10 ms·

Second best. The best is selective reporting. Even if every story is reported 100% accurately and objectively, by choosing which stories are promoted, and which

• HSO 7y ago
  Speaking of, I saw a particularly blatant example yesterday: https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1142442971922653184 https://twitter.com/scottsantens/status/1142442971922653184 I've been following the Andrew Yang campaign since his appearance on the Joe Rogan show and so far as I can tell MSNBC has been at it for months now. The gall still astonishes me: 20 candidates qualified for the debates, he now polls in the top 8 and betting markets even place him in the top five, and they substitute someone who did not even qualify for the debate for him.
  • hanniabu 7y ago
    Yup, I've noticed that too. Unfortunately it seems he's making too much sense and others are trying to bury him by not covering him. It was a breath of fresh air when I discovered him. I'm somebody that absolutely hates politics because everyone's saying what people want to hear just to get votes rather and only talking about issues at surface level. You can sense the sincerity in Yang's voice, he's not a lifetime politician, he comes from a social work background, he's going after real root-cause issues, provides data to back up his arguments, talks about issues instead of trying to gain popularity by demeaning the opponent, etc etc.
  • ch4s3 7y ago
    They didn't replace him in the debate, the mistakenly omitted him from a graphic on screen and later corrected it. He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good. I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.
    • m0zg 7y ago
      Polls, as we've discovered in 2016, are also largely fake news. To me Yang seems to be the only sane candidate on the left, and the only one who'd be able to give Trump a hard time.
      • Green_man 7y ago
        This needs a citation. There was a lot of people spinning polls or making bad predictions off polls in 2016 (like every election year), but polls are not fake news. They certainly weren't proven to be fake news just because some people were surprised by the outcome.
        • m0zg 7y ago
          LMGTFY: https://www.google.com/search?q=poll+oversampling+2016&oq=poll+oversampling+2016&aqs=chrome..69i57j33.8986j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=poll+oversampling+2016&oq=po... The scheme is simple. Oversample the mostly-democratic areas, and you get the result that supports your narrative that "Donald Trump is going to lose". Easy as a pie. Moreover, I'd bet good money that you'll see it again in 2020. They've learned nothing. This is why campaigns run their own polls as well.
          • theaustinseven 7y ago
            Hey, posting an LMGTFY is basically always extremely condescending and unnecessary. Here's a link that explains the quality of polling in 2016 and talks about some of the misconceptions both before and after the election: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...
          • Marazan 7y ago
            Trump lost the popular vote. National polls captured that perfectly. The polling failure came in the rust belt where the polling models were not tuned to turnout correctly. Turnoit model is the secret sauce of political polling and the most likely source of failure. I was betting on the election and this proved an expensive failure for me. However, your notion of deliberately skewed polls by 'oversampling' Democratic areas is utter hogwash.
  • mesozoic 7y ago
    He's probably not extreme enough. A classic liberal is basically viewed as a republican these days.
    • conception 7y ago
      A "center" dem from today is 100% a 1980's republican. Their platforms are basically indistinguishable.
      • jlawson 7y ago
        1980's Republicans supported sanctuary cities, gay marriage, free college, and socialized health care? No, they didn't. Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6grXCooL3-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6grXCooL3-M Listen to Bill Clinton in the 90's basically laying down the Trump line on 'illegal aliens': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnOpGI0qRhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnOpGI0qRhA
        • hindsightbias 7y ago
          Sanctuary cities didnt need to be a thing because Republicans didnt care until the 90s. Buchanan wasnt the norm, he was out there. College was practically free then. And ever hear of Nixoncare? The left today is a caricature of the left in the 60s and early 70s.
          • whatshisface 7y ago
            The right isn't happy with the right, the left isn't happy with the left, they aren't happy with each other, who is happy in this political landscape?
        • pessimizer 7y ago
          Bill Clinton and the New Democrats were the rightward shift in the Democratic Party.
  • kurthr 7y ago
    And of course it wouldn't be Twitter without fake news... sorry you've been had! https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/17/which-candidates-have-made-democratic-debate-stage/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/17/which-can... Edit, fixed AMP version.
    • HSO 7y ago
      I didn't say they dropped him from the debates. Of course they cannot do that, this is already decided by the DNC. What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him. Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.
  • tracker1 7y ago
    They did this during the Presidential election as well with Gary Johnson as well.
  • dragonsky67 7y ago
    I see what you did there. Clever.
• bracobama 7y ago
  Related: Google is doing this. https://www.allsides.com/blog/audit-finds-evidence-googles-bias-toward-these-media-outlets https://www.allsides.com/blog/audit-finds-evidence-googles-b...
  • vkou 7y ago
    This analysis only looks at whether or not the source is 'left' or 'right', and not on the quality of the source. Google also rarely[1] promotes Chinese and North Korean state-sponsored media sources as 'top news', or Marxist-Leninist publications, or the moral and political degenerates behind New Trotskyism[2], but for some reason, that analysis doesn't take issue with this lack of 'balanced reporting'. It's only upset that a very particular, very narrow political spectrum of ideas isn't getting 50/50 coverage. [1] Never? [2] Isn't it obvious that we'd be better off without listening to them? /s
    • mc32 7y ago
      Google US I think it’s obvious would have little reason to promote Granma or RT. But they should have a pan-US org like USA Today and WSJ more evenly distributed. Also The Miami Herald is a pretty good paper, better than some on that list. It should also be higher ranked.
      • vkou 7y ago
        Why not? After all, as the article posits, a diversity of opinion is important for the health of democracy. What better way to introduce diversity of opinion, then news that doesn't neatly fall into the socially-left-us-exceptional-pro-business-anti-human and the socially-right-us-exceptional-pro-business-anti-human buckets? You don't even have to turn to foreign news for that. There's no shortage of diverse domestic ideas, that for some unfathomable reason aren't being promoted.
        • mc32 7y ago
          Oh I agree we should have more diverse domestic news sources for sure. We mainly get the take from large coastal metro areas but many inland areas and some big areas (like Chicago or All of Texas) are ignored. As I mentioned, the Miami Herald is a great paper. Not only does it serve Florida well, but it also has great international coverage, specially LatAm and Caribb.
• jahabrewer 7y ago
  In your edit, are you suggesting that reporting on a topic should be proportional to how many people die from it?
  • deogeo 7y ago
    I'd say no. But people should be very aware that the news gives a non-representative picture of reality. And I don't think they are, or not enough. I used that example because it's the only one I have on hand. That's the trouble with biased story choice - it takes a lot of work and statistical analysis to reveal.
• awinder 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure "the best" fake news comes from state actors who have paid employees, and budgets, and a clear and clean mission statement (disrupt our enemies). Most news organizations are not these secret cabals where everyone is indoctrinated and working on some dupe-the-masses approach.
• hinkley 7y ago
  Kind of a form of lying by omission, right? If aliens invaded earth tomorrow and the local news decided to go with the story of someone's Aunt Mary who just won a cobbler bake-off for the third straight year, you'd be shouting "WTF" at your TV. But the subtler ones just go right past your filters.
• projectileboy 7y ago
  This to me is the most important thing, and has been for decades. When people complain about liberal bias in the news, they’re looking at the small picture - how a particular story was written. They don’t see that what stories are told in the first place get decided by people with a lot of power and money. Instead of focusing on “How should we handle immigration in the US?”, the first question is, “Why are we talking about immigration in the US instead of something else?”
  • jswizzy 7y ago
    To be fair we were told the immigration crisis was fake by the media until Trump story rating dips and immigration story rating spiked. Basically after the Muller report turned up nothing it went from full on media gas lighting to now front page on every outlet.
  • btilly 7y ago
    The best comment that I heard about media bias was from a conversation I had with a major news anchor nearly 20 years ago. Off the record she says, "We are biased both ways. Most reporters are liberal, and most owners of the media are right-wing. So most stories slant left, but on the big ones we're forced to slant right.* This was before Fox News became so powerful, and media became more explicitly ideologically divided. I sometimes wonder how much it has changed since. But given how any left-wining news outlets Rupert Murdoch owns, probably there remains a lot of truth to the observation.
    • cat199 7y ago
      > left, but on the big ones we're forced to slant right so peculiar that while existing in a 4d space, we are so prone to believing that politicians only operate on a 1d vector.
      • jeremyjh 7y ago
        In the US we have only two political parties that are able to regularly elect people to national offices. So yes, its pretty one-dimensional politicking here.
• the_duke 7y ago
  This is why I always try to read newspapers from both ends of the spectrum. At first it is often very annoying to confront yourself with the different viewpoints and opposite spin. But you train yourself to read everything more critically, recognize how easy it is for your preferred media outlets to blur your "vision", and discover that the truth usually is somewhere in the middle.
• endymi0n 7y ago
  Ironically, on a meta level, OurWorldInData itself isn‘t immune from that. While I personally love how they build a positivist and fact based counterpoint to a world not built for a 24h news cycle, they are selectively confirmation biased as well. All their facts are aimed towards their main message of „in the grand scheme of things, everything is good“ and they conveniently underreport on climate change and growing inequality.
• noobermin 7y ago
  Your source is interesting, but devoid in those stats are human values, which are much harder to measure and add a weighting to each of those bins that may shift the histogram. I don't even think the framing shown here is without some level of bias, for example, they put all types of cancer into one bucket, they treat road fatalities the same as falls and other accidents. It's very hard if not impossible to color the results somewhat, and it's a struggle we have to always deal with and be mindful of.
• nabla9 7y ago
  This discussion is falling to a trap where "Fake News" is diluted to synonym for all influencing in and propaganda. Fake News is propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes. Nothing mentioned mention here falls into a category of Fake News. Fake News creates cognitive dissonance and distrust. More subtler methods work differently. "But mainstream media also does Fake News" arguments are whataboutism.
  • btown 7y ago
    I've upvoted you because you make a good point, but I disagree. IMO, Fake News, in your restrictive definition, is to modern propaganda what Bootstrap is to modern frontend dev. It's an easy shortcut, widely known, and even talented operators are going to use it because it's the easiest way to control a (domestic or foreign) population. But resources are there, funding is there, to build much more subtle/complex systems if needed. Cut away Bootstrap, and you don't particularly dent the startup ecosystem. Cut away fake news, and you don't particularly dent the ability of troll farms to get work done. We're in a new era, fake news or not.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • johnchristopher 7y ago
    Wasn't "fake news" a term popularised by someone accusing others of lying about him ? So that he'd look like the victim ?
    • krapp 7y ago
      Fake news was initially popularized in reference to hoaxes and propaganda being spread on the internet under the guise of legitimate news, and the effect that increasing public trust in such stories had on the recent Presidential campaign cycle. Trump supporters found themselves more strongly associated with such stories than the Democrats (not surprising given his support among right-wing social media,) so they attempted to reframe "fake news" as, itself, a fake phenomenon invented by the left to discredit alternative media out of fear of the threat it presented to the leftist media establishment status quo. This to further the narrative that the mainstream media was little more than a propaganda wing of the DNC and its globalist masters, and that any Trump-critical stories from the MSM were likely to be fabrications and thus not to be trusted (but you could trust those stories on your Facebook feed about HRC having Parkinsons' disease or running a child sex slave ring out of a pizza parlor.) And then Trump himself picked up on it somehow and now likes to label anything and anyone that criticizes him as fake news. Ironically, the least likely thing to be called fake news nowadays is news that is actually fake.
• maxerickson 7y ago
  What's the scientifically correct ratio? Or is there not some objective standard for determining that?
• basq 7y ago
  There used to be this thing called the fairness doctrine. It's abolishment paved the way for 'infotainment'.
• cjslep 7y ago
  Chomsky's book "Manufacturing Consent" is a great look at real world instances of this, for example Vietnam and Central America.
• ataturk 7y ago
  Chomsky nailed this with his work on agenda setting in the media. It reminds me of "1984" with how the antogonists were redefining the language so that people couldn't even conceive of rebelling because there were simply no words for it. I see what the media does as exactly the same thing. They have the agenda, they create the narrative and then never deviate from it. People are left with cognitive dissonance. They know something is wrong but can't put a finger directly on it. So then they fight each other instead of the entity that is truly at fault.
• jkoudys 7y ago
  Sure, and while biased reporting can certainly promote an incorrect worldview, it doesn't quite meet the standard of being "fake". The game is much more about outright fabricated stories that gain credibility. There can be more than one bad thing happening at once, and it's not necessary that everything address all of them.