8 ms·

How media bias works

26 points by mellosouls 5y ago

jpthurman 5y ago
This is a good analysis. I’m often looking for something like this to help back my own intuition. Everyone sees the problem of media bias but it’s hard to define in more tangible terms. I appreciate the side by side of WSJ and NYT articles on the Canadian Truck Drivers - shows how subtle differences in reporting the same event skew left or right. One way I’ve seen it couched is that the liberals have always owned the cultural high ground by having a preponderance of left-leaning, highly educated individuals in the ranks of the news media and in Hollywood - and that Fox News, Limbaugh, Bongino are an aggressive response to that. When I talk to my own family members who skew right they talk pretty negatively about the media in general and particularly the NYT or WaPo - but they know and trust me. So I try to explain that many of the folks who work at these places are very similar to me (education, background, thinking) - and that they shouldn’t wholesale discount whatever they publish.
- PathOfEclipse 5y ago
  I consider myself well-educated and have no respect for either the Washington Post or the New York Times. I don't ever wholesale discount what they publish, but I also don't trust anything they put out, especially if it shows a left-leaning bias in any way. I also do not rely on them for news; I get my news from other sources I trust more. From: https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/bari-weiss-on-why-she-left-the-new-york-times/ https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/bari-weiss-on-why-she-left-the... "What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets. Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it." I should note that I probably disagree with Bari on most political issues, but she seems to have the intellectual honesty to notice corruption and also the courage to refuse to give into it.
  - fortuna86 5y ago
    You don't trust the NYT or Washington Post, but link to literal tabloids interviewing outrage grifters and right wing blogs? Surely cognitive dissonance only goes so far.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  Educated, thinking people can work very well for propaganda outlets. Most mainstream media sources are now just that.
- jsnk 5y ago
  > and that they shouldn’t wholesale discount whatever they publish. This was my previous position, but in recent years, I wouldn't recommend this anymore. I believe that in the past at some point, there was a time when these mainstream media were more right than wrong, and more useful than useless if not harmful. If you are an academic or someone who has time or interest to discern what mainstream media says is right or wrong, by all means, use them. But for average people, these mainstream media being sources of information doesn't pass usefulness or correctness than any other sources of information.
fullshark 5y ago
Agree with the broad strokes here, but the fact is everyday people who consume news, as in every day they want to know what is happening politically largely don't want unbiased information. They want biased information, and that is what have learned in the internet age as you can see exactly what stories people read and click on. They hunger for confirmation bias cause it strengthens their way of making sense of the world and that gives them strength in their day to day life and decision making. They don't want to be challenged.
- ssss11 5y ago
  Is there any research paper to back up this claim? It could simply be that sensationalist headlines get people’s attention. As one data point I certainly don’t want biased information I’d prefer facts, including those that contradict my current worldview, so that I may be better informed. I see your point, and I do sometimes see people unwilling to be challenged in life, I just don’t think you can draw a conclusion that people want biased information from the media.
- brnaftr361 5y ago
  Imagine you're arguing with a child, "I don't want to!" says they, and you respond "Why not?", what answer comes next? "I don't like it!", perhaps "Because." I think there's a long chain of conditioning that we undergo, and I think it presses people into a genuinely inhumane sense that rationality must be prioritized, that you have to justify everything with some rational argument. The thing is we're human, and there's sort of two sides to every truth[0]. And there's autonomy, viewpoint, personal ethics, emotions, and all sorts of confounding processes that go on that simply can't be explained, but the conditioning compels one to explain it anyways, thus we seek confirmation, without regard for truth. To some extent I think that's what feeds the "misinformation" and "disinformation" markets. Society makes little room for the abstract man, society needs exact predictable units for its theories to function in practice. No free radicals. [0]Quashing infant mortality appears to be good, but there's the argument that it has effectively manufactured population booms in societies that aren't organized for the mass of people, viola, you've got a developing world population that suffers extremes of poverty on a totally unprecedented scale. But that latter argument would probably be discounted, right? It's a little indirect, correlation rather than causative, it presses certain intractable things like the concept of suffering, economic wellbeing, comparitive analysis with historical human condition shit...
inopinatus 5y ago
The real telling facet here is the implied, but deeply parochial conviction, that left-wing means Democrat and right-wing means Republican. They’re actually both right-wing by global standards, and the distinction looks from the outside like a pissing contest into only one side of the pool. Furthermore the binary status quo appears as manufactured tribalism to keep the American masses busy with minute shades of policy difference. The continuing appearance of articles like this on “Hacker News” indicates not just the large US readership, nor even the confluence of media and technology (something politicians have understood for millenia), but also that even a group skewing thoughtful and analytical can be hijacked by memetic engineering.
- jevoten 5y ago
  > They’re actually both right-wing by global standards Depends entirely on the issue. On foreign wars, tax policy, or gutting the social safety net, they're both right-wing. On immigration, they're left or extreme left - the Republican party, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, continues the current record-high levels of legal immigration, while the Democratic party doesn't want to enforce any immigration law, and is even giving non-citizens the vote: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/noncitizen-voting-rights-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/noncitizen-votin...
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    Neither party supports open borders last I checked. > the Republican party, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, continues the current record-high levels of legal immigration What about those murderous caravans from South America Fox News keeps telling us about every time we have an election? GOPs paving the road for those? > while the Democratic party doesn't want to enforce any immigration law, and is even giving non-citizens the vote This is completely false. Democrats are enforcing immigration laws, for better or worse. They're just not doing it as inhumanely as Trump was. And New York City is not the Democratic Party.
    - jevoten 5y ago
brnaftr361 5y ago
This left/right dichotomy has always been broken. How about a teleological spectrum assessment? I have beliefs that lie at the extremes of both ends, I've never been represented by either progressives or conservatives. It's such an obscenity that such polar thinking has persisted for so long. And especially considering the wide gamut of controversies we're capable of undertaking with the complications that science, economics, and the embrace of moral relativism on all scales has introduced into the organizational weave of our society, and the implications that the US has on the globe as the de facto world sovereign. At an individual level we're all morally culpable for the wrongs our society commits, and the first step to engaging that is allowing people to give meaning to politics to reawaken political consciousness, and the way to do it is to give people a higher degree of autonomy over their environment, and attribute them with the responsibility of determining the direction we had ought to take. Another gripe I have is academia. You ship the bulk of "educated" people from one institution to the next, and they're wholly clueless as to how the world actually works when they finally get out, but they have all the pretensions that they've got a clue. My friend, a Pharm.D., chatting about business exposed his naivety to me and another friend, whinging about how some minutiae got its corners cut, and general incompetence. This is stuff me and my partner had been exposed to since we exited high school. Whats worse is this pattern is almost certainly occurring inside the institutions themselves, where kids never having been met with the real world are shoehorned through programs and eventually given license to teach. It comes to mind that a large proportion of these people are living inside a bubble where theory is practice. Yes, it's a generalization, but from my own first-hand I think it does possess a kernel of truth.
abernard1 5y ago
I will put this opinion here, as my political affiliation can best be described as "Mean Tweets Nostalgia." For two decades, the complaint from "the right" has not been media bias, but media agenda. This terminology has been widespread in circles that most here would never have considered, and I believe it is telling this distinction is not made in the article. There is a distinct difference between even editorializing vs reporting and that of media control of "narrative," a term anyone who has a liberal arts degree knows is something distinct from the idyllic "just the facts" view of journalism. Post-Woodward & Bernstein and the mythos surrounding that event, the journalistic class took it upon themselves to be agents of social change. This idea that neutrality shouldn't be approached, and that journalism as a class were supposed to be agents of change, created the forcing function for the rise of Fox News in the first place. And that's where we are now: a world where Dan Rather can make Times New Roman printed pages and act like it was historical documents, Journolist can induce "epistemic closure" amongst hundreds of journalists, and where an entire social class can feel empowered to shut down speech of which they are critical. (The publication that broke the Journolist scandal was founded by someone who is now quite famous, and it mirrors the reaction indicated in the article.) Narrative, a euphemism for agenda, is the core distinction driving this conflict. It is also deeply imbued in the soft postmodernist philosophy encountered by the (well-off) journalist and tech class now in power. Until narrative goes, the brief period of respect for facts will not recover, and we'll have the norm that has been American press for most time: yellow journalism.

26 points by mellosouls 5y ago

This is a good analysis. I’m often looking for something like this to help back my own intuition. Everyone sees the problem of media bias but it’s hard to define in more tangible terms. I appreciate the side by side of WSJ and NYT articles on the Canadian Truck Drivers - shows how subtle differences in reporting the same event skew left or right. One way I’ve seen it couched is that the liberals have always owned the cultural high ground by having a preponderance of left-leaning, highly educated individuals in the ranks of the news media and in Hollywood - and that Fox News, Limbaugh, Bongino are an aggressive response to that. When I talk to my own family members who skew right they talk pretty negatively about the media in general and particularly the NYT or WaPo - but they know and trust me. So I try to explain that many of the folks who work at these places are very similar to me (education, background, thinking) - and that they shouldn’t wholesale discount whatever they publish.

PathOfEclipse 5y ago
I consider myself well-educated and have no respect for either the Washington Post or the New York Times. I don't ever wholesale discount what they publish, but I also don't trust anything they put out, especially if it shows a left-leaning bias in any way. I also do not rely on them for news; I get my news from other sources I trust more. From: https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/bari-weiss-on-why-she-left-the-new-york-times/ https://nypost.com/2020/07/14/bari-weiss-on-why-she-left-the... "What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets. Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it." I should note that I probably disagree with Bari on most political issues, but she seems to have the intellectual honesty to notice corruption and also the courage to refuse to give into it.
- fortuna86 5y ago
  You don't trust the NYT or Washington Post, but link to literal tabloids interviewing outrage grifters and right wing blogs? Surely cognitive dissonance only goes so far.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Educated, thinking people can work very well for propaganda outlets. Most mainstream media sources are now just that.
jsnk 5y ago
> and that they shouldn’t wholesale discount whatever they publish. This was my previous position, but in recent years, I wouldn't recommend this anymore. I believe that in the past at some point, there was a time when these mainstream media were more right than wrong, and more useful than useless if not harmful. If you are an academic or someone who has time or interest to discern what mainstream media says is right or wrong, by all means, use them. But for average people, these mainstream media being sources of information doesn't pass usefulness or correctness than any other sources of information.

fullshark 5y ago

Agree with the broad strokes here, but the fact is everyday people who consume news, as in every day they want to know what is happening politically largely don't want unbiased information. They want biased information, and that is what have learned in the internet age as you can see exactly what stories people read and click on. They hunger for confirmation bias cause it strengthens their way of making sense of the world and that gives them strength in their day to day life and decision making. They don't want to be challenged.

ssss11 5y ago
Is there any research paper to back up this claim? It could simply be that sensationalist headlines get people’s attention. As one data point I certainly don’t want biased information I’d prefer facts, including those that contradict my current worldview, so that I may be better informed. I see your point, and I do sometimes see people unwilling to be challenged in life, I just don’t think you can draw a conclusion that people want biased information from the media.
brnaftr361 5y ago
Imagine you're arguing with a child, "I don't want to!" says they, and you respond "Why not?", what answer comes next? "I don't like it!", perhaps "Because." I think there's a long chain of conditioning that we undergo, and I think it presses people into a genuinely inhumane sense that rationality must be prioritized, that you have to justify everything with some rational argument. The thing is we're human, and there's sort of two sides to every truth[0]. And there's autonomy, viewpoint, personal ethics, emotions, and all sorts of confounding processes that go on that simply can't be explained, but the conditioning compels one to explain it anyways, thus we seek confirmation, without regard for truth. To some extent I think that's what feeds the "misinformation" and "disinformation" markets. Society makes little room for the abstract man, society needs exact predictable units for its theories to function in practice. No free radicals. [0]Quashing infant mortality appears to be good, but there's the argument that it has effectively manufactured population booms in societies that aren't organized for the mass of people, viola, you've got a developing world population that suffers extremes of poverty on a totally unprecedented scale. But that latter argument would probably be discounted, right? It's a little indirect, correlation rather than causative, it presses certain intractable things like the concept of suffering, economic wellbeing, comparitive analysis with historical human condition shit...

inopinatus 5y ago

The real telling facet here is the implied, but deeply parochial conviction, that left-wing means Democrat and right-wing means Republican. They’re actually both right-wing by global standards, and the distinction looks from the outside like a pissing contest into only one side of the pool. Furthermore the binary status quo appears as manufactured tribalism to keep the American masses busy with minute shades of policy difference. The continuing appearance of articles like this on “Hacker News” indicates not just the large US readership, nor even the confluence of media and technology (something politicians have understood for millenia), but also that even a group skewing thoughtful and analytical can be hijacked by memetic engineering.

jevoten 5y ago
> They’re actually both right-wing by global standards Depends entirely on the issue. On foreign wars, tax policy, or gutting the social safety net, they're both right-wing. On immigration, they're left or extreme left - the Republican party, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, continues the current record-high levels of legal immigration, while the Democratic party doesn't want to enforce any immigration law, and is even giving non-citizens the vote: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/noncitizen-voting-rights-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/23/nyregion/noncitizen-votin...
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  Neither party supports open borders last I checked. > the Republican party, despite any rhetoric to the contrary, continues the current record-high levels of legal immigration What about those murderous caravans from South America Fox News keeps telling us about every time we have an election? GOPs paving the road for those? > while the Democratic party doesn't want to enforce any immigration law, and is even giving non-citizens the vote This is completely false. Democrats are enforcing immigration laws, for better or worse. They're just not doing it as inhumanely as Trump was. And New York City is not the Democratic Party.
  - jevoten 5y ago

brnaftr361 5y ago

This left/right dichotomy has always been broken. How about a teleological spectrum assessment? I have beliefs that lie at the extremes of both ends, I've never been represented by either progressives or conservatives. It's such an obscenity that such polar thinking has persisted for so long. And especially considering the wide gamut of controversies we're capable of undertaking with the complications that science, economics, and the embrace of moral relativism on all scales has introduced into the organizational weave of our society, and the implications that the US has on the globe as the de facto world sovereign. At an individual level we're all morally culpable for the wrongs our society commits, and the first step to engaging that is allowing people to give meaning to politics to reawaken political consciousness, and the way to do it is to give people a higher degree of autonomy over their environment, and attribute them with the responsibility of determining the direction we had ought to take. Another gripe I have is academia. You ship the bulk of "educated" people from one institution to the next, and they're wholly clueless as to how the world actually works when they finally get out, but they have all the pretensions that they've got a clue. My friend, a Pharm.D., chatting about business exposed his naivety to me and another friend, whinging about how some minutiae got its corners cut, and general incompetence. This is stuff me and my partner had been exposed to since we exited high school. Whats worse is this pattern is almost certainly occurring inside the institutions themselves, where kids never having been met with the real world are shoehorned through programs and eventually given license to teach. It comes to mind that a large proportion of these people are living inside a bubble where theory is practice. Yes, it's a generalization, but from my own first-hand I think it does possess a kernel of truth.

abernard1 5y ago

I will put this opinion here, as my political affiliation can best be described as "Mean Tweets Nostalgia." For two decades, the complaint from "the right" has not been media bias, but media agenda. This terminology has been widespread in circles that most here would never have considered, and I believe it is telling this distinction is not made in the article. There is a distinct difference between even editorializing vs reporting and that of media control of "narrative," a term anyone who has a liberal arts degree knows is something distinct from the idyllic "just the facts" view of journalism. Post-Woodward & Bernstein and the mythos surrounding that event, the journalistic class took it upon themselves to be agents of social change. This idea that neutrality shouldn't be approached, and that journalism as a class were supposed to be agents of change, created the forcing function for the rise of Fox News in the first place. And that's where we are now: a world where Dan Rather can make Times New Roman printed pages and act like it was historical documents, Journolist can induce "epistemic closure" amongst hundreds of journalists, and where an entire social class can feel empowered to shut down speech of which they are critical. (The publication that broke the Journolist scandal was founded by someone who is now quite famous, and it mirrors the reaction indicated in the article.) Narrative, a euphemism for agenda, is the core distinction driving this conflict. It is also deeply imbued in the soft postmodernist philosophy encountered by the (well-off) journalist and tech class now in power. Until narrative goes, the brief period of respect for facts will not recover, and we'll have the norm that has been American press for most time: yellow journalism.