5 ms·

There Really Was a Liberal Media Bubble

53 points by protomyth 10y ago

camperman 10y ago
"Nate, Nate" I said ever so many times, graciously telling my tale. You got it wrong. Horribly wrong. Let it go and move on. The US mainstream media is not there to report the news. It's there to shape public opinion in favor of the small group of elites who own it. It didn't work in 2016 because there's been an awakening; people want government that represents them and not itself and they're sick of being lied to. No-one really gives a fuck about what's on Memoerandom. This analysis reads like an in-depth textual criticism of the Hitler Diaries that's forgotten the main point about them: they weren't real. Let me give you an example of how pathetic the reporting has become. This is an interview from Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/washington_post_bezos_amazon_revolution.php http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/washington_post_bezos_amazon_revo...): CJR: So you think news consumers in the future will make a decision on which Hillary Clinton story to click on based on speed? If they see a number of options and their experience tells them that The Washington Post is faster, then they’re going to read that one? SP: Yes. And we see that already. I don’t know if it’s a conscious choice. I think it’s more about not hesitating to click. CJR: I can’t imagine that’s a popular view in the newsroom. JM: Well, it doesn’t really change our editorial strategy in any way. I'm an old-school journo and I found a number of things in this disturbing. One: Hillary is assumed to be the winner. Two: The WaPo is admittedly trying to brainwash their readers through site responsiveness. Three: the article should mention owner Jeff Bezos's large contracts with the intelligence community and the ramifications of possible influence there. But it doesn't. In short, it's propaganda.
- masonic 10y ago
  Four: their metric for success is web volume: "Its Web traffic ... far outstrips The New York Times (and even BuzzFeed) in the number of online posts its reporters file every day." And "Today, the office has the feel of a tech startup well-blessed by the VC gods. Video screens scrolling Web analytics hang above the newsroom." Not news alerts. Not stock tickers. Web analytics are the coin of their realm.
  - camperman 10y ago
    Indeed. And not quality of stories either.
- masonic 10y ago
  Also this, from the interview: "When Jeff bought us, within about six months, he threw (profitability) out. Now there are three other criteria. It’s basically: How fast do you move? It’s very subjective. The second one is that there are no sacred cows, to push experimentation. The third thing is debate, but commit. So you can argue all you want, but once we agree, then there’s no undermining." In other words, "we've chosen the narrative; don't you content producers DARE to go outside it."
  - camperman 10y ago
    Of course he threw profitability out. An alphabet, probably the CIA, has underwritten him for the foreseeable future. Jeff Bezos is what's known as a NOC, a Non-Official Career officer in the CIA. And they do as they're told. Other examples: Valerie Plame, Eric Schmidt, billg, Eric Braverman.
pottersbasilisk 10y ago
So journalists are still going through the stages of grief after the last presidential election.
fred_is_fred 10y ago
I actually think Silver deserves some of the blame because he set the odds at basically 20-25% that Trump could win.. Many people who would have "held their noses" and voted for Hillary did not, and Trump won.
- pottersbasilisk 10y ago
  I doubt it. Bernie supporters like Susan Sarandon said she prefered Trump to Hillary.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Silver deserves some of the blame That's not fair to Silver. At all. You're really saying he was a reason that Hillary lost? He should have been nothing more than a cheerleader? Is there no longer a place for impartiality or objectivity in polling and reporting? So hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania first checked to see what Silver was saying, then decided that the election was in the bag for Hillary, and then decided to vote for Trump as a protest? The media groupthink was absurd. Compared to the rest of them, Silver was an outlier. For example, Huffington Post gave Hillary a 98.2% chance of winning, and predicted she would get 323 electoral votes.[1] Blame HuffPost if you want to blame someone. Heaven forbid you actually blame the person most at fault: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trump didn't win, Hillary lost, because she was a worse candidate than Trump, if such a thing was possible!!! [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-win_us_5821074ce4b0e80b02cc2a94 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-wi...
- muninn_ 10y ago
  20-25% iS a pretty good chance.
- gozur88 10y ago
  It's more likely to have gone the other way - potential Trump voters, convinced that Trump had no chance, stayed home.
MR4D 10y ago
In my opinion (and I disagreed with Nate in late October, and early November), Nate is great at trees, but horrible at forests. For instance, he never took into account the high bias of the media. Tons of people saw it - I'd even argue that most Trump voters saw it. But he never saw it, nor the effect that it had. I contended that the polls did not make sense - one candidate was pulling huge crowds and yet was hated by everyone? Didn't make sense to me. But that's one opinion. I fault him for not saying, "hey, wait - the media is really biased in this - could their polls be too?" That's what I thought. No, I didn't have the statistics horsepower available, but I saw the forest. So did many others. One (much smarter than me to be sure), was Nicholas Taleb, who excoriated Nate on his lack of statistics knowledge. His critique was well above my understanding, but I'll trust someone who made money off of statistics more than any pollster.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  I followed the election via Nate Silver's site and remained frightened of a Trump victory the whole time. How does that square with all the people like yourself who have a different recall? Quite a lot of it seems to come down to people just boiling everything he said to a binary Hillary will win message. Humans are after all famously terrible with stats. What does it mean for example to have disagreed with him in November? My only interpretation of that is that you thought Trump would win. But he never said Clinton would win, he's making a statistical prediction. It's like arguing he's wrong because a dice roll came up 2 and he only gave it 1/6th odds. I can say for definite that he talked repeatedly about the possibility of the polls being wrong, specifically saying that if the polls were off by the same amount that they have historically been off and in his favor, then Trump would win. Again, I don't understand why people want to pretend he never said stuff like this. Is it part of their own media bias narrative?
tnone 10y ago
"Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, ..." They're just categorically unable to see what's staring them right in the face, aren't they? Stop. Equating. Race. And. Gender. With. Diversity. Of. Opinion. It's. A. Non. Starter.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  Diversity of experiences is important when looking for diversity of opinions. Most of America is either female or not caucasian so if all you are getting is white men I feel like that would indicate a large systematic bias in your sampling
Jack000 10y ago
I'm not an American but as far as I can tell the Liberal bias is created by the media staying the same and the country moving to the right. I don't really buy the idea that diversity of opinion is something to strive toward. Human opinion doesn't follow some sort of gaussian distribution, and there are opinions that are objectively objectionable.

53 points by protomyth 10y ago

"Nate, Nate" I said ever so many times, graciously telling my tale. You got it wrong. Horribly wrong. Let it go and move on. The US mainstream media is not there to report the news. It's there to shape public opinion in favor of the small group of elites who own it. It didn't work in 2016 because there's been an awakening; people want government that represents them and not itself and they're sick of being lied to. No-one really gives a fuck about what's on Memoerandom. This analysis reads like an in-depth textual criticism of the Hitler Diaries that's forgotten the main point about them: they weren't real. Let me give you an example of how pathetic the reporting has become. This is an interview from Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/washington_post_bezos_amazon_revolution.php http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/washington_post_bezos_amazon_revo...): CJR: So you think news consumers in the future will make a decision on which Hillary Clinton story to click on based on speed? If they see a number of options and their experience tells them that The Washington Post is faster, then they’re going to read that one? SP: Yes. And we see that already. I don’t know if it’s a conscious choice. I think it’s more about not hesitating to click. CJR: I can’t imagine that’s a popular view in the newsroom. JM: Well, it doesn’t really change our editorial strategy in any way. I'm an old-school journo and I found a number of things in this disturbing. One: Hillary is assumed to be the winner. Two: The WaPo is admittedly trying to brainwash their readers through site responsiveness. Three: the article should mention owner Jeff Bezos's large contracts with the intelligence community and the ramifications of possible influence there. But it doesn't. In short, it's propaganda.

masonic 10y ago
Four: their metric for success is web volume: "Its Web traffic ... far outstrips The New York Times (and even BuzzFeed) in the number of online posts its reporters file every day." And "Today, the office has the feel of a tech startup well-blessed by the VC gods. Video screens scrolling Web analytics hang above the newsroom." Not news alerts. Not stock tickers. Web analytics are the coin of their realm.
- camperman 10y ago
  Indeed. And not quality of stories either.
masonic 10y ago
Also this, from the interview: "When Jeff bought us, within about six months, he threw (profitability) out. Now there are three other criteria. It’s basically: How fast do you move? It’s very subjective. The second one is that there are no sacred cows, to push experimentation. The third thing is debate, but commit. So you can argue all you want, but once we agree, then there’s no undermining." In other words, "we've chosen the narrative; don't you content producers DARE to go outside it."
- camperman 10y ago
  Of course he threw profitability out. An alphabet, probably the CIA, has underwritten him for the foreseeable future. Jeff Bezos is what's known as a NOC, a Non-Official Career officer in the CIA. And they do as they're told. Other examples: Valerie Plame, Eric Schmidt, billg, Eric Braverman.

pottersbasilisk 10y ago

So journalists are still going through the stages of grief after the last presidential election.

fred_is_fred 10y ago

I actually think Silver deserves some of the blame because he set the odds at basically 20-25% that Trump could win.. Many people who would have "held their noses" and voted for Hillary did not, and Trump won.

pottersbasilisk 10y ago
I doubt it. Bernie supporters like Susan Sarandon said she prefered Trump to Hillary.
PhantomGremlin 10y ago
Silver deserves some of the blame That's not fair to Silver. At all. You're really saying he was a reason that Hillary lost? He should have been nothing more than a cheerleader? Is there no longer a place for impartiality or objectivity in polling and reporting? So hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania first checked to see what Silver was saying, then decided that the election was in the bag for Hillary, and then decided to vote for Trump as a protest? The media groupthink was absurd. Compared to the rest of them, Silver was an outlier. For example, Huffington Post gave Hillary a 98.2% chance of winning, and predicted she would get 323 electoral votes.[1] Blame HuffPost if you want to blame someone. Heaven forbid you actually blame the person most at fault: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trump didn't win, Hillary lost, because she was a worse candidate than Trump, if such a thing was possible!!! [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-win_us_5821074ce4b0e80b02cc2a94 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-wi...
muninn_ 10y ago
20-25% iS a pretty good chance.
gozur88 10y ago
It's more likely to have gone the other way - potential Trump voters, convinced that Trump had no chance, stayed home.

MR4D 10y ago

In my opinion (and I disagreed with Nate in late October, and early November), Nate is great at trees, but horrible at forests. For instance, he never took into account the high bias of the media. Tons of people saw it - I'd even argue that most Trump voters saw it. But he never saw it, nor the effect that it had. I contended that the polls did not make sense - one candidate was pulling huge crowds and yet was hated by everyone? Didn't make sense to me. But that's one opinion. I fault him for not saying, "hey, wait - the media is really biased in this - could their polls be too?" That's what I thought. No, I didn't have the statistics horsepower available, but I saw the forest. So did many others. One (much smarter than me to be sure), was Nicholas Taleb, who excoriated Nate on his lack of statistics knowledge. His critique was well above my understanding, but I'll trust someone who made money off of statistics more than any pollster.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago
I followed the election via Nate Silver's site and remained frightened of a Trump victory the whole time. How does that square with all the people like yourself who have a different recall? Quite a lot of it seems to come down to people just boiling everything he said to a binary Hillary will win message. Humans are after all famously terrible with stats. What does it mean for example to have disagreed with him in November? My only interpretation of that is that you thought Trump would win. But he never said Clinton would win, he's making a statistical prediction. It's like arguing he's wrong because a dice roll came up 2 and he only gave it 1/6th odds. I can say for definite that he talked repeatedly about the possibility of the polls being wrong, specifically saying that if the polls were off by the same amount that they have historically been off and in his favor, then Trump would win. Again, I don't understand why people want to pretend he never said stuff like this. Is it part of their own media bias narrative?

tnone 10y ago

"Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, ..." They're just categorically unable to see what's staring them right in the face, aren't they? Stop. Equating. Race. And. Gender. With. Diversity. Of. Opinion. It's. A. Non. Starter.

tdb7893 10y ago
Diversity of experiences is important when looking for diversity of opinions. Most of America is either female or not caucasian so if all you are getting is white men I feel like that would indicate a large systematic bias in your sampling

Jack000 10y ago

I'm not an American but as far as I can tell the Liberal bias is created by the media staying the same and the country moving to the right. I don't really buy the idea that diversity of opinion is something to strive toward. Human opinion doesn't follow some sort of gaussian distribution, and there are opinions that are objectively objectionable.