[ctrlalt_g]

It caught me by surprise the other day to learn about this. It's not just Twitter and Reddit and Facebook. It's also college campuses and public events, and weird unexpected places like public radio (Planet Money, I think, or Freakonomics. I can't remember which). It's made me question my political loyalties.

[broodbucket]

Personally, it's swung me from the left to the center. I never thought the left would be the ones censoring and controlling speech.

[WalterBright]

> I never thought the left would be the ones censoring and controlling speech.

The old Soviet Union was infamous for pervasive censorship.

[MichaelGG]

In the US anyways, I had always associated "the left" with equality values, the side of science, truth, sanity. Pro civil rights. Etc. I have no love for conservative values (oppression of marriages, religion, etc.) But online I see so much censoring of things the left doesn't like. Not even arguments, just screaming racist/bigot/etc. Look at those protests: it's just people screaming slogans and yelling down anyone that talks. (Like that famous Bernie rally where people got on stage and said they'd shut him down if they weren't given the mic right now.)

So I don't bring it up as much - some folks get really upset when I do. And it's always the same. "He's racist! He's an idiot!" If I lived in a liberal/urban area I think it'd be very hard to have friends if I let my views known. I bet there's tons of people like this and it's gonna be a big shock when the votes come in.

[WalterBright]

> I had always associated "the left" with equality values, the side of science, truth, sanity. Pro civil rights.

Those are core libertarian values, too. Where the left differs from libertarians, though, is the left does not value property rights and tends to believe in centralized economic planning, price fixing, etc.

[tomp]

It's not fair to compare the democratic left with the autocratic communist movements, just as it's unfair to compare the democratic right with autocratic nazist/fascist movements.

[internaut]

The bias of NPR is as obvious as Fox news. And I really like many NPR programs. Radiolab is another classic example.

If you cannot detect it, then you've fallen for it. With Fox News it's presented directly, like a minister in a church giving a sermon. With others the One True Way is presented indirectly and this is harder to recognize at first. That's one reason why older people are more conservative, you need a certain amount of crystallized knowledge to see it.

How bias at NPR and Radiolab works is that they selectively leave out facts that won't contribute to the narrative they are trying to construct.

This is partially based in politics but it is then exaggerated because of the medium they are working with which it harks back to the old radio broadcasting system i.e. uni-directional. There's not a lot of "What about X?" going on outside of the company, so if your firm has a monoculture that is going to be expressed in your product. The questions asked are purely rhetorical because they also provide the answers. This can make you sound very sophisticated to the novice but dumb as rocks to an insider.

For a practical example of worldshaping views, consider doing an macroeconomics program without any reference to the critiques of the Austrian school. Now consider doing a similar program using materials exclusively from people like Hayek and Mises. Or having a entire discussion about global warming and alternative energy while pretending nuclear energy doesn't exist, something my country has done successfully for decades.

Right wing propaganda makes you biased beyond rationality and left wing propaganda makes you ignorant but superficially confident. Both groups believe they have the right model of the world. Sometimes they're even right.

The right wing often pattern match too much e.g. Blacks are bad because they kill whites at a higher rate than in reverse. It goes unmentioned that of course men also kill women at a much higher rate than in reverse, but that doesn't make the character of men intrinsically bad. Getting rid of all the men wouldn't really help any. A statistic is a single number and the world is stuffed with complicated correlations.

The left wing don't believe in patterns at all. Every day is full of random surprises totally unconnected to the previous day. You see that in the present with Orlando's terrorist attack. This was ludicrous to see. I felt like the reporters on the BBC were presenting information about an Act of God like a freak lighting strike.

If the school shootings which periodically occur in the US were secretly all connected to some special organization, I think that would be pretty interesting information.

Once you spot the mechanism of bias, the selectivity of their attention, then it is easy to see that both the left and right have relatively simplistic models of the world. They're not wrong. They're just models.

[ctrlalt_g]

The bias isn't the surprise. I'd like to think that the core NPR demographic understands that every narrative has a bias. The surprise is that the mainstream left is exhibiting behavior previously associated with the far-right.