4 ms·

A bit of a tangent, but since we're discussing NPR... I remember a while back (maybe 10 years?) NPR spent some airtime trying to address head-on their alleged

A bit of a tangent, but since we're discussing NPR... I remember a while back (maybe 10 years?) NPR spent some airtime trying to address head-on their alleged liberal bias. I respect that, I think their effort was sincere. What left me frustrated, though, was they never addressed what I saw as their main vector of bias: they seemed to broadcast many more interviews with people unhappy about conservative policies, than people happy with conservative policies. E.g., illegal immigration was a hot topic at the time. NPR provided a lot of sympathetic interviews with illegal immigrants, both adults and children. I don't think I heard even one NPR interview with individuals in other groups, e.g. construction companies that get out-bid by competitors who pay illegal immigrants under the table, or would-be immigrants who are awaiting their turn to legally enter the U.S. Again, I don't doubt the integrity of Bob Edwards and other NPR staff who tackled that project. But I think it shows how hard it can be for liberals to accurately understand conservative perspectives.

origin_path 4y ago
IIRC there is some research in psychology that seems to prove this. It involves a questionnaire about political topics in which you take a representative sample of people on the left and right, then split that population into quarters. One half is told to answer the questions truthfully, as they believe. The other half is told to answer in the way they think someone with the opposite politics to themselves would answer. The results are then compared. The findings are apparently always the same when this is done: conservatives pretending to be left wingers give answers much closer to the real left wingers than vice-versa. That is, the right understands the left but the left doesn't understand the right. It's been some years since I read about this but iirc the failure mode was that the left imagined people on the right as having far more extreme views than they really do, amongst other problems. W.R.T. the construction companies - see my comment elsewhere in this thread about the quote-sourcing feedback loop. Not so many companies are willing to talk to journalists about illegal immigration, because they know journalists are left-biased and because it'd realistically have to be the CEO doing it, and he/she is busy. That in turn means journalists don't hear alternative perspectives, causing them to become more biased, and repeat.
- boppo1 4y ago
  Wish I could find that research.
- dgeiser13 4y ago
  Citation please. This sounds like some completely fabricated bullshit.
- grzm 4y ago
  Here's a reference to a reference that you might be referring to (a passage from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind referring to a study by Graham, Haidt, and Nosek) https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... > "In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?" I believe this passage refers to work done Study 2 in "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations" https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhaidt/articles/graham.haidt.nosek.2009.liberals-and-conservatives.pub064.pdf https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhaidt/articles/graham.haidt.no... In my brief reading of the paper, it's not clear to me whether they've reporting their findings on the understanding aspect, though the materials section for Study 2 sounds like the situation described. (They may have, I just haven't read it closely.) > "As with relevance items, there were three versions of the moral judgment items—answered as oneself, as a typical liberal, or as a typical conservative. For both types of items, only results for the self versions are reported here."
tootie 4y ago
"JOURNALISM 101 RULE: If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true."
- CoastalCoder 4y ago
  I don't understand why that would apply here. Mind connecting the dots for me?

origin_path 4y ago

IIRC there is some research in psychology that seems to prove this. It involves a questionnaire about political topics in which you take a representative sample of people on the left and right, then split that population into quarters. One half is told to answer the questions truthfully, as they believe. The other half is told to answer in the way they think someone with the opposite politics to themselves would answer. The results are then compared. The findings are apparently always the same when this is done: conservatives pretending to be left wingers give answers much closer to the real left wingers than vice-versa. That is, the right understands the left but the left doesn't understand the right. It's been some years since I read about this but iirc the failure mode was that the left imagined people on the right as having far more extreme views than they really do, amongst other problems. W.R.T. the construction companies - see my comment elsewhere in this thread about the quote-sourcing feedback loop. Not so many companies are willing to talk to journalists about illegal immigration, because they know journalists are left-biased and because it'd realistically have to be the CEO doing it, and he/she is busy. That in turn means journalists don't hear alternative perspectives, causing them to become more biased, and repeat.

boppo1 4y ago
Wish I could find that research.
dgeiser13 4y ago
Citation please. This sounds like some completely fabricated bullshit.
grzm 4y ago
Here's a reference to a reference that you might be referring to (a passage from Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind referring to a study by Graham, Haidt, and Nosek) https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conservatives-understand-liberals-better-than-liberals-understand-conservatives/ https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/conserva... > "In a study I did with Jesse Graham and Brian Nosek, we tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Qyestionnaire. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out normally, answering as themselves. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a “typical liberal” would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a “typical conservative” would respond. This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing people’s expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and the right)’ Who was best able to pretend to be the other?" I believe this passage refers to work done Study 2 in "Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations" https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhaidt/articles/graham.haidt.nosek.2009.liberals-and-conservatives.pub064.pdf https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~jhaidt/articles/graham.haidt.no... In my brief reading of the paper, it's not clear to me whether they've reporting their findings on the understanding aspect, though the materials section for Study 2 sounds like the situation described. (They may have, I just haven't read it closely.) > "As with relevance items, there were three versions of the moral judgment items—answered as oneself, as a typical liberal, or as a typical conservative. For both types of items, only results for the self versions are reported here."

tootie 4y ago

"JOURNALISM 101 RULE: If someone says it’s raining, and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the fucking window and find out which is true."

CoastalCoder 4y ago
I don't understand why that would apply here. Mind connecting the dots for me?