Taming the News

Forty years ago, we all got our news from three TV stations (CBS, ABC and NBC), the same local newspapers, and a small handful of magazines (Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News). A few would supplement their reading with The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and magazines like Atlantic or the New Yorker. The choices were much more limited than today but the trust in journalism was much greater. We all read the same stories and few people felt the need to ‘fact check’ anchors like Peter Jennings or Walter Conkrite. We may have reached different conclusions but we began from a common point of information.

This radically changed with the growth of cable television, the internet and social media. The massive proliferation of choices was overwhelming. Instead of common sources we leaned toward those that confirmed our views. The left watched MSNBC and the right watched Fox News. We no longer watched the same stories with the same frequency. Our differences widened and hardened.

Social media gave everyone a big microphone and a big audience. Some independents broke major stories, but most knew little of basic journalistic standards or lacked the resources to properly vet a story. News became entertainment and sport more than information.

After years of trying to cut through the clutter I developed a few axioms and observations to focus my time better on information that is useful, meaningful, and hopefully accurate.

Get the whole story. A piece of the truth can be more misleading than all of a lie. Bias is much about what is not said. Context matters.
Never attribute to a conspiracy what can as easily be explained by chance or incompetence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
When you trust nothing, you will believe anything.
Even the brightest are subject to cognitive biases and ignorance of probability.
The more data you have the more likely you are to see patterns that only appear relevant.
In the face of irrefutable evidence, it is still possible to reach the wrong conclusion.
Drastic changes and discoveries are rare. We advance more from evolution than revolution. History is mostly about the exceptions.
Basic journalistic standards have been undermined by a preference for narratives and competition from social media where everyone regardless of merit or qualifications gets space to vent.
Successful journalism is less likely to be measured by objective truth, clarity, and illumination than by clicks and shares. Clicks and shares are generated by outrage and fear mongering. If your first response to an article is outrage or vindication, put it aside for a few days; there is a good chance you are being played.
“The risk of offense is the price of clarity.” Roy Williams
More people read the news for confirmation than information.
“The great enemy of the truth is not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest; but the myth- persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.” JFK
Most issues and decisions are not between good and evil or right and wrong but involve tradeoffs. More often our choices are between good or better, or bad and worse. Life is complicated and rarely comports to any unified theory.
Avoid Bulverism, the subversion of an argument’s merits or reason to the identity of the source. Demonization of dissent and differences is just intellectual bigotry.
If it needs to be fact checked it is not worth your time. The mere existence of fact checking sites speaks volumes about the loss of trust in media. Stop wasting time on sites you cannot trust.
Trust is not measured in percentages. It is not good enough to be accurate 95% of the time. A few errors admitted and corrected may be tolerable over a period of many years, but multiple errors always made with the same bias means it is time to find a more reliable source.
A fact or a sound position must be falsifiable. If it cannot conceivably be proven incorrect it is not a fact, it is a belief.
The goal is illumination. Accuracy is only the first step.
In our obsession with diversity we neglected intellectual diversity, the range of ideas and experiences. When 95% of a news organization votes the same way bias is inevitable but so is misreporting. When a story fits a common narrative, it is tempting to relax journalistic diligence.
Much of our disagreements and differences can be attributed to the different meanings we assign to words.
Correlation is not causation. The Phillips Curve.
Don’t confuse trends with laws. The Phillips Curve again.
We are subject to emotional rationalism. We decide quickly from emotions and then rationalize our decision. There is a world of difference between rationalization and rational.
Do not confuse confidence with competence.
Be cautious with anecdotes. They can put a face on the data. Anecdotes can be used to confirm rational conclusions or their exceptions, but they are never a substitute for the data.
“Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples – while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” George W. Bush
The strength of an argument is proportional to its tolerance for dissent.
Crisis is the rallying cry of the tyrant.
When you silence you amplify.
The prevailing wisdom also includes the prevailing biases and myths. Dissent is essential to finding the truth. Dissent is respect for minority rights. The prevailing wisdom in the time of Galileo was that the universe was geocentric.
Beware of weasel words that can have very different meanings. Most, almost, and always can convey different meanings to different readers. The difference between a plurality and a majority can be substantial.
Know your denominator. The fact that 30% of drug dealers belong to a single ethnic group, does not mean that 30% of that ethnic group are drug dealers.
Beware the Straw Man argument- when the debater does not address the question involved but responds to a completely different point. For example if you speak in favor of open trade with China and your opponent says, “Oh, you are in favor of forced child labor.”
You do not get more reliable information by a diversification of unreliable resources.
Hitchens’ Razor- “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Most people will hear or believe what they want to or expect to, regardless of the intent or clarity of the message.
It is easier to prove a point of information is wrong that to convince a person that they are wrong.

Poetic Disinformation

Jason Riley writes in The Wall Street Journal, Was a Judicial Nominee Prejudiced in Her ‘Role as an Advocate’? Nusrat Choudhury claimed police kill unarmed black men in America ‘every day.’ That’s nowhere near true.

Shelby Steele calls them “poetic truths.” They are narratives that play down or disregard reality and facts to advance a favored ideological position. A poetic truth about policing and race in the U.S. has gained currency in recent years, and it was on vivid display last week at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

There is no evidence that police officers kill unarmed black men daily. Black deaths at the hands of police are statistically rare, and those involving unarmed suspects are rarer still. Arrests in the U.S. number more than 10 million in a typical year. According to a database maintained by the Washington Post, police shot 1,054 people in 2021, including 234 whites and 139 blacks. Thirty-three of those shooting victims were unarmed, including eight whites and six blacks.

HKO

With all the heat raised about disinformation, little concern is expressed from such disinformation from our most respected sources. Under the persistence of Senator John Kennedy, Choudhury would not correct a patently false statement, even suggesting that speaking as an ‘activist’ somehow made the truthfulness of a statement a secondary consideration (a poetic truth). This is the thinking of a judicial nominee from Columbia University, Princeton University and Yale Law School.

Similarly, Justice Sotomayor made an easily discernable false statement about children hospitalized from Covid from her exalted position on the Supreme Court.

Major media resources perpetuated the myth of widespread killings of unarmed blacks by police in the wake of the George Floyd tragedy. This led to the ‘defund the police’ movement which has led to a spike in urban crimes with minorities becoming the most common victims. Obama was correct, misinformation kills.

Two points:

Even the most educated and credentialed are subject to cognitive biases, and commitment to a preferred narrative over objective facts.

This is especially true for a government run Ministry of Truth, no matter what you decide to call it.

Truth Wizards

From Invasion of the Fact-Checkers by Jacob Siegel at Tablet:

By putting an official stamp on obvious manipulations of language, the fact-checkers license false and misleading coverage by outlets that playact the quaint 20th-century practice of objective news reporting—calling balls and strikes—while also batting for Team Democrat. The convergence of fact-checking and Democratic Party priorities is not a matter of speculation. The Democratic National Committee calls for establishing a “political misinformation policy” and repeatedly cites the International Fact-Checking Network’s partnerships with tech companies as a model for the party’s national censorship policy.

Another driving force behind the growth of the fact-checking complex is the necessity of enforcing loyalty to progressive ideas that can’t survive on their own. Stripped of their specialized language and social and bureaucratic context, key articles of Progressive Church faith are repulsive to most ordinary voters, regardless of gender or race. That is true of the racialized approach to education that was just roundly rejected by San Francisco parents in recent school board elections. It is also true of calls to defund the police, to teach transgender ideology to kindergarteners, and of approaches to addiction that appear to promote continued drug use. Policies that Biden administration officials would have boasted about in front of an audience of academics and public health administrators sound different—meaning, crazy—to people who have not been socialized to accept professional class bullshit. That’s where the fact-checkers come in with their tin badges and unearned air of authority. They can declare that a story is not merely mistaken or overwrought but dangerously defective—because we, the fact-checkers, paid by the tech giants and NGOs that are in turn funded by a seemingly endless tide of dark money from billionaires who want to be woke, or at least buy a woke insurance policy, said so.

Politics aside, fact-checkers fill a gap in the American system of government, which increasingly and for at least several decades now has looked nothing like the system described in high school civics classrooms and textbooks. Because the U.S. state now routinely exercises its power through administrative decrees, rather than through laws passed by the elected representatives of the people, it must rely on subcontracted nonofficials to enforce compliance with its dictates. This method of governance relieves policy makers of any obligation to build broad majorities that support their ideas. Maybe it really is a good idea to distribute crack pipes to addicts because it will save lives, as advocates claim. But if they believed they had the truth on their side, we might expect to see the people who champion these policies arguing for their merits and convincing a coalition of voters to support them. Instead, we see the opposite: the naked use of power and coercion to stifle arguments by people who believe they have a mandate of heaven, and the truth is whatever they say it is.

The fact-checkers have proved to be crucial compliance officers for the state, filtering out troublesome information before it reaches the public, torturing “the facts” until they conform to officially sanctioned narratives, and smearing dissenters as dangers to the public or stooges of Vladimir Putin. That’s the information ecology we are living in, and as a reporter I can tell you it stinks.

The Consequences of Our Ignorance

A fascinating polling piece at YouGov.com illuminated how much we overestimate the size of minority groups whether it is Blacks, Jews, lesbians, transgenders or millionaires. How can it be that in a nation drowning in sources and distribution of information we can be so ignorant about who we are?

Once reason is our mistaking entertainment for information. Minorities are disproportionately represented in sports and entertainment not from pushing an agenda but because most people are not entertained by watching the mundane activities of the majority of Americans. We see more interracial couples in product ads, not to push an agenda but to reflect the reality. “The percentage of married-couple households that are interracial or interethnic grew across the United States from 7.4 to 10.2 percent from 2000 to 2012-2016.”

The non binary character of Taylor Mason on the Showtime series Billions made the TGNC (Transgender nonconforming) minority real for many people outside of the settings where they are likely to encounter them.

The news is more focused on minorities for two reasons. The lines between news and entertainment are increasingly blurred, and the success of news in the age of internet and social media is measured in clicks and shares more than journalistic quality. Fear and outrage is the cheap and easy path to clicks and shares. While entertainment exaggerates the percent of minority groups in our lives, the news exaggerates their oppression. The Jessie Smollet case indicates the demand for hate crimes is greater than the supply. Multiple studies estimate the rate of hate crime hoaxes ranges from 15% to a third.

In the aftermath of the George Floyd murder the incidence of unarmed Blacks killed by police was wildly exaggerated in the public’s mind. Public surveys showed estimates in the thousands. The real number in 2019 was closer to 15. (Liberals guessed much higher than conservatives.)

This misinformation has consequences. The George Floyd riots lead to the disastrous defund police movement which preceded sharp rises in violent crime in affected urban areas.

A large part of the problem lies is the political affiliation of news sources. Political differences became existential threats and justified news crossing the line to propaganda. While distrust of media has led people to even less reliable sources we are misled as much by the omission of stories that are true as we are by the acceptance of stories that are not. Facts, incomplete or out of context, can also be used to mislead.

From Kevin Williamson:

Our friends in the media who bemoan the rise of Donald Trump and Trump-style politics — which is to say, the politics of lies — have some penance of their own to do, because it was not right-wing populists who trained so many Americans to be skeptical of what they read in the newspaper: It was the newspapers themselves, not least the New York Times. As I have written before, the Times does some great work on its news pages, particularly on its local-news pages, but the intellectual standards of its opinion pages can be shockingly low — especially when it comes to the matter of entirely unsubstantiated claims about Republican politicians. And I say that as someone who has written for the Times opinion page.

This isn’t just a problem for the Times opinion pages, it isn’t just a problem for the Times as a whole, and it isn’t just a problem for the press, either: The more elite institutions fail to do their basic jobs, and the more they abuse their positions at the commanding heights, the more room they create for populist demagoguery .

The politicalization of the press creates a feedback loop where noise drowns out information and volume trumps accuracy. Efforts to silence dissent only amplifies them. Media stories increasingly reflect a world unfamiliar to more and more viewers. This destroys trust and when you trust nothing you will believe anything.

The Cost of Media Failures

From Kevin Williams in National Review, Sarah Palin vs The New York Times:

Our friends in the media who bemoan the rise of Donald Trump and Trump-style politics — which is to say, the politics of lies — have some penance of their own to do, because it was not right-wing populists who trained so many Americans to be skeptical of what they read in the newspaper: It was the newspapers themselves, not least the New York Times. As I have written before, the Times does some great work on its news pages, particularly on its local-news pages, but the intellectual standards of its opinion pages can be shockingly low — especially when it comes to the matter of entirely unsubstantiated claims about Republican politicians. And I say that as someone who has written for the Times opinion page.

This isn’t just a problem for the Times opinion pages, it isn’t just a problem for the Times as a whole, and it isn’t just a problem for the press, either: The more elite institutions fail to do their basic jobs, and the more they abuse their positions at the commanding heights, the more room they create for populist demagoguery — ironically, the very kind of politics in which Sarah Palin today specializes, to the modest extent that she remains a political figure.

As every recovering addict knows, the first step toward getting better is admitting that you have a problem. And the New York Times has a problem. The Times may not have any love for Sarah Palin, nor she for it, but the former governor is doing the newspaper a favor by giving it the opportunity to recommit itself to fundamental journalistic values, one of which is not making stuff up about people you hate simply because it is fun and profitable to hurt them.

HKO

There are three opportunities for bias in the press: what you decide to cover, what you decide NOT to cover, and how you cover it. The last one requires factual correctness and proper context to avoid misleading the reader. When the staff overwhelmingly leans in a single political direction and embraces a narrative accuracy suffers.

Our media has monetized outrage at the expense of journalistic integrity. Populism thrives not just from lack of accuracy but from lack of perspective; they just do not see the same world. Some of the populist media on the right propagates inaccurate information, but the left often does not see accurate information. One side will believe things that are not true and the other side will not be exposed to things that are true.

I do not know that these failures from the old media institutions are the main reason for the rise of the populist press. Contempt is a powerful and unforgivable force that is also part of the shift. In their fanaticism for diversity, intellectual diversity should come first.

The Truckers’ Spring

From Glenn Harlan Reynolds at New York Post, Truckers are starting a working-class revolution — and the left hates it:

A working-class revolution led by the working class is the left’s worst nightmare because the working class doesn’t want what the left wants. The working class wants jobs, a stable economy, safe streets, low inflation, schools that teach things and a conservative, non-adventurous foreign policy that won’t get a lot of working-class people killed. It’s not excited about gender fluidity, critical race theory, “modern monetary theory,” foreign adventures and defunding police.

Worse yet, a huge part of the lefty self-image revolves around feeling superior to the working class and openly expressing disdain for it. One need spend only a few minutes tuning into left media like NPR, CNN or MSNBC to hear the disdain for working-class Americans, inhabitants of “flyover country,” people who live in the middle of nowhere.

That’s why, even as they legitimize and valorize outright rioting and violence by leftist groups, lefties vilify every working-class protest movement, going back before the Tea Party. In Canada, the press even tried to pretend that the thousands of truckers driving to the capital city of Ottawa were actually Russian agents. When that failed, it fell back on its old standard, calling them fascists, Nazi sympathizers and white supremacists.

But nobody believes that because it’s as obvious a lie as the claims about Russians. Leftists talk about race because they don’t want people to notice they’ve been waging class war.

HKO

‘Truckers’ Spring’ is a reference to the unplanned uprising in the Middle East we now call the Arab Spring.

Being tone deaf and contemptuous are the two most unforgivable sins.

Hurling extreme invectives like Nazi and white supremacist without objective evidence because it serves a preferred narrative is how the major media channels lost the trust and credibility it once had.

There is a seismic political shift. The blue collars, long a staple of the FDR Democrats are moving elsewhere. Demographics are less predictable as Hispanics and Asian are no longer default Democratic voters. Black voters are drifting away even if at a slower pace. The youth are dependable left leaning voters if they are in college, but less so if they work in the trades.

Corporate executives and high tech billionaires are now dependable Democratic voters. Wall Street and Main Street have parted ways.