About Media and Institution political biases

[Theodarzna]

Vox’s David Roberts writes about Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology.

It’s got a long and complicated argument which I can’t really do justice to here, but the thesis seems to be that the US Right is defecting against the country’s shared institutions in favor of forming its own echo chambers.

So for example, there used to be a relatively fair media in which both liberals and conservatives got their say. But Republicans didn’t like having to deal with facts, so they formed their own alternative media – FOX and Rush Limbaugh and everyone in that sphere – where only conservatives would have a say and their fake facts would never get challenged.

Or: everyone used to trust academia as a shared and impartial arbitrator of truth. But conservatives didn’t like the stuff it found – whether about global warming or trickle-down economics or whatever – so they seceded into their own world of alternative facts where some weird physicist presents his case that global warming is a lie, or a Breitbart journalist is considered an expert on how cultural Marxism explains everything about post-WWII American history.

It concludes that “the press cannot be neutral”, although it also “cannot afford to be, or be seen as primarily instruments of the Democrats”. To its credit, it admits this is kind of contradictory:

They must figure out a way to play a dual role: to be fair and consistent referees of policy and ideological disputes within the public square — while also acting to defend the institutional integrity of the square itself from what is, at present, a highly asymmetrical threat. They must fight to keep some core principles and commitments inviolate, outside the sphere of normal political dispute, against an administration that wants to drag them in…that’s a humdinger of a problem.

Let me start by saying what this article gets right.

I think it’s right that the two parties used to have much more in common, and be able to appeal to shared gatekeeper institutions that both trusted.

I think it’s right the Republicans unilaterally seceded from those shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself “neutral” and the other labeling itself “conservative”.

Roberts devotes four sentences in his six thousand word article to the possibility that conservatives might be motivated by something deeper than a simple hatred of facts:

The right’s view that the institutions lean liberal is hyperbolic, but not without foundation. Science, academia (at least liberal arts and social sciences), and journalism do tend to draw their personnel from left-leaning demographics.

Those institutions have cosmopolitan aspirations — fair application of transpartisan standards — but there’s no doubt that in practice, those aspirations often cover for more parochial preferences.

But the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own.

Roberts says that these neutral gatekeeper institutions “tend to draw their personnel from left-leaning demographics”, as if this was just a big fuss about 105 New Englanders for every 100 Texans. I would like to counter with a report from a friend who graduated from a top university last year:

I was at my graduation last weekend, and the commencement address was basically about twenty minutes of vitriolic insults directed at Trump. And in between burying my head in my friend’s shoulder in discomfort and laughing nervously, I was thinking about the family of this guy in my class.

He’s the first person in his family to go to college. He drove an hour every day to go to a somewhat better high school because there was an epidemic of gang violence at his local school. Against the odds, he did well, and got into college, where he has continued to get good grades and play sports and generally do things that make parents proud.

His family is not well off. They’re Mexican-American. And they’re Trump supporters.

Yeah, I’m kind of confused too. But they honestly are. (Not even reluctant Republicans supporting Trump–they voted for him in the primary. His aunt owns a Make America Great Again cap.) And all I could think about was how happy they must have been to be attending their son’s graduation from one of the best universities in the world [citation needed], only to have that happiness turn to bewilderment and anger as everyone around them cheered a series of caustic attacks against them and their values. The message couldn’t have been clearer: “You don’t belong here.”

My mom thought this speech was So Courageous. When I suggested that it might have been more courageous to say something that not everyone there agreed with, she replied, “the students maybe, but a lot of the parents looked unhappy.”

Seventy percent of the parents there had family incomes over six figures. (More, probably, since low-income parents are less likely to attend graduation.) A lot of them are members of the self-perpetuating intellectual/economic elite. This probably isn’t true of the few Trump supporters among them.

So if we are going to single them out for judgment, force them to account for their support for an “infantile,” “bullying,” “proto-fascist” “charlatan”…can it not be on the day of their kids’ graduation?

And sure, if you consider me your friend, then that makes this one of those “friend of a friend” stories. But I dare you to say that any of this sounds the least bit implausible. My point is, just because a university paints “ACTUALLY, WE ARE POLITICALLY NEUTRAL” in big red letters on the college quad, doesn’t mean that anyone is required to believe it. And the ideology that invented the microaggression can’t hide behind “but we haven’t officially declared you unwelcome!”

And the same thing is happening in the media. For example, in this very piece, Roberts cites a Vox poll showing that Trump supporters are more likely to be authoritarians. Vox has pushed this same claim many more times: Authoritarianism: The Political Science That Explains Trump, The Rise Of American Authoritarianism: A Niche Group Of Political Scientists May Have Uncovered What’s Driving Donald Trump’s Ascent, The Rise Of American Authoritarianism Explained In 6 Minutes, The Best Predictor Of Trump Support Is Authoritarianism.

Okay. But Vox is working off an internal poll that it hasn’t released (or at least I can’t find it) meaning no one has any idea if the sample size and methodology are okay. And some political science professors tried the same exercise around the same time with excellent methodology and a sample size of over a thousand and found the opposite – Trump supporters were less authoritarian than Cruz supporters, and no more authoritarian than Rubio supporters. They did find that Republicans were a bit more authoritarian than Democrats, but correctly noted that the measure involved is literally called “Right-Wing Authoritarianism”, is based on a scale invented by Theodor Adorno to prove conservatives had fascist tendencies, and only asks questions about child-rearing practices (you get marked as “authoritarian” if you have a traditional religious child-rearing style). And there are other investigations of authority that try to control for this sort of thing and sometimes find find liberals and conservatives are about equal in respect for authority.

Whenever I mention this sort of thing, people protest “But Fox and Breitbart are worse!” And so they are. But I feel like Vox has aspirations to be something more than just a mirror image of Fox with a left-wing slant and a voiced fricative. It’s trying to be a neutral gatekeeper institution. If some weird conservative echo chamber is biased, well, what did you expect? If a neutral gatekeeper institution is biased, now we have a problem.

Roberts writes that “the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own”. This is a bizarre claim, given the existence of groups like Accuracy In Media, Media Research Center, Newsbusters, Heterodox Academy, et cetera which are all about the right seeking greater fairness in mainstream institutions, some of which are almost fifty years old. Really “it’s too bad conservatives never complained about liberal bias in academia or the mainstream media” seems kind of like the opposite of how I remember the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternately pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall. Then they defected to create their own.

I don’t want to give the impression that this is limited to the places people traditionally gripe about like academia and the media. The same dynamics are going on everywhere.

In the hospital where I work, there’s a RESIST TRUMP poster on the bulletin board in our break room. I don’t know who put it there, but I know that anybody who demanded that it be taken down would be tarred as a troublemaker, and anyone who tried to put a SUPPORT TRUMP poster up next to it would be lectured about how politics are inappropriate at work. This is true even though I think at least a third of my colleagues are Trump supporters.

I went to a scientific conference in a field completely unrelated to politics where one of the researchers giving a presentation started with a five minute tangentially-related anti-Trump rant. I can’t imagine someone giving the opposite rant any more than I can imagine a pro-Trump commencement speaker at my friend’s graduation.

I’m desperately trying to avoid the Nerd Culture Wars, which have somehow managed to be even worse than the Regular Culture Wars, but even I’ve heard about GamerGate and the Rabid Puppies. These were originally movements to fight a perceived liberal bias in regular gaming/sci-fi. They of course failed, and now they’re their own little separate conservative spaces practicing conservative video game commentary/sci-fi writing. I don’t want to deny that they’re often horrible. They’re horrible in exactly the same way FOX News is horrible, and for exactly the same reasons. I expect this pattern of conservatives seceding from theoretically-neutral-but-realistically-left-leading communities and forming terrible communities full of witches to repeat itself again and again, because it’s happening for systemic rather than community-specific reasons.

The overall impression is of a widespread norm, well-understood by both liberals and conservatives, that we have a category of space we call “neutral” and “depoliticized”. These sorts of spaces include institutions as diverse as colleges, newspapers, workplaces, and conferences. And within these spaces, overt liberalism is tolerated but overt conservativism is banned. In a few of these cases, conservatives grew angry enough that they started their own spaces – which began as noble attempts to avoid bias, and ended as wretched hives of offensive troglodytes who couldn’t get by anywhere else. This justifies further purges in the mainstream liberal spaces, and the cycle goes on forever.

Stanford historian Robert Conquest once declared it a law of politics that “any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. I have no idea why this should be true, and yet I’ve seen it again and again. Taken to its extreme, it suggests we’ll end up with a bunch of neutral organizations that have become left-wing, plus a few explicitly right-wing organizations. Given that Conquest was writing in the 1960s, he seems to have predicted the current situation remarkably well.

David Roberts ends by noting that he doesn’t really know what to do here, and I agree. I don’t know what to do here either.

But one simple heuristic: if everything you’ve tried so far has failed, maybe you should try something different. Right now, the neutral gatekeeper institutions have tried being biased against conservatives. They’ve tried showing anti-conservative bias. They’ve tried ramping up the conservativism-related bias level. They’ve tried taking articles, and biasing them against conservative positions. I appreciate their commitment to multiple diverse strategies, but I can’t help but wonder whether there’s a possibility they’ve missed.

Look. I read Twitter. I know the sorts of complaints people have about this blog. I’m some kind of crypto-conservative, I’m a traitor to liberalism, I’m too quick to sell out under the guise of “compromise”. And I understand the sentiment. I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.

And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”

Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging.

(Source)

So, the Too Long, Didn't Read of it is that in general there is an implicit left-ish bias found in a lot of institutions not explicitly Conservative, and Conservative institutions are indeed extremely partisan, but they existence is a consequence of the "Neutral Gatekeepers" not being neutral even if the lack of neutrality is asymmetrical between say CNN and Brietbart, one at least has the pretense of neutrality.

The author concludes largely that nothing in his opinion can be done. These Neutral Gatekeeper institutions were used to squash the Right, but it turns out the Right can create their own institutions and don't really need these ones. So both the Neutral Gatekeepers start to swing Left and the Right builds an overtly Right-Wing structure for themselves. This will of course make us politically very partisan.

[Thekri]

(Source)

So, the Too Long, Didn't Read of it is that in general there is an implicit left-ish bias found in a lot of institutions not explicitly Conservative, and Conservative institutions are indeed extremely partisan, but they existence is a consequence of the "Neutral Gatekeepers" not being neutral even if the lack of neutrality is asymmetrical between say CNN and Brietbart, one at least has the pretense of neutrality.

The author concludes largely that nothing in his opinion can be done. These Neutral Gatekeeper institutions were used to squash the Right, but it turns out the Right can create their own institutions and don't really need these ones. So both the Neutral Gatekeepers start to swing Left and the Right builds an overtly Right-Wing structure for themselves. This will of course make us politically very partisan.

It is actually a pretty good read, and I agree. A large part of what made Donald Trump president is that all that nonsense he spews isn't completely nonsense. The reason he can claim the media is "Fake News" is because a large part of America already believed that. I found it amusing that the media recently walked out a poll showing that all the major news networks were trusted more then Trump... but those numbers were still not higher then 60%. If 40% of the country or more thinks your news is bogus to begin with, they have a problem that runs deeper then Trump. Trump is capitalizing on problems that already existed, he isn't fabricating completely new ones for the most part.

Unfortunately both sides are running full tilt towards insisting there has to be a divide. There seem to be very few places left where you can hear both sides accurately represented. Higher education is splitting between Left and Right leaning schools, with the latter disenfranchised (justly in many cases) from the academic communities they allegedly inhabit. The networks have long since lost vast swathes of right leaning viewers to Fox and other right wing media, leaving them with an established base to pander to, shifting them further to the left.

[Ahhdurr]

Reality has a liberal bias and if uneducated morons want to claim 'fake news' because the truth conflicts with their world view then that's their fault.

[Theodarzna]

It is actually a pretty good read, and I agree. A large part of what made Donald Trump president is that all that nonsense he spews isn't completely nonsense. The reason he can claim the media is "Fake News" is because a large part of America already believed that. I found it amusing that the media recently walked out a poll showing that all the major news networks were trusted more then Trump... but those numbers were still not higher then 60%. If 40% of the country or more thinks your news is bogus to begin with, they have a problem that runs deeper then Trump. Trump is capitalizing on problems that already existed, he isn't fabricating completely new ones for the most part.

Unfortunately both sides are running full tilt towards insisting there has to be a divide. There seem to be very few places left where you can hear both sides accurately represented. Higher education is splitting between Left and Right leaning schools, with the latter disenfranchised (justly in many cases) from the academic communities they allegedly inhabit. The networks have long since lost vast swathes of right leaning viewers to Fox and other right wing media, leaving them with an established base to pander to, shifting them further to the left.

Starslatecodex is in general a great read; even if me and him might not agree politically, I think he is one of the better voices out there.

Firstly; Yeah, the institutions have had a major credibility issue for decades now and it has only gotten worse. Trump wisely capitalized on a growing discontent and distrust in these institutions. I know some want to suggest its all Russian voodoo or something, but distrust of the institutions is both old and somewhat justified.

Secondly; Yeah, the schools are already practically bubbles for which nobody ever encounters someone of their political opposition, and if they do that person is subject to expulsion pretty quickly.

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Reality has a liberal bias and if uneducated morons want to claim 'fake news' because the truth conflicts with their world view then that's their fault.

Did you read the article?

[Endus]

He doesn't give the origin of all this enough examination, because it critically informs what's occurring right now.

In short;

The media in general took a neutral, fact-based, analytical position, if we go back 30+ years. That was their role; to inform the populace, and provide informed and educated opinions on analysis. Politically, they were relatively centrist. Some might personally lean one way or the other, but they weren't partisan.

As time progressed, the Republicans shifted further right, and moved away from factual analysis. This is why they hold views such as opposing global warming science, why they've developed economic views that economists have flatly discarded as hokum, and so forth. Not all Republicans, but enough that it increasingly became the core of the party's ideology. As they shifted further right, the Democrats also shifted further right, becoming centrist by any international comparison.

The media stayed basically where it always was, but now they were confronted with one side of the political divide that stuck (mostly) to the facts, and another that (again, mostly) didn't. And they reported that accordingly. This made them seem biased to one side, but it reflects a shift in the Parties, not the media.

Then, Fox News et al sprung up, to give "the other side" of the discussion, which is a silly concept when the media was already centrist. As can easily be seen when you compare American media's positions to the media of basically any other developed nation. The new "right-wing media" was biased by design, and part of their refrain was that they were biased to offset everyone else's bias, but this is an appeal to a false middle, that because they are SO off-base and partisan, the "truth" must somehow lie between them and the rest of the media. When in truth, they're just being partisan and biased, and the rest of the media largely wasn't.

And now we're in the state we're in today. Academia and the media are largely getting staffed by centrists and left-wingers because they still recognize facts for what they are, and don't try and mold those facts to fit a particular bias. Right-wingers in the USA are only being excluded if they demonstrate that kind of agnosticism towards facts that's creating the issue.

And no; it isn't inherent to being right-wing or conservative, at all. It's a specific factor of American partisan politics, and it's only really gotten bad in the last 20 years or so, so it's not even a long-term trend.

When a fact-based stance is deemed to be "biased against conservatives", you can pretty easily see what the hell is going on. See the "debates" on global warming. On whether gun violence is a problem. On health care. Etc.

[Ahhdurr]

Did you read the article?

That sums up the entire first half of the article.

[Theodarzna]

He doesn't give the origin of all this enough examination, because it critically informs what's occurring right now.

In short;

The media in general took a neutral, fact-based, analytical position, if we go back 30+ years. That was their role; to inform the populace, and provide informed and educated opinions on analysis. Politically, they were relatively centrist. Some might personally lean one way or the other, but they weren't partisan.

As time progressed, the Republicans shifted further right, and moved away from factual analysis. This is why they hold views such as opposing global warming science, why they've developed economic views that economists have flatly discarded as hokum, and so forth. Not all Republicans, but enough that it increasingly became the core of the party's ideology. As they shifted further right, the Democrats also shifted further right, becoming centrist by any international comparison.

The media stayed basically where it always was, but now they were confronted with one side of the political divide that stuck (mostly) to the facts, and another that (again, mostly) didn't. And they reported that accordingly. This made them seem biased to one side, but it reflects a shift in the Parties, not the media.

Then, Fox News et al sprung up, to give "the other side" of the discussion, which is a silly concept when the media was already centrist. As can easily be seen when you compare American media's positions to the media of basically any other developed nation. The new "right-wing media" was biased by design, and part of their refrain was that they were biased to offset everyone else's bias, but this is an appeal to a false middle, that because they are SO off-base and partisan, the "truth" must somehow lie between them and the rest of the media. When in truth, they're just being partisan and biased, and the rest of the media largely wasn't.

And now we're in the state we're in today. Academia and the media are largely getting staffed by centrists and left-wingers because they still recognize facts for what they are, and don't try and mold those facts to fit a particular bias. Right-wingers in the USA are only being excluded if they demonstrate that kind of agnosticism towards facts that's creating the issue.

And no; it isn't inherent to being right-wing or conservative, at all. It's a specific factor of American partisan politics, and it's only really gotten bad in the last 20 years or so, so it's not even a long-term trend.

I think you are falling into an ideological trap that the author gets at. He says elsewhere in the piece if you follow the link:

I think it’s right the Republicans unilaterally seceded from those shared gatekeeper institutions, so that now we’re in the weird position of having two sets of institutions: one labeling itself “neutral” and the other labeling itself “conservative”.

I think it’s right to consider the situation asymmetrical. Yes, CNN leans liberal, but it’s not as liberal as FOX is conservative, and it’s not as open about it – it has a pretense of neutrality that FOX doesn’t, and although we can disagree about how realistic that pretense is I think few people would disagree that the pretense is there. Nor is there a liberal version of FOX that lacks that pretense of neutrality.

I think it’s right that the conservative side is worse than the neutral side. However biased and crappy you think CNN and mainstream academia are, FOX and the conservative academic bubble are working on a different level (though note that as a liberal, I would say this, and you should interpret it with the same grain of salt that you would any other “my side is better than yours” claim).

I think it’s right that this situation is horrible and toxic and destroying the country, and it’s really good that someone has pointed this out and framed it this clearly.

I think it’s wrong in exactly the way I would expect it to be wrong, which is also an example of what’s wrong with it.

I think you are not giving the article much of a read and falling back to "Well Reality has a Liberal Bias!" without realizing that of course you would say and think that. If your estimation is that your side is at no fault, then well, errrr, what discussion is there to have with a morally righteous Paladin?

[Garnier Fructis]

(Source)

So, the Too Long, Didn't Read of it is that in general there is an implicit left-ish bias found in a lot of institutions not explicitly Conservative, and Conservative institutions are indeed extremely partisan, but they existence is a consequence of the "Neutral Gatekeepers" not being neutral even if the lack of neutrality is asymmetrical between say CNN and Brietbart, one at least has the pretense of neutrality.

The author concludes largely that nothing in his opinion can be done. These Neutral Gatekeeper institutions were used to squash the Right, but it turns out the Right can create their own institutions and don't really need these ones. So both the Neutral Gatekeepers start to swing Left and the Right builds an overtly Right-Wing structure for themselves. This will of course make us politically very partisan.

Neutrality is not and should not be considered more important than factual reporting.

[Ahhdurr]

I think you are not giving the article much of a read and falling back to "Well Reality has a Liberal Bias!" without realizing that of course you would say and think that. If your estimation is that your side is at no fault, then well, errrr, what discussion is there to have with a morally righteous Paladin?

What a pile of shit. The right didn't like reality cause they're wrong all the fucking time so they went and created their own reality of alternative facts. That was their choice. The 'reality has a liberal bias' argument is used because because many on the right are not living in reality.

[Endus]

I think you are falling into an ideological trap that the author gets at. He says elsewhere in the piece if you follow the link:


I think you are not giving the article much of a read and falling back to "Well Reality has a Liberal Bias!" without realizing that of course you would say and think that. If your estimation is that your side is at no fault, then well, errrr, what discussion is there to have with a morally righteous Paladin?

I'm not saying "reality has a liberal bias". In fact, what I'm saying is the reverse. That American liberalism has a reality bias. And Republicanism is rather agnostic on that, at best.

Reality isn't left-wing. It just is. If your ideological views contradict or work against that reality consistently, you're the one engaging in rampant partisan bias, not your opponents. And right now, that's Republicans. Trying to plead to a false middle, which is all your article really does, isn't an argument at all.

When confronted with one party that says "2+2=4", and another that says "2+2=6", neutral reporting is to say that the first party is right and the second is wrong. It is not to split the difference and take a position between the two that "2+2=probably 5". That's allowing your neutrality to be biased, because you're more concerned with how you appear than with the actual facts.

[Theodarzna]

What a pile of shit. The right didn't like reality cause they're wrong all the fucking time so they went and created their own reality of alternative facts. That was their choice. The 'reality has a liberal bias' argument is used because because many on the right are not living in reality.

I suspect you didn't really finish reading the article.

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Neutrality is not and should not be considered more important than factual reporting.

What would be the most factual reporting? Name me a place you feel gets it right?

[Dacien]

As they shifted further right, the Democrats also shifted further right, becoming centrist by any international comparison.

I've always felt like measuring the "right versus left" political spectrum in the US by a European or international yardstick misses the mark. Especially when "conservative positions" can shift between different countries.

[Theodarzna]

I'm not saying "reality has a liberal bias". In fact, what I'm saying is the reverse. That American liberalism has a reality bias. And Republicanism is rather agnostic on that, at best.

Reality isn't left-wing. It just is. If your ideological views contradict or work against that reality consistently, you're the one engaging in rampant partisan bias, not your opponents. And right now, that's Republicans. Trying to plead to a false middle, which is all your article really does, isn't an argument at all.

When confronted with one party that says "2+2=4", and another that says "2+2=6", neutral reporting is to say that the first party is right and the second is wrong. It is not to split the difference and take a position between the two that "2+2=probably 5". That's allowing your neutrality to be biased, because you're more concerned with how you appear than with the actual facts.

You are making a distinction without a difference.

[Endus]

I suspect you didn't really finish reading the article.

The article ends with an argument that the media should bias itself to appear more fair, and ignore the facts, because it deems that the appearance of fairness is more important than factual accuracy.

So no, I really don't think we're misrepresenting it.

[Garnier Fructis]

What would be the most factual reporting? Name me a place you feel gets it right?

PBS/NPR

/10char

[Endus]

I've always felt like measuring the "right versus left" political spectrum in the US by a European or international yardstick misses the mark. Especially when "conservatism" can mean different things between different countries.

When it comes to the media, it's kind of important, though, because when the "mainstream media" in the USA is pretty comparable, in terms of reporting, compared to the media in most other developed nations, then either you're arguing that there's a massive global shadow conspiracy running the media, or you have to admit that just maybe, the mainstream media in the USA isn't actually biased.

Because facts don't change when you cross borders.

[Draco-Onis]

PBS/NPR

/10char

To the right if even one liberal works in a place then it means everything they write is invalid.

[Theodarzna]

PBS/NPR

/10char

And why would that be?

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To the right if even one liberal works in a place then it means everything they write is invalid.

So for something to have a bias does it have to explicitly state it as such?

[PC2]

Okay but should anything be done about bias in particular fields? I think society evolves by bombarding every perspective with criticism. Record everything, criticize everything, civilization then improves regardless of bias.

[Endus]

So for something to have a bias does it have to explicitly state it as such?

Bias is determined by how much one misrepresents the facts, not in who the reporting is most friendly to or supportive of.