4 ms·

I'm not contesting the conclusion. But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compellin

I'm not contesting the conclusion. But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling. (Not to mention NYT is squarely center right, politically. "Left" of the GOP but not left in any meaningful sense.)

bhupy 6y ago
Lots to unpack here. 1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark. 2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum. 3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.
- naravara 6y ago
  > Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. Even breaking views down as "social" and "economic" encodes a lot of biases. In reality political views seem to align more based on a matrix of dimensions like "openness to novel experiences" or "preference for structure/stability." The system we use often surprises people with how often the Individualist Lefties (of the hippie variety) and Far Right align on both social and economic policy. It turns out their main differences are just about things like sexual mores and recreational drug use, but the general orientation on most other dynamics is the same. They just end up on different ends of the spectrum because of how factional alliances manifest in our political system.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. It's not really in the US, where it's been studied and the main dimensions of political variability were a strong economic left-right axis and a weaker racial policy axis (Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy), and since that study it's pretty clear that divisions on the race axis have aligned more tightly with those on the economic axis, making the US political spectrum even closer to a unidimensional one.
belorn 6y ago
http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/Graphics/Fig7_11.pdf http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/G... Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study. It's sits center-left in that study because the study centers around the center of US media coverage, not any principled definition of political center; the NY Times viewpoint is, and has long been, neoliberal corporate capitalist, which is a center-right position (the same center-right position which was held by the dominant factions of both US political parties in the neoliberal consensus of the early 1990s, though the Republican Party has since shifted further Right, and the center-left faction has been gaining ground in the Democratic Party in the last several years.)
  - macspoofing 6y ago
    >It's sits center-left in that study because the study centers around the center of US media coverage, not any principled definition of political center; the NY Times viewpoint is, and has long been, neoliberal corporate capitalist Your contention is that the center is really defined by the progressive/Marxist/"democratic socialist" minority? In that case, I guess anything to the right of that minority (i.e. everything) would be see as right-wing. Unfortunately, that's not the actual center. A better descriptor for those groups is 'far left'.
kortilla 6y ago
> But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling That makes the NYTimes admitting that it wasn’t that big of a deal more compelling, not less.
macspoofing 6y ago
>NYT is squarely center right, politically. Just because you are far-left, doesn't mean institutions to the right of you are actually 'right-wing' or 'center-right'. NYT is in no way a 'center-right' publication.

bhupy 6y ago

Lots to unpack here. 1. That the traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media, and "even the NYTimes" came to a conclusion that advances a social media friendly narrative is exactly the point. If we are talking about the historical biases of the NYTimes, their reporting has consistently had a bent critical of the Citizens United decision (pertaining to paid political speech) and in this particular case, overstating the impact of Cambridge Analytica. That the NYTimes would then go on to conclude that CA's impact on the 2016 election was overrated is absolutely worthy of special remark. 2. Calling NYT "squarely center right and not left in any meaningful sense" is pretty odd. The left-right spectrum is created within the polity in question. It's of no use to an American to classify the American political spectrum from the locus of European politics, because Europeans have no say in American politics. It literally doesn't matter that Joe Biden is "to the right of" Corbyn, because the two will never run against each other in a political election, and British voters have no say in American elections. So while you're technically correct that, on a global scale, the NYT is "center right", that fact is not meaningful at all to their readers, the vast majority of whom are American voters participating in the American political spectrum. 3. Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. On social issues, I think you'd have a pretty difficult time arguing that the NYT is "squarely center right". The issues of election integrity, paid speech, and campaign finance are decidedly social in nature.

naravara 6y ago
> Even if one were to concede your premise that it's somehow valuable to classify American politics through another political entity's spectrum of discourse, the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. Even breaking views down as "social" and "economic" encodes a lot of biases. In reality political views seem to align more based on a matrix of dimensions like "openness to novel experiences" or "preference for structure/stability." The system we use often surprises people with how often the Individualist Lefties (of the hippie variety) and Far Right align on both social and economic policy. It turns out their main differences are just about things like sexual mores and recreational drug use, but the general orientation on most other dynamics is the same. They just end up on different ends of the spectrum because of how factional alliances manifest in our political system.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > the left-right spectrum is an extremely lossy way of encoding both social and economic views. It's not really in the US, where it's been studied and the main dimensions of political variability were a strong economic left-right axis and a weaker racial policy axis (Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy), and since that study it's pretty clear that divisions on the race axis have aligned more tightly with those on the economic axis, making the US political spectrum even closer to a unidimensional one.

belorn 6y ago

http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/Graphics/Fig7_11.pdf http://wilkins.law.harvard.edu/projects/2017-08_mediacloud/G... Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> NYT sits pretty much center left, but feel free to point towards a more comprehensive study. It's sits center-left in that study because the study centers around the center of US media coverage, not any principled definition of political center; the NY Times viewpoint is, and has long been, neoliberal corporate capitalist, which is a center-right position (the same center-right position which was held by the dominant factions of both US political parties in the neoliberal consensus of the early 1990s, though the Republican Party has since shifted further Right, and the center-left faction has been gaining ground in the Democratic Party in the last several years.)
- macspoofing 6y ago
  >It's sits center-left in that study because the study centers around the center of US media coverage, not any principled definition of political center; the NY Times viewpoint is, and has long been, neoliberal corporate capitalist Your contention is that the center is really defined by the progressive/Marxist/"democratic socialist" minority? In that case, I guess anything to the right of that minority (i.e. everything) would be see as right-wing. Unfortunately, that's not the actual center. A better descriptor for those groups is 'far left'.

kortilla 6y ago

> But traditional media is incentivized to be biased against social media. So "even the NY Times" isn't particularly compelling That makes the NYTimes admitting that it wasn’t that big of a deal more compelling, not less.

macspoofing 6y ago

>NYT is squarely center right, politically. Just because you are far-left, doesn't mean institutions to the right of you are actually 'right-wing' or 'center-right'. NYT is in no way a 'center-right' publication.