberal-leaning curators (or algorithms written by liberal leaning programmers). How do you conclude that conservatives are uncompromising or closed minded when in fact it is the liberal side that is closing the door here?
  - pj_mukh 10y ago
    Most of Facebook's users are international. There is a chance that what is "liberal" in America is simply something that runs counter to the American conservatives disciplined beliefs. Example #1: When a prominent American conservative does something like shutdown the government instead of compromising (remember compromising gets you booted at the next elections see: Paul Ryan). To most of the world (liberal and conservative), this is nuts. Facebook bubbles news reports about how "crazy" this is to the top. American news media will most likely call this a liberal bias when really it's just an international one. Example #2: If facebook, editorializes a giant Ice-sheet melting and how that is related to anthropogenic global warming (something most International conservatives have accepted), most American conservatives will call that to be liberal bias. Note that this is not about policy decisions, most international conservatives don't agree with Carbon Taxes for instance, but one of just straight facts and assumptions.
serge2k 10y ago
> For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race. That makes sense. I will freely admit my opinion of a person changes if I find out that they are a republican or libertarian. Doesn't make them a bad person, but the ideas put out by the prominent members of those parties frequently range from from stupid to completely horrifying.
snowwrestler 10y ago
The 2008 study did not find that "88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party." It found that, of people who made a political donation and identified a journalism company as their employer, 88% donated to a Democratic candidate or cause. It's not possible to take this study as evidence of an overall bias in journalism, because it is a very small, non-random sample of people. The total number of people included in the study is less than 1,500, and it was a self-selected group. In addition it includes non-journalist jobs like CFO and a "Saturday Night Live" producer. About the only solid conclusion to draw from this study is that the vast majority of journalists do not contribute to political parties or candidates at all.
geofft 10y ago
> Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed). This seems to be measured by "Democrat" vs. "Republican". An alternative hypothesis is that mainstream American political views have skewed strongly towards the right in recent decades, but that shift did not touch the academy, and also that America became more prominent in research in recent decades (so more researchers labeled themselves by American political parties). Anecdotally, it seems like there's a liberal/conservative split within the Democratic party, exemplified by Sanders/Hillary. I wonder what you get if you figure out some good way to quantify that, and then redo the statistics. This is only frightening if you think that there's a lot of ideological conformity within the label "Democrat", or that the specific ideologies with the label "Republican" need representation. There are probably good arguments for those, but they're not completely obvious.
NOSHSHNACKERS 10y ago
Its based on faulty logic. The human mind has a bias against its own biases
mgalka 10y ago
Completely agree. Though I think the issue here is bigger than that. Journalism by its nature is subjective. So it may be bias, and that's still crummy, but at least the people consuming it know what they're getting. Facebook, on the other hand, portrays its "trending" news as being determined objectively based on what people are sharing. That goes beyond bias to manipulative. It would be the same if Google were filtering conservative news sites out of its results.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio). Fox News is not "explicitly partisan", they are purportedly neutral ("Fair and Balanced"). They are widely recognized as extraordinarily partisan, but that's different than "explicitly partisan".
rebootthesystem 10y ago
> the liberal political position is correct Agree with everything you said up to this point. Liberal politics is mostly correct on social matters and dead wrong on economics. And, of course, the GOP is dead wrong on social matters and mostly correct on economics. And that's what sucks for a lot of us, no party with a shot at winning and setting us on the correct path is mostly correct across the board. I have a feeling we are standing at a crossroad where the only option is to go for the economy. Why? Because if we deteriorate further we can kiss goodby to social and environmental responsibility. Just look at any country that's in the shits economically for examples of how well social and environmental programs work when you are broke. Trump? Barf. Sadly.

Grishnakh 10y ago

What's bad is that it doesn't help reinforce your feeling that your position is correct when the other side is being actively suppressed. I generally agree with many liberal positions, but when I hear about stuff like this it makes me want to reconsider my opinions of conservative positions. It's exactly like the Streisand Effect.

basch 10y ago
at the same time, how do you feel about creationism and intelligent design being suppressed instead of given equal airtime with competing theories. what constitutes "fair?" if one group is twice as loud while delivering the same amount of content, is it unfair to turn their volume down by half? how about something like snopes or myth debunking? does dr oz deserve equal placement to more credible nutrition science? what is worse, attempting to surface more legitimate sources, or letting your site turn into a free for all shouting match? for anyone downvoting me because they think I approve of censorship if my side wins: quite the contrary. I think from a purely theoretical standpoint, signal to noise is a complicated problem, and the people who reject the idea of filtering or ranking in totality are being unrealistic. allowing the loudest speakers to unabatedly monopolize collective attention is a problem.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  Quis custodiet ipsos custodet? (Who watches the watchers?) To have some kind of filtering or curation, you necessarily have to put some people into a position of power where they have the ability to censor this noise. On a forum where it's explicitly known that such "moderators" are present, and even better if their biases are known, this is perfectly fine. If I'm on a science-oriented discussion forum and it's advertised that the moderators of this forum will ban anyone who attempts to spread pseudoscience or anti-science religious junk, that'll help attract me because I don't want waste my time looking at that crap. There's also forums where there's very little such curation, and instead community moderation is mostly relied on: users are given moderation points to boost or suppress other posts. That's fine too: you know going in what the deal is, so you just have to see if you mesh with the other members or not. However, if a forum claims to be "open" and "inclusive" but then censors people, that's just hypocritical and wrong. If you're going to push a bias, then you have to at least inform users of this. As it relates to Facebook, which is supposed to be for everyone and not just people of a certain political persuasion, they shouldn't be censoring anything unless they're going to make this known up-front (which they haven't). "Trending topics" should be anything that's highly popular. If some completely wrong and debunked BS is the most popular new story among your site's users, then you need to show that at the top, or else you're not serving your users. If you don't like that, then you either need to inform them of how you're going to censor and slant things, or you need to get rid of users you don't like. Or maybe just get rid of the "trending topics" section, and replace it with something more fine-tuned so that one group of users doesn't get annoyed at seeing junk they disagree with that another group of users really likes. The simple fact is that you can't please everyone. If you try, you're going to fail. Sites like Reddit avoid this by having tons of different sub-forums, each with their own rules and moderators. Some far-right conservative wackos can co-exist with far-left liberals there because they're on separate subreddits.

popmystack 10y ago

In the specific case of conservative politics, why does it matter that it's so skewed? I have absolutely no issue with, in this specific case, conservative politics not receiving much attention. I would liken it to not giving "flat earthers", blatant racists, and charlatans air time (excuse the hyperbole, hopefully the point was understood). While I agree that ideological conformity is a problem, I think it's a symptom rather than something that needs to be fixed itself at the moment. You would probably see more distributed alignment within certain communities if there wasn't so much "noise" elsewhere.

tynpeddler 10y ago
The concern is that you may be equating the conservative position to flat earthers bases on biased information. It's the classic epistomological dilemma, how do you know what you know? Maybe reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Maybe it's just the loudest people who have a liberal bias.
- popmystack 10y ago
  I am highly unconvinced that at this point there is some piece of information that will add credibility to conservative rhetoric, economic, or social beliefs. Sure it can happen, it's just unlikely to. Positions do not gain credibility by "what-ifs". What biased information am I acting on exactly?
- Chathamization 10y ago
  We might also be equating anti-vaccine individuals to flat-earthers based on biased information. This is pretty much true for just about anything we filter out. Sometimes the fringe stuff turns out to be correct, but often it's not. The National Enquirer broke the John Edwards scandal, yet most people don't take it as a reliable source since most of it's stories are still bogus. From the story: > Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories. That doesn't seem too terrible to me. If something from a untrustworthy source known for political agitprop is trending, I wouldn't mind Facebook waiting to see if the mainstream press picks up on it. If they were letting through stories from places like AlterNet through that would show bias, but being generally cautious with biased sites that have low journalistic standards isn't the worst thing in the world.

threatofrain 10y ago

But what is the conservative perspective? Have you checked out the party platforms for conservatives for major states like Texas? What are the most oft-used conservative, energy-tapping, get-out-to-vote talking points? Conservatives are now the minority of this country, but due to bad districting, they have disproportionate electoral power. And you know, it's not like the GOP needed to be enemies with the scientific community, but that's how they've positioned themselves. The conservative narrative is: scientists lie about global warming, fracking, coal, and other ecological points. Scientists lie about homosexuality. Scientists lie about the efficacy of abstinence, and they lie about condoms. I think conservatives have been toyed with the GOP repeatedly, and I think it's no coincidence that the GOP is having a crisis, and I think it's both surprising and unsurprising that Donald Trump barely plays the Christian card. The top and only Christian consensus issues are (1) abortion, (2) homosexuality, and (3) sex education in schools. Distracting issues.

sremani 10y ago
The party establishments play the Culture card, you can see Hillary Clinton playing the Culture card all the time. If you really observe, its the Rebels (Sanders and Trump) talking economics, and Establishment(Cruz/Clinton/Bush) talking about Gays, Guns and God.
- threatofrain 10y ago
  I think Clinton's main social points in terms of get-out-to-vote issues are abortion and immigration. I don't think Gays, Guns, and God are get-out-to-vote issues for Sanders, Clinton, or Trump. Those votes aren't easy to secure for these candidates. My point is not that Democrats or the GOP have social issues as part of get-out-to-vote drives. My point is to look at the content of the GOP points, whether on scientific policy or social issues.
  - sremani 10y ago
    Abortion is a cultural issue, and which ever politician talks about Abortion for or against, is playing the classic textbook cultural partisanship game. Immigration is a bit complicated, but can be boiled down to both culture and economics. Clinton talks about tolerance(cultural), Trump talks about jobs(economics) being lost to immigration and open borders. In my opinion Trump is not about 2016, but we will likely have a President in 2028 who runs on the Trump agenda of Native Populism, in a world of automation and globalization, his message is only going to get popular.

imgabe 10y ago

Having a certain set of political views does not necessarily imply that one deliberately manipulates or corrupts information to support those views. Who cares if journalists donate to the Democratic party? Does that mean that they are omitting information or lying? If they are, show evidence of that, not that they donated to a particular party. Conservative sources like those mentioned in the article have been repeatedly shown to distort the truth or even outright lie when the facts don't fit their agenda. Facebook is right to omit them because they are not reliable sources of information. The idea that we even need to know if something is "trending" is ridiculous to begin with. How many times has a celebrity been declared dead on Facebook only to find out that it was a hoax? How many times have we been told we have to declare our copyright in a Facebook status or Mark Zuckerburg will personally steal all our photos to reprint for profit? The fact that a bunch of people are sharing something is practically useless in determining whether it is a valuable or true piece of information.

golemotron 10y ago

> Even if you, like me, generally believe that the liberal political position is correct, ideological conformity of this magnitude should frighten you. What it does is make people whose views fall out of that bubble feel disenfranchised. This is no small part of the Trump phenomenon. I was watching a documentary about South American politics yesterday and there was a globalist establishment candidate running against one that was a protectionist populist. It was strange to see that the globalist was on the right and the protectionist was on the left and that is exactly the opposite of what we are seeing in the US election this year. After decades of people on the left lamenting that working class Republicans don't vote in their own interest the left is in a panic now because they are. No one saw this coming and the media lock down is the reason why. When it's easy to smear anyone who does not take a globalist position as a racist that part of political discourse goes underground until it pops up in the voting booth.

mc32 10y ago
I think it also helps to have someone "legitimize" what are relatively to mainstream news "outcaste" views. It also helps when you have a charismatic person personifying those ideas. Palin, for example may have had similar opinions but was not charismatic. Trump on the other hand sounds like your regular blue collar worker --I've known black as well as white blue collar workers and they speak just like that. When they make a mistake, they don't try to explain it away like a Clinton or a Bush. Nah, they just come out and say, yeah, I was probably wrong and this is why and offer some plausible support for the argument. Also, I think lots of working class people have felt funny about politicians tiptoeing around issues rather than just being a bit "vulgar" about things and that appeals to some people. If you ever listen to how people who take buses to the poorer areas of town talk, just sit at one of those stops long enough you'll know what I mean. They are unfiltered and speak as they feel without any affected tiptoeing.
- twoquestions 10y ago
  Wow, I never noticed this until now! I come from those blue-collar places you talked about, and I can't stand people who try to run away from what they've done, as it feels like they're trying to dodge responsibility for what they've done! Better to screw up and apologize than screw up and deny screwing up! This irritates me with corporate management types too, trying to tell you what to do without telling you, and therefore avoiding responsibility for their guidance. I'll have to think about this more, thanks again!

trhway 10y ago

> non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative isn't it so for every science? I mean it is only natural that the conservative views are displaced by education and scientific knowledge. That is almost by definition.

throwit992 10y ago
One of the fascinating things about that article I linked to is that it shows that this extreme bias has only existed since the 1990's. Before that time academia was moderately slanted to the left (a ratio of 2-1 or 3-1), but not to the severe extent. It's important to note that while conservative positions on some issues are objectively at odds with science (global warming comes to mind), there are plenty of liberal viewpoints that are also at odds with mainstream scientific research (think research in genetically modified organisms, or mandatory vaccination policies). This article is a good example of how liberal viewpoints can also conflict with science: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-social-science.html http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-so...
- morgante 10y ago
  It's hard to draw the line of causation though. Maybe the same kind of people have always gone into academia but the Overton Window has shifted. I generally agree with older conservative agendas (smaller government, efficiency, equality of opportunity) but would never ever call myself a conservative today. Doing so risks lumping yourself in with an ideology which denies reality. That being said, I'd also hesitate to label myself a liberal due to some of the less rational aspects of liberalism today (knee-jerk anti-capitalism, safe spaces, GMOs).
- chiaro 10y ago
  You may find it interesting that opposition to vaccines (to the degree that it exists) doesn't really have a left/right association outside of the states.
rhino369 10y ago
Can you really not see the extreme bias in that statement?

pj_mukh 10y ago

This "seems" like an American phenomenon. As a liberal, I can have a fully formed debate with a British Conservative, A Canadian conservative, a European conservative (sans latent Nazism), however the dominant American conservative seems to be operating on a completely different plain and set of assumptions. I find it extremely difficult to relate to and debate the American conservative. In general, if an american <insert institution here> (college, newspaper etc.) seems uber-liberal in America, it is just run-of-the-mill centrist in most other countries. Not because of any stated or unstated institutional biases, but simply because its been labelled so by a relentless, uncompromising, hyper-focussed and hugely disciplined conservative media looking for easy answers. P.S: Also the predilection to openly say "Compromise is impossible", esp behind the scenes, also seems to be a unique attribute of the American Conservative.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago
>>> I find it extremely difficult to relate to and debate the American conservative Yet, the topic here is that conservative-related news items appear to have been suppressed or down-scored on the influential Facebook trending box, presumably by liberal or liberal-leaning curators (or algorithms written by liberal leaning programmers). How do you conclude that conservatives are uncompromising or closed minded when in fact it is the liberal side that is closing the door here?
- pj_mukh 10y ago
  Most of Facebook's users are international. There is a chance that what is "liberal" in America is simply something that runs counter to the American conservatives disciplined beliefs. Example #1: When a prominent American conservative does something like shutdown the government instead of compromising (remember compromising gets you booted at the next elections see: Paul Ryan). To most of the world (liberal and conservative), this is nuts. Facebook bubbles news reports about how "crazy" this is to the top. American news media will most likely call this a liberal bias when really it's just an international one. Example #2: If facebook, editorializes a giant Ice-sheet melting and how that is related to anthropogenic global warming (something most International conservatives have accepted), most American conservatives will call that to be liberal bias. Note that this is not about policy decisions, most international conservatives don't agree with Carbon Taxes for instance, but one of just straight facts and assumptions.

serge2k 10y ago

> For anyone who believes these statistics are not based on overt discrimination based on political viewpoint, a recent study[2] showed that discrimination by party is stronger than that of race. That makes sense. I will freely admit my opinion of a person changes if I find out that they are a republican or libertarian. Doesn't make them a bad person, but the ideas put out by the prominent members of those parties frequently range from from stupid to completely horrifying.

snowwrestler 10y ago

The 2008 study did not find that "88% of journalists donate to the Democratic party." It found that, of people who made a political donation and identified a journalism company as their employer, 88% donated to a Democratic candidate or cause. It's not possible to take this study as evidence of an overall bias in journalism, because it is a very small, non-random sample of people. The total number of people included in the study is less than 1,500, and it was a self-selected group. In addition it includes non-journalist jobs like CFO and a "Saturday Night Live" producer. About the only solid conclusion to draw from this study is that the vast majority of journalists do not contribute to political parties or candidates at all.

geofft 10y ago

> Jonathan Haidt has shown[1] that non-economics social sciences skew more than 14-1 liberal to conservative (and that universities have not always been so skewed). This seems to be measured by "Democrat" vs. "Republican". An alternative hypothesis is that mainstream American political views have skewed strongly towards the right in recent decades, but that shift did not touch the academy, and also that America became more prominent in research in recent decades (so more researchers labeled themselves by American political parties). Anecdotally, it seems like there's a liberal/conservative split within the Democratic party, exemplified by Sanders/Hillary. I wonder what you get if you figure out some good way to quantify that, and then redo the statistics. This is only frightening if you think that there's a lot of ideological conformity within the label "Democrat", or that the specific ideologies with the label "Republican" need representation. There are probably good arguments for those, but they're not completely obvious.

NOSHSHNACKERS 10y ago

Its based on faulty logic. The human mind has a bias against its own biases

mgalka 10y ago

Completely agree. Though I think the issue here is bigger than that. Journalism by its nature is subjective. So it may be bias, and that's still crummy, but at least the people consuming it know what they're getting. Facebook, on the other hand, portrays its "trending" news as being determined objectively based on what people are sharing. That goes beyond bias to manipulative. It would be the same if Google were filtering conservative news sites out of its results.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> I have no great love of conservative politics, but there's a convincing argument to be made that their ideas and views are routinely suppressed by media outside of explicitly partisan media outlets (i.e. Fox News or talk radio). Fox News is not "explicitly partisan", they are purportedly neutral ("Fair and Balanced"). They are widely recognized as extraordinarily partisan, but that's different than "explicitly partisan".

rebootthesystem 10y ago

> the liberal political position is correct Agree with everything you said up to this point. Liberal politics is mostly correct on social matters and dead wrong on economics. And, of course, the GOP is dead wrong on social matters and mostly correct on economics. And that's what sucks for a lot of us, no party with a shot at winning and setting us on the correct path is mostly correct across the board. I have a feeling we are standing at a crossroad where the only option is to go for the economy. Why? Because if we deteriorate further we can kiss goodby to social and environmental responsibility. Just look at any country that's in the shits economically for examples of how well social and environmental programs work when you are broke. Trump? Barf. Sadly.