> our opinions should be formed from a careful examination of arguments and evidence on each side of the issue, reading from only one perspective is akin to not reading at all
The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings. On some issues it can be extremely difficult to find good faith arguments and evidence on each side of the issue.
For me personally, I'm not going to waste my time attempting to ingest all of the bad faith arguments out there just for the sake of seeking varied perspectives. If you have a claim, persuade me with logic and evidence, not with fear mongoring and throwing straw men down slippery slopes.
As it turns out, almost nobody actually wants a good faith argument. Public people that routinely engage in good faith arguments, with carefully considering opposing viewpoints, scrupulously and honestly analyzing evidence and making conclusion based on the strength of the argument presented - are routinely attacked for being harmful to whatever cause the activists prefer, not seeing the larger point, enabling the $BAD_GUYS, playing into the hands of $MORE_BAD_GUYS, being motivated by $ISM and $PHOBIA, and get whole online communities organized with a sole purpose of bringing them down, deplatforming them, de-employing them and generally getting them to stop what they are doing.
OTOH, the bad faith arguers are getting praise in the media, adoration from their peers, popularity, well-paid speaking opportunities, pompous awards and get their bad argument - which is usually much simpler and palatable than a good one - endlessly repeated and praised. Sometimes even taught to large groups of people as the paradigm they have to conform to from now on.
This. The "other side"'s bad faith arguments are often times so outrageous and patently wrong that even "your side" participates in spreading them and amplifying them by pointing fingers at them. It's like one side has the moral obligation to "keep watch" on the other side and keep finding arguments to remind people that the other side is dangerous and cannot be left unchecked in spreading these lies.
Stop promoting bad faith arguers, even if you agree with the conclusion? Stop mobbing people for "enabling" $BAD_GUYS and start praising people for catching and dismantling bad arguments even if the argument served the cause which you agree with? I am not seeing this happening much though, it'd require saint-level commitment to the quality of argument which probably not many are capable of and not many would consider a good thing to do.
> The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings
This highlights both a problem an opportunity. How many people know how to make a good argument or how to spot one? How many know what good evidence looks like or how to spot beliefs and assumptions making their way into something?
I would argue that many don't know how to spot or make a good argument. That they can't spot assumptions or what make for good evidence. People are taught something very different and it shows.
I absolutely agree. I have been tempted to buy the logical fallacies and critical thinking posters from The Thinking Shop[1] as gifts for certain family members, but I know too much of my motivation comes from the self-centered position of wanting to prove I'm right, which I didn't want to perpetuate.
Instead I just read through the posters and ended up recognizing several items I probably need to work on myself. The cognitive biases are especially tricky, and it seems the more we learn about neuroscience the more reasons we have to distrust our own thinking!
These are nice but I find the message "thou shalt not suffer cognitive biases" a bit off base - as you very well will suffer from them. It's like saying "you shalt not think of a white monkey" - and you will. The goal should be not to make people feel bad for failing yet again to be free of biases - the goal is to learn to detect them and work around them. You cannot make people fly by flapping their hands - but you can build tools that let people fly while they are sitting comfortably in their chairs. There should also be tools and processes built that allow even biased people to arrive to a correct conclusion, without demanding the impossible from them.
There are twenty four logical fallacies listed there...
twenty four
Genuine question: how does one keep 24 logical fallacies in mind when evaluating arguments? Do you mentally iterate through all these fallacies?
Don't get me wrong: they are very valid and I think they will make me better and my arguments better. I just want to understand how people without photographic memories do this.
Learn them one at a time, in such a way as you start seeing the pattern. Human brains are great pattern recognition machines, which is also where the errors come in. That’s okay: you want both zones to fire, so the cognitive dissonance forces you to consciously think about a potential fallacy.
You don't have to do this. Instead of memorizing fallicies, you can approximate the quality of nearly all arguments to two theory-of-truth claims:
1. The premises are themselves valid: you buy that they are truthful.
2. The argument's logic coheres: when added to your existing beliefs there is no contradiction.
Fallicies manifest through violations of these claims. But you don't have to know the name of that violation to raise a complaint: you can derive it on the spot. Discussing these fallicies mostly acts as a practice tool, and provides a useful bit of jargon if you are writing philosophy and need to convey the idea quickly. But most arguments in online spaces are dismissed with: "the premise is invalid" or "the reasoning is incoherent."
Find good examples that are easy to understand and absurd enough to stick in your head. For example (ha) the fallacy of composition Wikipedia page has a good one[0]:
> "This tire is made of rubber, therefore the vehicle of which it is a part is also made of rubber."
The fallacy of division page[1] also has a good one:
> 1. The second grade in Jefferson elementary eats a lot of ice cream
> 2. Carlos is a second-grader in Jefferson elementary
> 3. Therefore, Carlos eats a lot of ice cream
You can also categorise large numbers of common fallacies, for instance fallacies of relevance, and then - which is the larger point about fallacies - you don't need to know which exact fallacy someone has committed (they don't care, for one) but you know it's fallacious because what their argument relies upon is irrelevant.
You don't keep them in mind. You build processes and algorithms and habits to avoid them. When you learn to ride a bike or play baseball, you don't learn the laws of physics that govern the flight of the ball or the ride on the bike in detail - though basic awareness of gravity and such surely helps. You learn the process that gets you to the goal. Unfortunately, we're way behind on such processes, compared to baseball.
Note that I took care to point out that I didn’t believe it was not useful but had trouble with applying them personally. I am not asserting that they’re not useful.
> How many people know how to make a good argument or how to spot one?
Even if you could spot "good" arguments that really isn't enough without knowing that it's also made in good faith. If the person making an argument doesn't actually believe what they're saying, is arguing with a particular outcome, or is arguing with an ulterior motive like flame-bait then you also shouldn't bother engaging them even if it's well-formed.
I would take a bad argument made in good faith every time over the reverse. People who speak genuinely but are passionate, emotional, or aren't the best at expressing themselves can have productive conversations. Someone who's arguing to win isn't worth your time.
How would you know whether someone is making a good faith argument? Without some outward signifier like a cartoon character for an online avatar, which even then wouldn't provide any measure of certainty, it would require mind reading.
> People who speak genuinely but are passionate, emotional, or aren't the best at expressing themselves can have productive conversations. Someone who's arguing to win isn't worth your time.
If you want to get along in some kind of shallow fashion then the former are better, if you want to find truth or open your mind to possibilities then the latter will outstrip the former by a long way. Both are needed in life but to dismiss either as stupid or bad intentioned seems a stretch.
If an argument is bad faith but right, doesn't that still make it right?
Perhaps what you object to is being dragged into some messy going-in-circles argument. Those are frustrating but they happen because the good-faith participant tolerates some of the logical fallacies and false information presented by the bad-faith one.
People have a powerful force driving them to argue for the thing they believe in so it makes sense to tap into that force to generate high quality arguments. If everyone was kind of passive and willing to accept whatever seems obviously right, we wouldn't push any boundaries. Being kind of passive can happen if you're not emotionally invested in your argument.
I found the position of preferring a poorly formed, good faith argument weird at first but I've come to like it, given we are talking about material world, practical problems (of any scale).
Ultimately, most of our arguments are about solving problems (or pursuing opportunities). Most problems worth arguing at length require collaboration to solve.
I would rather discuss problems and their solutions, and hash out disagreements, with someone who is likely to be a true partner in the implementation of the solution.
Bad faith vs good faith can then be inferred by track records or commitments, same as you would for anything else.
One would assume that such a skill should be a requirement to be a part of the profession of journalism. Presupposing, of course, that the goal of journalism is to inform. Don't hire people who aren't qualified.
> The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings. On some issues it can be extremely difficult to find good faith arguments and evidence on each side of the issue.
"Good faith", "bad faith" labeling is not logical, it's more of an attempt to apply morality and ideology to reasoning to reject something based on your own preferred beliefs and feelings. Similarly illogical is evaluating evidence "from each side", this is not how to evaluate anything, there needs to be some base rate to compare the evidence to and all the evidence has to be compared, not just something cherry picked from each side, and not just evidence, known unknowns and unknown unknowns have to be considered too, and so on. It's way more complicated than people want it to be.
And it's very hard to have good logical arguments not full of fallacies. You will certainly never see them in mass media, as mass media needs to influence your opinion, not provide background for making a good decision.
Daniel Kahneman in his Thinking fast and slow book wrote plenty on reasoning, check it out if you haven't, it'll open your eyes on reasoning (I know the book had some crucial things wrong for his theory, but a lot of things throughout the book are still ok).
There is such a thing as bad faith argument. There is such a thing as lying or manipulating truth so that it sounds like a lie. There is such a thing as throwing as much mud as you can waiting for something to stick.
There are fallacies and mistakes too, sure. There are differences of opinion. But, there is also such a thing as person standing confidently in front of camera making claims or insinuations that person knows are false.
There are bad faith arguments, but there are also people who label any argument that they don't want to or can't deal with as 'bad faith', so... yeah. At some point we can't avoid the fact that people are human and tend to seize upon things they agree with.
I suspect you're talking about individuals while the TS is talking about the press. Press outlets will certainly make bad faith arguments to get ratings. For example by twisting someone's words into the most outrage-provoking interpretation possible. Even if they personally feel that the politician probably just misspoke or meant something benign or whatever.
As for private individuals, like posters arguing on the internet, yes they probably tend to believe what they say in the moment. A big problem there, perhaps ironically, is people assuming bad faith about each other.
As I read this, I think what the author is saying is that today's media is more about creating "Narratives" rather than communicating "Information."
My Grandfather, who was an attorney, shared with me that attorneys cut apart narratives with evidence to get to the truth. If all of the evidence is available, the only surviving narrative is most likely the truest representation of an event.
At the time, I didn't appreciate what he meant by that, these days however it seems "obvious" to me. When you are reading a story that says something is now "twice as likely" but doesn't tell you how likely it was before and how likely it is now, that is a missing piece of information that would help you evaluate the overall presentation. That it is missing, may be an indication that the presentation is less compelling if it were present. And it is that which changes something from "information" to a "narrative" in my opinion.
One used to be able to read multiple sources, which is touted these days as "meta journalism", in order to pull the evidence from a number of different narratives in order to arrive at something closer to the truth, but with the consolidation of media that becomes harder to do.
A huge part of narrative building is story selection. If there are groups A, B, C all of which do good and bad stuff to each other, media will create a narrative by highlighting again and again bad things that A does to B, leaving out the good things, leaving out what B does, and leaving out C entirely.
It depends on what kind of media sources you're looking at.
Long form media (like the New Yorker) are generally better at being somewhat exhaustive with their sources. Newspapers...are almost entirely narrative driven but do include the factual description of at least one event around which the stories are based. "Instant" media (e.g. Twitter, TikTok) is even more extreme in being narrative driven.
Because of the time commitment involved in consumption, I suspect that long form journalism won't ever get the audience that other types of media gets.
I quite disagree. Long form media tend to be just very long narratives. Newspapers are narrative wrapped around a single factual event, to fit that event into a preferred narrative.
Tweets can be narrative driven, but sometimes they’re centered around some primary source document or chart or something like that, and in that case they can be far more useful than a newspaper article.
My view these days is give me the primary sources or GTFO. For example, I don’t trust you to tell me what’s in a court filing—the first thing in your article better be a link to the filing itself and you had better actually quote the source material.
Suppose that the media reported on only one issue: the progress of the sun across the sky. Every day, they would report that it rose (in the east), grew higher in the sky, and eventually set (in the west). Periodically there would be analysis pieces that took a longer view, and noted how when the weather was warmer, the sun rose to a higher position in the sky, and that when it was colder, the rise point was a little more to the south.
After a year or two of this, by the metrics of TFA, this coverage would contain essentially zero information (at least for anyone who had followed said coverage for a while).
And yet ... every single part of it would be true, and there would be no other "sides" to consider. For most humans, the knowledge that the sun behaves in this way is of some importance, though less so in a modern industrialized society.
So ... the question is not about how much information there is "today's media". It's about whether or not what the media contains is true and whether or not it is important (which might often be synonym for "useful").
And yet every day, thousands of people reach an age where they start to follow "the news", and may read, for the first time, of the miracle of the sun's journey across the sky.
That's true of 24-hour news, sure. Theu have to fill air time. But most people don't consider that format to be real journalism.
Is there an example of a story on mainstream news sites that was covered without new info? I'm curious to see an example or two, which should be easy to find if it's really happening with most subjects.
> Is there an example of a story on mainstream news sites that was covered without new info?
In this thread, you and I have brought up a couple of points. I highlighted the tendency of prominent news orgs to choose their headline articles from one small stack of stories. That should be self-evident unless you rarely see different news sites with related headlines - which would be really odd.
You asked about news stories that don't add any content, which is a somewhat different issue. For that I offer news orgs parroting biz/gov/LEO press releases - without vetting for accuracy or without supplying relevant historical context. Though that's a particularly pervasive problem in local & state news, major news orgs tend to do it whenever they get in front of federal LEO/IC officials (eg: James Comey + "Going Dark").
One final example that fits both points is news sites republishing Reuters/AP/UPI articles verbatim.
It seems clear to me that the problem lies, at least in large part, with our business model. If you write a thought-provoking article that people read, reflect on, think back on numerous times during the next few weeks, etc. it does not get you as much money as if you write five clickbait articles a day.
If we were paying people based on the articles they write, that we read, which a week later we were still glad we read, the emphasis would be very different.
Business model may favor such a behavior but in my opinion its ethics should be considered as well.
For example, many cars generate some air pollution. But there are some, typically more expensive ones, which produce less or no air pollution.
It may be economically beneficial to simply buy the cheapest one. But some people choose the less polluting cars anyway, perhaps also because they incorporate ethics into their decisions.
I believe that it is very beneficial to the society as a whole that there are people who are willing to make ethically correct decisions even if they would not bring them any immediate personal advantage.
The reason is that such a behavior motivates people to look beyond their own interests. It may steer the society towards a better state thanks to appreciating values that have been underestimated before.
Sure, I try to buy organic foods, I try to recycle, etc. But, if the incentives are aligned in the wrong way, then the overall trend of society will head the wrong way.
Which is, sure, not a reason to not try your best within the existing system. But exhortations will only get you so far. We tell people not to steal, but we also have police, burglar alarms, doors that lock, etc. because we know appeals to people's better nature is not enough.
This post doesn't quite do it for me. There is indeed a huge amount of low quality and low information news content going around. However, to me, the issue is not the lack of novel or high quality articles around a single topic or set of topics, as the bell curve bit seems to imply.
For one, frequency bias is real, and people aren't able to dig deep into every single issue they read about online. There's just too much of it. They read snippets and headlines, and cobble together responses from peers or sources they trust to build up their view. As time goes on, one might look into a given topic more and become more well informed. Ideology forms around the responses and ideology informs the responses. Just look at how the disinformation campaigns in 2016 went. The absolute volume of headlines and memes meant that you couldn't refute them one by one. But if you consumed all of them at face value, they created a coherent narrative in many peoples' heads.
And the other point that others have brought up in this thread is bad faith discussions. There's really no point engaging with these other than to rudely and flippantly shut them down. If they get you to respond seriously, you've already lost. They're not playing the same game as you.
Combining these points, I'm not as convinced nowadays that variation in viewpoints in what is needed. Transparency and accurate reporting, certainly, but not a wide variety of takes through some worldview or lens. The reporting from the BLM protests this summer is a good example. Video evidence of police brutalizing protesters and news reporters cut through a lot of the noise and made things clear. It's one thing to go back and forth arguing about numbers and policy, and another to view something, see that it is not what you want our society to look like, and work on actions to take starting with that as a basis.
> cobble together responses from peers or sources they trust to build up their view.
A demoralizing moment was when I realized that I have a decent resistance to BS stories and advertising, but then I'll trust the opinions of friends and "convention wisdom" ... who formed their opinions based on BS stories and advertising.
> Video evidence of police brutalizing protesters and news reporters cut through a lot of the noise and made things clear.
And sometimes they are edited to make the perpetrator look the victim, giving a clear but wrong view.
Love the approach of looking at media through the lens of information theory.
A main point seems to be that free media is important.
It’s interesting to consider that the existence of google/craigslist/facebook destroyed the means by which the media used to fund their own existence and hire competent people with a high salary (now these people work in other areas of the economy and are compensated for their communication skills).
In an economy like this, we have no functioning media, therefore democracy is at risk.
It seems like an abuse of the concept of "degree of surprise".
An article produced by a totalitarian state could contain a lot of "surprising information", in an information theoretic sense - if it described surprising wardrobe choices and surprising choices of meals by the fearless leader. Vacuous tabloids describe the surprising antics of the more mentally unbalanced celebrities but also don't challenge our world view. And made-up stuff like QAnon is partly surprise driven.
Also, the biggest hit to conventional media has been craigslist - print media never was primarily funded by subscriptions but always made most of it's money with advertising.
I think many people don't really accept that there can be evidence on both sides of an issue. Once there's a critical mass of evidence on one side, each subsequent piece of evidence on the other side is kinda suspect and can be defeated by simple majority. It's a wrong way to think, but I'm sure my thinking on many issues is also like that.
I think don't there's automatically evidence on "both sides" of a issue. I don't issues actually tend to have just two sides. For a given issue or situation, there can be one, two, five or ten plausible models.
The worst thing about having roughly two very polarized ideologies constantly visible in society is that the slightly more clever people wind-up expecting that "the truth is somewhere in the middle". In a given case, there's no reason to think that.
Its not just with evidence its more broadly that many people think the majority has to be right. Which gets worse when the majority actually assumes that. Its then enough to just assume that a majority opinion exists to actually create one. That leads to the "first" or the "loudest" opinion to become the majority opinion without even consider any evidences.
You realize that the majority is often wrong every time you really really know stuff about something.
I don't understand why news sites do not add references and footnotes to their articles. I have been working on an idea for a site that makes "mind maps" of a graph of facts inside of news articles to show how conclusions are reached. However, I think the average person's critical reasoning skills would not appreciate this and just believe what they want to hear.
There are outlets that do that, but they tend to be trade journals. Simple example: legal cases. Lots of outlets report on them, but mainstream news almost never cites the case numbers and only sometimes links to source material (indictments etc.). Specialist legal websites usually do, but they have more limited reach, can't cover everything, and tend to focus on cases that are legally interesting because they might establish or overturn a precedent. So they're not great for covering crime news where many cases turn on the facts rather than legalities. On the flip side, mainstream news reports often do a terrible job of reporting the details of a case, some just rewriting prosecutors' press releases.
I think trying to come up with semantic mind maps in articles is likely to limit your audience as it's an abstract critical process that's subject to accusations of, er, subjectivity. On the other hand, a service that reliably led people to improperly cited source material would have value; examples like criminal indictments as described above, or local coverage of events that is then taken up and rewritten (often without attribution or backlinks) by larger outlets.
This could solve local news outlets' revenue problem too. I hate following up a story that goes to a small newspaper in Nowheresville which then asks for a subscription; I'm unlikely to consult that paper for anything else in the foreseeable future. but it's not fair to the Nowheresville Times if Big City News rewrites their content without attribution. If BCN articles about events in Nowheresville were flagged as mere rewrites of NT content, the latter publisher would be able to make a strong argument for pass-through revenue to flow their way.
I believe the word you're looking for is bibliography. If so, then I would love for all people that hold the title journalist or reporter to start including one. Use it for every statement. Will it slow down time to print? Sure. But factual accuracy and provability are worth enough that I would pay such a news source.
Journalists have sources. They name sources. They avoid linking to sources because sources are their competition for attention and ad/subscription revenue.
It's the same reason shops don't link to their competitors' or wholesalers' websites
>It's the same reason shops don't link to their competitors' or wholesalers' websites
Hardly. That's competition.
On the other hand your journalists are falling hard on using unnamed sources and tweets. What about back story, recent history, historically relevant information? Most articles are virtually all filler, no references, a quote, no context, no history.
I would've liked to see this quality of journalism regarding the recent election fraud allegations. With some exceptions the most common style has been to dismiss it as bad faith and cite election authorities who say there's insufficient evidence.
While I agree, it would've been much more illuminating, persuasive, engaging and educational to do a deep dive into the substance of the claims and show why they're likely incorrect. This is really the best way to assuage belief in related conspiracy theories too. We would learn both why the allegations are false and learn about how these false beliefs start and spread. Combine academic rigor (without its stifling formality) with the distribution of journalism. Be less verbose and more numerate and logical. Many bloggers do this but it's missing from the majority of mainstream journalistic outlets.
I somehow think the business model will preclude this though. They're providing outrage entertainment for the masses. Not everyone is a balanced individual with 130 IQ seeking detail and illumination.
I agree with you strongly. I’m a lawyer and I still don’t really understand why Trump’s cases are so weak, because I haven’t had time to read most of the decisions. I assume it’s true, but the news coverage has been totally unilluminating.
>My assertion, paradoxically, is that polarization has greatly diminished the quantity of information being produced and consumed via today's press despite the sea of content they produce.
Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.
Noam Chomsky
I agree with Chomsky here.
>In today's polarized media, each side of the media discourse has established its perspective, and the content they publish conforms to this perspective.
"Each side" is very interesting. The sentence is far more accurate when you remove "each side" The US media is tremendously uniform. There is no side here.
This level of uniformity cannot come about naturally.
>"A free press is one of the pillars of democracy." - Nelson Mandela
The interesting thing, people have started to realize how bullshit journalism has become. Suddenly big tech is going ham with censorship basically implementing the same uniformity.
As we can see, there's no free press. There will be many who will try to justify why there's no free press.
I haven't seen that before thanks. I believe what it's showing is why echo chambers form or for that matter why people of similar nationality tend to live in the same neighbourhoods.
Not necessarily that all the major news agencies all push the same story and never question or challenge anything. Or for that matter only challenge the reverse.
That sounds like a prognosis for a bygone era. There is nothing "uniform" about the news provided by MSNBC and OANN. Though I imagine that what we have now is not the kind of diversity of thought that Chomsky was hoping for.
>That sounds like a prognosis for a bygone era. There is nothing "uniform" about the news provided by MSNBC and OANN. Though I imagine that what we have now is not the kind of diversity of thought that Chomsky was hoping for.
I've never heard of OANN until like yesterday. So I'm very curious where it's coming from. Wiki suggests it has been around for 7 years but I'm guessing it gets no views. Chomsky is not referring to some tiny venue.
He's talking about PBS, NPR, Fox, msnbc, News corp, ATT, time, CBS, and Disney.
They are virtually all the same. The beauty of capitalism is when something like this happens, if you can provide a new product that isn't what everyone else is providing. You can crush the competition. Hence why suddenly OANN is a thing? Though I'm looking at their wikipedia and apparently all they do is report on 'conspiracy theories'.
Which makes sense to me. Anyone outside the unification will be attacked as such.
You should probably look for yourself rather than rely on Wikipedia to make your assessment. Newsmax is the other one I have been hearing about lately. They both do appear to be buying into the president’s election fraud story, if that’s what you are looking for.
>You should probably look for yourself rather than rely on Wikipedia to make your assessment. Newsmax is the other one I have been hearing about lately.
I'm not American. I really don't need any of these. I do understand the extreme bias Wikipedia has shifted toward. It's not that I can believe in Wikipedia's stance on this OAN but rather I see is that they do have a clearly biased page against OAN. Their attack on them may be correct but it shows the attack.
>They both do appear to be buying into the president’s election fraud story, if that’s what you are looking for.
Every election has fraud. What's important is to be completely transparent about the entire process. Admit the truth and show how much fraud there was, that people were charged, and if the results are skewed. In a place like IOWA or California, there's no big concern to worry about fraud. The win will be 1 sided.
In a place like Michigan where it doesn't smell right. The importance of transparency is tantamount to the process. What did they do? They threw out watchers and cardboarded the windows. That's literally the opposite of transparency.
Ultimately at the end of the day. Trump is done, but trust by the republicans in the election system has been eroded. Having MSNBC repeat that there was NO FRAUD isn't proving anything.
The political divide in the USA was virtually all Democrat sided. This has increased the political divide by moving the Republicans.
OANN and Newsmax should become part of your vocabulary. They are growing rapidly and they are absolutely nothing like the companies you listed. Millions of people consider them gospel.
I agree with this post, specifically the part about uniformity. People will say various news outlets differ from eachother in ideology, but really, you will not find a major news agency that is truly at odds with the establishment.
The only news reporting agencies which are actually in opposition to the current are the so called "alternate news sites", those which are also branded as fake news factories or hate centrals by the mainstream media.
The classical liberalism which arguably founded the western societies has been completely overthrown and subjugated by neoliberal leftism of various degrees, multicultural mania etc.
Most issues don’t have two sides, but a multiplicity of viewpoints and stakeholders with vastly different levels of knowledge and insight. There are more than two sides.
My biggest frustration with reporting is when the reporter provides some number without context.
“$1 billion was cut from X program”
How big is that program?
But they so often leave off how large the total program is.
The worst is when the cut was actually done do a planned budget increase. So the headline should have read “$1 billion in budget increases were cancelled”
>When one outlet consistently publishes pieces that align with their perspective, the information content [...] starts to diminish.
Two problems with this statement. It's unlikely to be correct, and it's built on a "the grass used to be greener" assumption.
First, unless skewed data are still data. As a rather extreme example: Soviet dissident Bukovsky recalled that he made his opinion on what life looks like behind the iron curtain from Soviet propaganda by making adjustments, and extrapolations. And when he was allowed (actually forced) to emigrate he found it was not the whole pucture, but his guesses were mostly correct. As a former Soviet citizen myself I can say one can learn to read between the lines, even when available sources don't shy away from producing 100% fakes. Certainly, people who do not filter, and re-adjust consumed information will be misinformed. But then we are coming to the next point: was it any different before? Before (we are talking about USA, I suppose), there were less controversies, because there was just one mainstream (now various outlets need not to be mutually coherent), and media was more protected from outside criticism, but it doesn't mean it was all correctness, no bias, and no corruption. Political polarization probably makes people more sensitive for an opposite side's bias (but not to one's own side), and modern communications give more possibilities to challenge it. Maybe that's why it feels like it appeared recently.
This is an interesting take. Are the total bytes of text, pictures, and video produced by the news media some significant fraction of the total bytes output by humanity? I'm not sure but also I'm not sure why it matters.
I wonder why people seem to be surprised/upset/perturbed at news media polarization. Humans read the news for fun/excitement/engagement/etc. The vast majority don't have to read the news, they choose to. They choose to read the news over engaging in some other activity that might be more fun/etc. Therefore the news competes with all other fun things to do. Opinion and polarization are more fun and exciting and outrage-inducing than dry, unbiased, fact-based reporting - so you see more and more of the former and less and less of the latter.
This is because of how humans are. This isn't because there are mean content producers. The content that wins is a reflection of humanity. Generally we like to consume content that invokes emotion; facts are boring.
As an aside, I watch (with what I wish wasn't a touch of schadenfreude) as people get upset at the decline of the newspaper industry. I guess it turns out that humans don't really care about journalistic ethics - they just want a hit of dopamine. The noble-ness of journalism IS noble and to be lauded, because it prescribes a standard that goes against the grain of the typical media consumer.
The news media is called the “fourth estate” for a reason. Many people believe it is a foundational element of democracy. I am one of them and I am “upset/perturbed” at the news media’s decline. You seem to accept that it is in decline but say that’s just “a reflection of humanity.” Isn’t that something to be upset about? If the media can become more polarised and less factual, couldn’t it also move in the other direction? Can’t we be upset that this is not happening, and propose political solutions, in the same way that we reform other political institutions?
The problem is that people don't want surprises - they want confirmations of what they already believe.
"The reality is that the implication of the Internet is that ideas are in abundance, and people will seek out what they already agree with, as opposed to accepting what is delivered to them." https://stratechery.com/2020/the-idea-adoption-curve/
Somehow we what we value is not information. Maybe it is the political use of it - we want to know so that we can pass it to others from our group?
A number of commenters seem hung up on the actual measurement of information, which I think is a little ancillary to the point (which I think is valid). So I'll add that I think the author's point here is that the press has shifted from focusing on surprising news to reiterating things we already know, because that is a good way to reassure and flatter their audience.
Consider a headline like, "Trump says illegal immigration is a big problem." He's said that many times, it's very unsurprising that he would say it again, and hence it contains very little information. However, each time he says it, it affords the press that agree with him a fresh opportunity to talk about why he's right, and the press that disagrees a new chance to talk about why he's wrong.
That is the point here - that what we call "news" has shifted from spending most of its energy informing us of things we don't know towards reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know. If that trend is true, then certainly it represents a reduction in information (in the Claude Shannon sense as well as the everyday sense).
When you say "reinforcing and emphasizing things we do know" is honestly concerning. That is a common tactic in propaganda. Especially when you consider propaganda's goal is a systematic effort to manipulate other people’s beliefs and attitudes. Using different events to reiterate the same thing is just trying reinforce whatever idea/fact is being reiterated.
It's even worse when what is being reiterated is not true because reiteration effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect). This can be even aggravated further since a lot modern news is not just a statement of facts, but can also include various opinions which may be only partially related to that fact, but get reinforced as well.
However, repeating something over and over will decrease information density. Heck it's used in error correction when dealing with noisy/lossy channels the information theoretic sense. So reiterating things of course will reduce information density.
I have two journalism degrees and I only worked in the “media” for a year at a newspaper before transitioning to advertising/marketing for a decade. Now I own a small business in my hometown.
The business of journalism has much to do with where we are today. During my year at the newspaper it was obvious where things were going: revenue was down (which meant the number of physical pages in the paper was down as that number is based on advertising needs), number of employees was down, anything digital was an afterthought, and people were 100% focused on how to keep doing the same thing they had done for the last 50 years with fewer resources. After I left they started to consolidate everything they could (design from a single hub instead of in the actual city where the reporting took place, centralized printing, more reliance on wire services for news, etc) and it still wasn’t enough cutting to solve the problem. Of course they also weren’t focused on growth of any kind, so things quickly got worse. Of the hundreds of journalism majors I graduated with I only know of a couple who are still in the business.
What was once thought of as “news” (timely, useful, important, non-biased, accurate reporting) became “content” and journalists became “content creators,” sometimes at the same publications and sometimes for other businesses or marketing firms. The money that once went to advertising that supported journalism indirectly instead shifted directly to creating content. There was no need for a PR firm to spend time or resources trying to influence a reporter because instead they could just create the content and pay for it to run as an advertorial, or pitch it as “news” to a decimated newsroom that would publish almost anything to keep the stories flowing and the lights on.
This was happening in every area of news, including politics. Then the money really started to flow after the Citizens United decision. You’ll recall that Citizens United is essentially a not for profit content farm. It makes content from a specific ideological viewpoint instead of from the unbiased and fact-focused view of a journalist.
As the article mentioned, there are still journalists out there trying to show both sides and focus on the facts. That all goes out the window when there is so much money involved in creating content that supports one side or the other, and especially when people on one side or the other use the tenets of journalism against us. Politicians have figured out that it’s “news” when they say ridiculous things, so they continue to do so and watch as it gets covered. Even if the journalist tries to show both sides the mere act of repeating the “news” gives it credence and further solidifies the politicians’ views as “real.” And if they don’t cover it they are decried for being biased. Politicians are the only ones who win.
It’s clear to me we can’t go back to a time when journalism was relevant or non-harmful, even if we could roll back some changes like Citizens United. The only thing I can hope for is that people who disagree somehow start to talk with one another directly instead of focusing so much on the “media” as a way to relate to one another.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity".
A useful exercise is to look at a news site and ask which items started as a press release, or are simply an opinion piece, vs ones which contain info someone had to go and dig out. For many lesser news sources, it's 100% PR, because they have no real reporters.
I can't vouch for it personally, but I've recently heard good things about SemiAccurate: https://semiaccurate.com/
>SemiAccurate is a technology news site focusing not just on the new shiny stuff but the how and why behind the technology we use. We cover a wide spectrum of topics from hardware reviews, theoretical technology, production, security and enterprise products.
> Professional membership allows instant access to the entire site and all content. It includes immediate access to all news, analysis, and summaries of the news. It also includes access to all regularly published analysis, all news, white papers, and related materials. Pricing is $1,000 for a year’s worth of access. We do not offer refunds for cancellation or termination.
I have a messages for conservatives. For your own benefit - shut up about bias. Seriously, hear me out. I'm not just ragging on you.
Sure, bias exists, but you're getting awful at identifying it. More importantly, railing about bias won't get what you want, which is bringing grief to center->left people in power.
I have something better for that.
What you want is a Meaningfully Competent Press Corps - something that mostly doesn't exist now.
An MCPC never hesitates to target anyone in power. It knows government and corporations are dangerous by default - that harm is only averted thru ceaseless, aggressive, public oversight. It lives to expose powerful corruption and it doesn't care who's it is. A MCPC knows that secrecy is generally about hiding misdeeds and it never, ever assumes powerful people are being truthful.
Will a MCPC routinely ding powerful people you like? Sure, but isn't that what you see happening now? Wouldn't it be gratifying to see powerful people you dislike get dinged?
How about Pelosi going down for protecting horrific CIA abuses? Sweet. Imagine Obama being justly shamed for prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous PotUS combined. An MCPC could deliver that for you.
Consider how golden that could be.
Seriously conservative dudes. Forget bias. An MCPC will cost you nothing that you aren't already paying and it is uniquely positioned to give you rich, satisfying payback - which, truthfully, is what you want.
Only peripherally related, but today i read a post by a former MSNBC producer, Ariana Pekary, about why she left, and how US cable news in particular is broken [1]:
> Context and factual data are often considered too cumbersome for the audience. There may be some truth to that (our education system really should improve the critical thinking skills of Americans) – but another hard truth is that it is the job of journalists to teach and inform, which means they might need to figure out a better way to do that. [...] Therefore, it’s particularly notable to me, for one, that nearly every rundown at the network basically is the same, hour after hour. And two, they use this subjective nature of the news to justify economically beneficial decisions. I’ve even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”
My 1995 opinion: News is saturated with bias and it enables systemic corruption because important questions go unasked.
My 2020 opinion: Bias in news is largely unimportant. News is saturated with incompetence however and that is harming everyone, in direct and meaningful ways. Worst of all, important questions go unasked.
News. It isn't simple new. It also needs to be relevant and important. Something being factual (e.g., X happened) isn't enough. It also needs to be relevant and important.
Use a proper definition of news, and much of what gets passed off as news is in fact fake. News is not noise.
Yes, of course. If one side wants to behead a scientist for talking about reality and the other side thinks the same scientist should guide policy, we should carefully listen to both sides, and then compromise by cutting the scientist's fingers off. I am very smart.
Not all views have equal value. Giving equal consideration to crackpots and con artists (e.g. flat eathers, alternative medicine advocates, climate change deniers, COVID deniers, antivaxx advocates, election results deniers) only benefits the crackpots and con artists.
Reality matters; promoting a false balance[0] only helps those people who object to reality for dubious reasons.
There’s a certain amount of information the world creates, and some fraction of that gets written up in the news.
The first would seem to be vastly larger today, just because the human population has grown significantly and the reduction of poverty has brought far more people to a level where they work on “information-producing” endeavors.
What fraction of that will be covered in the news media, in some form or another? The top segment, such as “who is the new prime minister of France” gets covered today as it did in the past. Similar news from smaller places probably gets covered more, because networks of correspondents have increased, communication has become easier, and the wire service model has had huge effects for efficiency. The same is likely true for the “long end” of domestic news.
We should probably look at not just production, but also distribution: how much information is transmitted. While subscriptions have dropped off a cliff, distribution has vastly increased. I’m in Europe, but regularly read the NYT and dozens of other US outlets. That just wasn’t possible even in the recent past.
They are defining information as “surprise”, but mixing the technological meaning with its common meaning at will. Am I surprised by the name of the next US Secretary of State? Sure, in the way that I had never heard the name before. I’d be more surprised by Whoopi Goldberg, but that doesn’t make the latter more “information-dense”. Newspapers today include all the scores of twelve different sports leagues from all over the world, which alone would likely dominate any actual measure of information. Then again, they dropped their listings of stock prices, which probably reduced that measure by 9x%. To recover, they should print some random number generators output, which is nothing but information according to the theory the article is (ab)using. Which just shows that “information” is ill-defined and probably useless to measure news quality.
This blog post is really just the old complaint about a “liberal bias”, cargo-culting with sciency phrases. No surprise there.
The elephant in the room not addressed in this essay is the widespread use of bad faith arguments, and the absence or dismissal of evidence in preference of beliefs and feelings. On some issues it can be extremely difficult to find good faith arguments and evidence on each side of the issue.
For me personally, I'm not going to waste my time attempting to ingest all of the bad faith arguments out there just for the sake of seeking varied perspectives. If you have a claim, persuade me with logic and evidence, not with fear mongoring and throwing straw men down slippery slopes.