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The mainstream news media is actually pretty good at being technically factually correct, but it's so heavily biased that normal people can't see the truth behi

The mainstream news media is actually pretty good at being technically factually correct, but it's so heavily biased that normal people can't see the truth behind the spin. What they take away from a story is the emotion, not the facts. It can be the complete opposite of what really happened. Subjective language is one way they do it. For example, an organization might have a "culture of abuse". That's not factually wrong but it has no meaning either. When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". When they want to suggest a person is dishonest, it's "X claims, without evidence, that ...". Another way is taking advantage of people's inability to distinguish anecdotes from a representative sample. If they want us to believe that crime is increasing, they'll report more on crime so the audience gets the impression that there's more of it. They may even say it's increasing, which it always is if you cherry pick the appropriate time scale. Then there's using quotes from other people to say whatever the journalist wants to say themselves. A technique for interviewing people is to go fishing for someone to say the right thing, which someone inevitably will if you ask enough people. Or worse, telling their subjects what to say or tricking them into saying they thing they want, perhaps by expressing the same belief themselves and using the human nature of agreeableness to get the subject to say they agree, even if they don't really. Sometimes the quotes are written inline with the rest of the sentence so they feel like facts being asserted by the journalist but aren't subject to the usual standard of accuracy. I'd say these are more serious problems than factual errors because they're convey high level feelings and overall sense of the state of the world which are being prefabricated and fed to gullible voters so they don't have to think for themselves. With factual errors, you still have to use those facts to conclude something, which is hard mental work.

ojnabieoot 6y ago
> When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". That white supremacists are expanding their membership and becoming more violent is in fact objectively true and "growing white supremacy" is an objective comment on the political circumstances that led to the Christchurch terrorism attack. Honestly, and I know this is an ad hominem: you declaring that such a view is "subjective" says a lot more about your politics than it does anything about journalism. So I looked at your HN profile. In fact, looking at your comment from 6 days ago[1]: > [James Watson] [b]lasphemed against contemporary morality by taking the "wrong" side in the nature-vs-nurture debate. See his Wikipedia page for details. That is not why James Watson got in trouble. James Watson got in trouble because he said directly that black people were dumber than white people, and that this is due to genetic differences. He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former, and absolutely zero for the latter. His claim is strongly disputed by anthropologists and sociologists, who have considerable evidence that African art, technology, and society is just as sophisticated as the European variety. His claim is also disputed by human geneticists - again due to a total lack of evidence. The fact that you a) dishonestly sanitized his actual views with a cowardly euphemism, and b) apparently agree with him that Africans are dumber than Europeans makes me suspect you aren't "objectively" concerned about the media reporting on increasing white nationalism. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24762396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24762396
- lopmotr 6y ago
  How can it be objectively true when there isn't even an objective definition of white supremacy, let alone knowledge of who subscribes to that belief? But even then, growing on what time scale? It's surely been in decline over the past century but perhaps grew over the previous year or decade? The journalist is still correct if it grew over the past year and otherwise declined over the past decade, or if the reverse is true, so it's a meaningless statement without more details. > He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former The former is consensus among researchers in the field. The latter is something there's disagreement on and no clear consensus. This is not like claiming the Earth is flat or he achieved cold fusion. It's not clearly incorrect, but is morally wrong by contemporary standards.
  - ojnabieoot 6y ago
    The fact that you are blatantly a white supremacist means that your entire first paragraph is dripping in pure bad faith. You are also attacking your own strawman by the way, "growing white supremacy" was your quote! Not something from a journalist. White supremacy has clearly been crowing over the past decade, with increasing membership and activity among white supremacist terrorist groups (in the US) and political parties (in the EU). I guess you can say that it "declined" over the past century, but that's a useless point of view when considering the Christchurch terrorist attack. > The former is consensus among researchers in the field. No it isn't. The "consensus among researchers in the field" is that black Americans tend to score more poorly on IQ tests than white Americans. It does not mean black people are actually "dumber" since IQ is not conclusively related to "intelligence" - we don't even know what intelligence is! We also know that you can raise your IQ considerably by practicing IQ tests, that psychological pressures have immense impact on IQ scores, that education increases your IQ score, that being adopted into a richer family can increase your IQ score, and so on. Hence the IQ tests are flawed circumstantial evidence, where the testee's "inherent" and "biological" intelligence is hopelessly entangled with psychological and economic factors that obviously have nothing to do with the individual. This is like the phrenology arguments of old: it might have been the consensus among researchers in the field that Africans had less cranial CC than Europeans. But there was no evidence that this had anything to do with brainpower, and racists like yourself have always played fast-and-loose with "real fact" versus "evidence-free assertion" to make your point. Now that it's been demonstrated that the 19th century phrenologists were wrong about African/European head size differences, you rarely see people pushing phrenological arguments and they sound self-evidently ridiculous.

ojnabieoot 6y ago

> When the Christchurch massacre happened, suddenly there was "growing white supremacy". That white supremacists are expanding their membership and becoming more violent is in fact objectively true and "growing white supremacy" is an objective comment on the political circumstances that led to the Christchurch terrorism attack. Honestly, and I know this is an ad hominem: you declaring that such a view is "subjective" says a lot more about your politics than it does anything about journalism. So I looked at your HN profile. In fact, looking at your comment from 6 days ago[1]: > [James Watson] [b]lasphemed against contemporary morality by taking the "wrong" side in the nature-vs-nurture debate. See his Wikipedia page for details. That is not why James Watson got in trouble. James Watson got in trouble because he said directly that black people were dumber than white people, and that this is due to genetic differences. He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former, and absolutely zero for the latter. His claim is strongly disputed by anthropologists and sociologists, who have considerable evidence that African art, technology, and society is just as sophisticated as the European variety. His claim is also disputed by human geneticists - again due to a total lack of evidence. The fact that you a) dishonestly sanitized his actual views with a cowardly euphemism, and b) apparently agree with him that Africans are dumber than Europeans makes me suspect you aren't "objectively" concerned about the media reporting on increasing white nationalism. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24762396 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24762396

lopmotr 6y ago
How can it be objectively true when there isn't even an objective definition of white supremacy, let alone knowledge of who subscribes to that belief? But even then, growing on what time scale? It's surely been in decline over the past century but perhaps grew over the previous year or decade? The journalist is still correct if it grew over the past year and otherwise declined over the past decade, or if the reverse is true, so it's a meaningless statement without more details. > He has only flawed circumstantial evidence for the former The former is consensus among researchers in the field. The latter is something there's disagreement on and no clear consensus. This is not like claiming the Earth is flat or he achieved cold fusion. It's not clearly incorrect, but is morally wrong by contemporary standards.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  The fact that you are blatantly a white supremacist means that your entire first paragraph is dripping in pure bad faith. You are also attacking your own strawman by the way, "growing white supremacy" was your quote! Not something from a journalist. White supremacy has clearly been crowing over the past decade, with increasing membership and activity among white supremacist terrorist groups (in the US) and political parties (in the EU). I guess you can say that it "declined" over the past century, but that's a useless point of view when considering the Christchurch terrorist attack. > The former is consensus among researchers in the field. No it isn't. The "consensus among researchers in the field" is that black Americans tend to score more poorly on IQ tests than white Americans. It does not mean black people are actually "dumber" since IQ is not conclusively related to "intelligence" - we don't even know what intelligence is! We also know that you can raise your IQ considerably by practicing IQ tests, that psychological pressures have immense impact on IQ scores, that education increases your IQ score, that being adopted into a richer family can increase your IQ score, and so on. Hence the IQ tests are flawed circumstantial evidence, where the testee's "inherent" and "biological" intelligence is hopelessly entangled with psychological and economic factors that obviously have nothing to do with the individual. This is like the phrenology arguments of old: it might have been the consensus among researchers in the field that Africans had less cranial CC than Europeans. But there was no evidence that this had anything to do with brainpower, and racists like yourself have always played fast-and-loose with "real fact" versus "evidence-free assertion" to make your point. Now that it's been demonstrated that the 19th century phrenologists were wrong about African/European head size differences, you rarely see people pushing phrenological arguments and they sound self-evidently ridiculous.