When the news is "balanced" in an unbalanced world, it becomes an instrument of deception. This has made producing the news extremely difficult in an era of mass delusions and hyper-polarization.
Frankly, I've given up on the newspapers of record, NY Times, WaPo, to investigate the real sources of American problems. There's simply too much money to be made from political-psychological thriller stories and click-bait narratives based on the Trump's latest lies and "Wacko -Joe-MAGA-goes-to-Congress" stories. Are J.D. Vance and MTG involved in a steamy three-way hookup with Lauren Boebert? What really happens in those private rooms at Mar-a-Lago after Trump's parties? Is Texas about to turn its state into Handmaid Central? Whose memory is fading more rapidly, Biden's or Trump's?
The unavoidable realities facing America are many: climate change, economic stratification, the ending of ordinary religion and the rise of fanatical religiosity, failure of U.S. capitalism to provide for everyone goods and services at a fair price (food, housing, health care).
Government at large scale only exists by the consent of the people. By definition, the operating norms of a modern government like that in the U.S. are so complex that ordinary folks cannot be expected to understand how they operate. Government exists because of the trust of the people. If the trust goes, the nation collapses. Trump has a death wish and now want the world to collapse into anarchy because his cunning self feels he has a better chance at survival there than in a world based on law and order.
MAGA adherents are living in a dreamworld where they believe idiots can effectively rule, as long as the right opponents/enemies are eliminated. But it's all just a white male power fantasy. One way or another though, the crazies are going to attempt to drag us through their dysfunction. We cannot engage with them on their terms of violence. That would be a mistake. We need to change the socio-economic conditions on the ground that created MAGA because, as Bandy X. Lee the forensic Psychiatrist, Yale professor and UN violence prevention expert points out, the loss of their Orange Messiah is going to hit them hard. You cannot argue with the fundamentals of a person's religion, and that is what MAGA is -- a religion. Trump will be gone soon, so we need to allow the MAGAs to recover on their own while the rest of us (the majority) figure out how to put the pieces of America back together again and work to solve our real problems .
For whatever reason, both the NYT and WaPo have devoted considerable resources to 1) head line writers who distort the content of news articles to emphasize negative things about Democrats (e.g. the recent “presidents without ties” take on the Clinton, Obama, Biden fundraiser) and 2) conservative opinionators up to and including torture advocates (Marc Theissen). So it’s not hard, reading the legacy media, to see what the authoritarian anti-democracy party thinks about almost anything. Finally, let’s not forget Rupert Murdoch who has done more to misinform and create hatred than any army of Russian trolls could hope to do.
I was going to say I wish you didn't have this one behind a paywall because it's important to get it out there. But then I saw your comment about the Newsmaxers not coming and spamming you in the comments since they don't subscribe, so I understand. But I think it's very important to get the message out there that covering the bad-faith authoritarian argument in equal time with the good-faith democracy-supporting argument is bad. And failing to do that is not bias, it's supporting truth.
A great exposition of the problems. There was a time when media were more about objective truth and facts and the debate was about going forward. But Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite are not walking through the door anytime soon.
Still, I think that media in the US has always been driven by sensationalism and the tendency to lie or cover up lies to increase circulation…or buy into the narrative spin without checking facts. Remember the Maine! and stirring the pot for war with Spain was driven by Hearst. The media bought fully into the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident when there was a paucity of evidence. Only when the obvious happened in Vietnam (Tet in 1968) did the media wake up.
The piece missing from your argument is the media are driven by profit motive rather that objective truth and democracy. Within this paradigm it is about generating clicks and outrage to feed the adrenaline rush to maintain or increase subscriptions and ad revenue. Let’s be honest, data, facts, truth are often boring and do not sell. In the case of WaPo and NYT, it is about appearing balanced to avoid loss of a large subset of readers as to do otherwise would not be profit maximizing.
I am not sure how we exit this Orwellian descent into 1984 and Animal Farm, but we must keep hammering home data, facts, and objective truth for if we give up on that, then all is lost.
Thanks for the clear articulation of the problem; I have felt this way from the get-go. The first two comments (at the point I am typing, I am the third) both repeat the assertion that "the MSM cannot be objective because the desire for profits is what drives them."
Let me say at the outset that I don't watch TV news, mainstream or cable, except in snippets I see referenced in "print" (included pixeled) stories. So I can't speak to how they are dealing with this problem.
I've always wondered if that profit motive is the reason for the "bothsides" coverage we have been seeing (which is, btw, diminishing ever since SOTU, at least. See below). How many trumpites actually read the NYT or WaPo or are tempted to do so by things like the Times/Sienna poll. I very much doubt they get many subscribers. I can't speak to what would happen to ad revenue if they focused on objectivity but I'm guessing not much: it seems unlikely that many of their advertisers are so pro-Trump that they would forego the major audience for their ads provided by at least the larger MSM. In short, blaming it all on profit-mongering is really a knee-jerk statement to the idea that "if it's a corporation it must be bad." That is as lacking in analysis as anything Hannity might say.
I have also felt that an trump-lie bias shows up most in the headlines. The STORIES often point out the problems with the reactionary aspect of whatever they are reporting on. And there seems to be a fight going on, at least in the NYT, about those headlines. People have been complaining (me too!) and the headlines have been changing in what I hope is response. And just yesterday there was an example of a difference in the slant of headlines that also shows the fight I posit.
My "breaking news" email said, about the new Times/Sienna poll, said. "President Biden has nearly erased Donald Trump’s early polling advantage, according to a new Times/Siena survey." The fact that trump is still ahead in this poll was given secondary place. By the time I got to the paper itself the headline was "Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll." That is still a headline that focuses on Biden's success, not on trump's continuing lead in that particular poll.
I don't have any trouble with MSM printing op-eds that push a more trumpite view. That is the place to "cover" the issues dear to the hearts of the cult, not that I suspect many of those folks read them. As with any op-ed or other opinion, I evaluate based on whether or not the writer makes a reasoned argument and supports it with evidence. Based on the comments from readers on this kind of thing, so do a lot of other people who bother to read newspapers, as opposed to headlines, at all.
I myself think that the problem of "biased" coverage of the Kingdom of Lies is way less pursuit of profits that it is with a leadership still caught up with a completely outdated paradigm-- the "both sides" coverage appropriate when both sides operated from truth but had differing interpretations of that truth. For so long the word "lies" was absent from stories: now you see it regularly.
WaPo has a fact checking component regularly published (at least online)---the famous Pinocchios. I don't know that other MSM does that as a regular feature: they undoubtedly should.
At the very outset of the Big Lie--the simple claim of "rigged" one could say that the facts were unclear even if the claims were really improbable. So "Trump claims election was rigged" COULD have been based on fact. Of course, it wasn't, and each part of the lie has been thoroughly investigated and I don't know there is an MSM outlet that still claims it is true. At best you see surveys of how many people still believe the lie, and those are now saying "lie" in their reporting of even that.
The problem of the alternate-facts media and its divisiveness is real. Not longer is there a Walter Cronkite that everyone watches and trusts to give the facts that one can then interpret differently from ones rational Republican uncle. But it is clear that those media are in the business of making money, not reporting news and will say anything for eyeballs or clicks. Once upon a time Fox's newsroom did some accurate reporting--but those reporters are long gone and Fox is dominated by opinionators rather than news (apparently "news" there has to do with "dumbing down Scrabble".) But as I said at the outset, I very much doubt that MSM turning more objective would actually move people away from it towards the alt-facts folks, since I don't think the alt-facts folks were much consumers of MSM in the first place. They go to the alt-facts media for their entertainment value--Fox is the ultimate "reality show" ---and for validation of their emotional response spurred on by the blatherings of the GOP mis-leaders.
I agree with your analysis in the context of defending truth and democracy, which are things that political scientists and 'discerning readers' like us (thanks for the compliment) care about. However, are they what most people (and even discerning readers) care about the most? Do most people (and again us) really care first and foremost about defending democracy? If so, why the real concern that many leftish voters will sit on their hands or vote for a third party because of Biden's policy on Israel?
Shouldn't they also see the looming danger and make it an absolute priority? And would they be swayed by more exposure of Trump's perfidy from the NY Times? I have my doubts.
People have views on a wide range of topics that they care about more than how they are governed. In that perspective, it may be that the balance that should be restored is not between democrats and fascists, but among diverse reasonable points of view on the wide range of questions that people care about. And this is where your note 3 about the skew in mainstream media becomes important. As shown by objective textual analysis (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/14/american-journalism-sounds-much-more-democratic-than-republican), the language in most US mainstream media on a range of topics reflects left leaning ideas more than right leaning ones, and increasingly so since Trump's election in 2016. So people with different views than let's say standard postmodern liberalism see themselves less and less represented, not only in politics but in all aspects of their lives. I don't know about PBS but I can confidently predict that a textual analysis of our national broadcaster in Canada would reveal that same leftward bias, even though they also do excellent work that I greatly appreciate. This is what I think the commentator on PBS bias, and other figures focused more on the liberal skew in academia (Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff come to mind) are really worried about. I think they have a point.
Another reason to think differently about the balance question is that nobody has a monopoly on the truth. Objectivity is not a property of individuals but of a system that provides the rules and incentives for individuals to engage in a reasonable debate about reality. Also, objective truth is elusive when dealing with wicked issues that are bound up with people's values rather than facts. We will never know what Rona McDaniels would have said on NBC, but maybe she would have said some things that would help us shape our view of reality. I can't say it better than Dan Gardner (from his substack https://dgardner.substack.com/p/on-kahneman-and-complexity):
'There is value, however modest, to be found in almost every view, and if we assiduously collect these bits and pieces of value, we will get more knowledgeable, our thinking will get more complex, and we will see reality a little more clearly. And our thinking, more often than not, will avoid the extremes.'
It may well be that the situation is too far gone and that the November disaster will happen, in which case ringing the alarm loudly is warranted. However, it is not too late to think about how the social fabric can be repaired in the aftermath.
What is a lie, as opposed to an opinion? Robert Trivers, “The Folly of Fools”, notes that people are self-deceived and/or suffer from induced self-deception (someone has convinced them that “alternative facts” are true facts). Is a self-deceived person a liar? I would say he is not lying, he just believes things that are not true.
Concerning “authoritarian liars”, 1) for the liar aspect, many fall into the same category of self-deceived people who believe what they say is true. 2) And to the authoritarian, I agree with Karen Stenner’s definition of an authoritarian: a person who is psychologically predisposed to be intolerant of diversity. Being “predisposed” is a brick short of being predetermined. Robert Sapolsky (“Determined; The Science of Life Without Free Will”) would say authoritarians are who they are because of their genetics and the environment that shaped them.
Brian, you used the word “banality” which congers Hannah Arendt’s comment about “the banality of evil.” Arendt wasn’t a psychologist, but still she should have known that evil (sociopaths and psychopaths) can appear very banal. What Arendt focused on as to the source of the banality of evil is the inability to think. Are these people unable or unwilling to “think” or are they predisposed (see book of that title by Hibbing, Smith and Alford) or “determined” such that they cannot think? Then there is Camus who succinctly said that we get into the habit of living before we get accustomed to thinking.
So, when asked “Do you think?” that is actually a deep question. The way I see NPR is that they are trying to think.
Brian, I agree that the press has a responsibility to truth and democracy and that responsibility overrides worries about perception. Unfortunately, the need to turn a profit overrides that responsibility to truth and democracy. Divorcing that profit motive from journalistic duties is certainly beyond me. Alternatively, hasn't that tension always existed for a free press in this country?
This is a fascinating and fairly exhaustive analysis of the problem. But as always, it's a part of cyclical history and closely mimics the manipulation of the press just prior to and during the entire reign of Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini himself was a prior journalist, author and self-declared intellectual who was extremely astute in the manipulation of the media. Even more so than Trump. And sadly, given the outcome in Italian politics and the reign of fascism there, bodes poorly for our future. This is an excellent article on how it played out in Italy between 1929 and 1945.
Wouldn't giving air time to loonies from either side of politics in combination of clear and objective alternative arguments have the effect of the loonies discrediting themselves by looking ridiculous?
I've always thought of NPR as meaning "Nice, Polite, Republicans." They seem to bend over backwards to include the rightwing even if that meant treating lies as reasonable opinions.
Frankly, I've given up on the newspapers of record, NY Times, WaPo, to investigate the real sources of American problems. There's simply too much money to be made from political-psychological thriller stories and click-bait narratives based on the Trump's latest lies and "Wacko -Joe-MAGA-goes-to-Congress" stories. Are J.D. Vance and MTG involved in a steamy three-way hookup with Lauren Boebert? What really happens in those private rooms at Mar-a-Lago after Trump's parties? Is Texas about to turn its state into Handmaid Central? Whose memory is fading more rapidly, Biden's or Trump's?
The unavoidable realities facing America are many: climate change, economic stratification, the ending of ordinary religion and the rise of fanatical religiosity, failure of U.S. capitalism to provide for everyone goods and services at a fair price (food, housing, health care).
Government at large scale only exists by the consent of the people. By definition, the operating norms of a modern government like that in the U.S. are so complex that ordinary folks cannot be expected to understand how they operate. Government exists because of the trust of the people. If the trust goes, the nation collapses. Trump has a death wish and now want the world to collapse into anarchy because his cunning self feels he has a better chance at survival there than in a world based on law and order.
MAGA adherents are living in a dreamworld where they believe idiots can effectively rule, as long as the right opponents/enemies are eliminated. But it's all just a white male power fantasy. One way or another though, the crazies are going to attempt to drag us through their dysfunction. We cannot engage with them on their terms of violence. That would be a mistake. We need to change the socio-economic conditions on the ground that created MAGA because, as Bandy X. Lee the forensic Psychiatrist, Yale professor and UN violence prevention expert points out, the loss of their Orange Messiah is going to hit them hard. You cannot argue with the fundamentals of a person's religion, and that is what MAGA is -- a religion. Trump will be gone soon, so we need to allow the MAGAs to recover on their own while the rest of us (the majority) figure out how to put the pieces of America back together again and work to solve our real problems .
For whatever reason, both the NYT and WaPo have devoted considerable resources to 1) head line writers who distort the content of news articles to emphasize negative things about Democrats (e.g. the recent “presidents without ties” take on the Clinton, Obama, Biden fundraiser) and 2) conservative opinionators up to and including torture advocates (Marc Theissen). So it’s not hard, reading the legacy media, to see what the authoritarian anti-democracy party thinks about almost anything. Finally, let’s not forget Rupert Murdoch who has done more to misinform and create hatred than any army of Russian trolls could hope to do.
I was going to say I wish you didn't have this one behind a paywall because it's important to get it out there. But then I saw your comment about the Newsmaxers not coming and spamming you in the comments since they don't subscribe, so I understand. But I think it's very important to get the message out there that covering the bad-faith authoritarian argument in equal time with the good-faith democracy-supporting argument is bad. And failing to do that is not bias, it's supporting truth.
A great exposition of the problems. There was a time when media were more about objective truth and facts and the debate was about going forward. But Edward R Murrow and Walter Cronkite are not walking through the door anytime soon.
Still, I think that media in the US has always been driven by sensationalism and the tendency to lie or cover up lies to increase circulation…or buy into the narrative spin without checking facts. Remember the Maine! and stirring the pot for war with Spain was driven by Hearst. The media bought fully into the “Gulf of Tonkin” incident when there was a paucity of evidence. Only when the obvious happened in Vietnam (Tet in 1968) did the media wake up.
The piece missing from your argument is the media are driven by profit motive rather that objective truth and democracy. Within this paradigm it is about generating clicks and outrage to feed the adrenaline rush to maintain or increase subscriptions and ad revenue. Let’s be honest, data, facts, truth are often boring and do not sell. In the case of WaPo and NYT, it is about appearing balanced to avoid loss of a large subset of readers as to do otherwise would not be profit maximizing.
I am not sure how we exit this Orwellian descent into 1984 and Animal Farm, but we must keep hammering home data, facts, and objective truth for if we give up on that, then all is lost.
Thanks for the clear articulation of the problem; I have felt this way from the get-go. The first two comments (at the point I am typing, I am the third) both repeat the assertion that "the MSM cannot be objective because the desire for profits is what drives them."
Let me say at the outset that I don't watch TV news, mainstream or cable, except in snippets I see referenced in "print" (included pixeled) stories. So I can't speak to how they are dealing with this problem.
I've always wondered if that profit motive is the reason for the "bothsides" coverage we have been seeing (which is, btw, diminishing ever since SOTU, at least. See below). How many trumpites actually read the NYT or WaPo or are tempted to do so by things like the Times/Sienna poll. I very much doubt they get many subscribers. I can't speak to what would happen to ad revenue if they focused on objectivity but I'm guessing not much: it seems unlikely that many of their advertisers are so pro-Trump that they would forego the major audience for their ads provided by at least the larger MSM. In short, blaming it all on profit-mongering is really a knee-jerk statement to the idea that "if it's a corporation it must be bad." That is as lacking in analysis as anything Hannity might say.
I have also felt that an trump-lie bias shows up most in the headlines. The STORIES often point out the problems with the reactionary aspect of whatever they are reporting on. And there seems to be a fight going on, at least in the NYT, about those headlines. People have been complaining (me too!) and the headlines have been changing in what I hope is response. And just yesterday there was an example of a difference in the slant of headlines that also shows the fight I posit.
My "breaking news" email said, about the new Times/Sienna poll, said. "President Biden has nearly erased Donald Trump’s early polling advantage, according to a new Times/Siena survey." The fact that trump is still ahead in this poll was given secondary place. By the time I got to the paper itself the headline was "Biden Shrinks Trump’s Edge in Latest Times/Siena Poll." That is still a headline that focuses on Biden's success, not on trump's continuing lead in that particular poll.
I don't have any trouble with MSM printing op-eds that push a more trumpite view. That is the place to "cover" the issues dear to the hearts of the cult, not that I suspect many of those folks read them. As with any op-ed or other opinion, I evaluate based on whether or not the writer makes a reasoned argument and supports it with evidence. Based on the comments from readers on this kind of thing, so do a lot of other people who bother to read newspapers, as opposed to headlines, at all.
I myself think that the problem of "biased" coverage of the Kingdom of Lies is way less pursuit of profits that it is with a leadership still caught up with a completely outdated paradigm-- the "both sides" coverage appropriate when both sides operated from truth but had differing interpretations of that truth. For so long the word "lies" was absent from stories: now you see it regularly.
WaPo has a fact checking component regularly published (at least online)---the famous Pinocchios. I don't know that other MSM does that as a regular feature: they undoubtedly should.
At the very outset of the Big Lie--the simple claim of "rigged" one could say that the facts were unclear even if the claims were really improbable. So "Trump claims election was rigged" COULD have been based on fact. Of course, it wasn't, and each part of the lie has been thoroughly investigated and I don't know there is an MSM outlet that still claims it is true. At best you see surveys of how many people still believe the lie, and those are now saying "lie" in their reporting of even that.
The problem of the alternate-facts media and its divisiveness is real. Not longer is there a Walter Cronkite that everyone watches and trusts to give the facts that one can then interpret differently from ones rational Republican uncle. But it is clear that those media are in the business of making money, not reporting news and will say anything for eyeballs or clicks. Once upon a time Fox's newsroom did some accurate reporting--but those reporters are long gone and Fox is dominated by opinionators rather than news (apparently "news" there has to do with "dumbing down Scrabble".) But as I said at the outset, I very much doubt that MSM turning more objective would actually move people away from it towards the alt-facts folks, since I don't think the alt-facts folks were much consumers of MSM in the first place. They go to the alt-facts media for their entertainment value--Fox is the ultimate "reality show" ---and for validation of their emotional response spurred on by the blatherings of the GOP mis-leaders.
__________________________________________________________
I agree with your analysis in the context of defending truth and democracy, which are things that political scientists and 'discerning readers' like us (thanks for the compliment) care about. However, are they what most people (and even discerning readers) care about the most? Do most people (and again us) really care first and foremost about defending democracy? If so, why the real concern that many leftish voters will sit on their hands or vote for a third party because of Biden's policy on Israel?
Shouldn't they also see the looming danger and make it an absolute priority? And would they be swayed by more exposure of Trump's perfidy from the NY Times? I have my doubts.
People have views on a wide range of topics that they care about more than how they are governed. In that perspective, it may be that the balance that should be restored is not between democrats and fascists, but among diverse reasonable points of view on the wide range of questions that people care about. And this is where your note 3 about the skew in mainstream media becomes important. As shown by objective textual analysis (https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/12/14/american-journalism-sounds-much-more-democratic-than-republican), the language in most US mainstream media on a range of topics reflects left leaning ideas more than right leaning ones, and increasingly so since Trump's election in 2016. So people with different views than let's say standard postmodern liberalism see themselves less and less represented, not only in politics but in all aspects of their lives. I don't know about PBS but I can confidently predict that a textual analysis of our national broadcaster in Canada would reveal that same leftward bias, even though they also do excellent work that I greatly appreciate. This is what I think the commentator on PBS bias, and other figures focused more on the liberal skew in academia (Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff come to mind) are really worried about. I think they have a point.
Another reason to think differently about the balance question is that nobody has a monopoly on the truth. Objectivity is not a property of individuals but of a system that provides the rules and incentives for individuals to engage in a reasonable debate about reality. Also, objective truth is elusive when dealing with wicked issues that are bound up with people's values rather than facts. We will never know what Rona McDaniels would have said on NBC, but maybe she would have said some things that would help us shape our view of reality. I can't say it better than Dan Gardner (from his substack https://dgardner.substack.com/p/on-kahneman-and-complexity):
'There is value, however modest, to be found in almost every view, and if we assiduously collect these bits and pieces of value, we will get more knowledgeable, our thinking will get more complex, and we will see reality a little more clearly. And our thinking, more often than not, will avoid the extremes.'
It may well be that the situation is too far gone and that the November disaster will happen, in which case ringing the alarm loudly is warranted. However, it is not too late to think about how the social fabric can be repaired in the aftermath.
clearly written and helpful. Thanks.
I generally agree, but…
What is a lie, as opposed to an opinion? Robert Trivers, “The Folly of Fools”, notes that people are self-deceived and/or suffer from induced self-deception (someone has convinced them that “alternative facts” are true facts). Is a self-deceived person a liar? I would say he is not lying, he just believes things that are not true.
Concerning “authoritarian liars”, 1) for the liar aspect, many fall into the same category of self-deceived people who believe what they say is true. 2) And to the authoritarian, I agree with Karen Stenner’s definition of an authoritarian: a person who is psychologically predisposed to be intolerant of diversity. Being “predisposed” is a brick short of being predetermined. Robert Sapolsky (“Determined; The Science of Life Without Free Will”) would say authoritarians are who they are because of their genetics and the environment that shaped them.
Brian, you used the word “banality” which congers Hannah Arendt’s comment about “the banality of evil.” Arendt wasn’t a psychologist, but still she should have known that evil (sociopaths and psychopaths) can appear very banal. What Arendt focused on as to the source of the banality of evil is the inability to think. Are these people unable or unwilling to “think” or are they predisposed (see book of that title by Hibbing, Smith and Alford) or “determined” such that they cannot think? Then there is Camus who succinctly said that we get into the habit of living before we get accustomed to thinking.
So, when asked “Do you think?” that is actually a deep question. The way I see NPR is that they are trying to think.
Brian, I agree that the press has a responsibility to truth and democracy and that responsibility overrides worries about perception. Unfortunately, the need to turn a profit overrides that responsibility to truth and democracy. Divorcing that profit motive from journalistic duties is certainly beyond me. Alternatively, hasn't that tension always existed for a free press in this country?
This is a fascinating and fairly exhaustive analysis of the problem. But as always, it's a part of cyclical history and closely mimics the manipulation of the press just prior to and during the entire reign of Mussolini in Italy. Mussolini himself was a prior journalist, author and self-declared intellectual who was extremely astute in the manipulation of the media. Even more so than Trump. And sadly, given the outcome in Italian politics and the reign of fascism there, bodes poorly for our future. This is an excellent article on how it played out in Italy between 1929 and 1945.
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/mussolini-press
Wouldn't giving air time to loonies from either side of politics in combination of clear and objective alternative arguments have the effect of the loonies discrediting themselves by looking ridiculous?
I've always thought of NPR as meaning "Nice, Polite, Republicans." They seem to bend over backwards to include the rightwing even if that meant treating lies as reasonable opinions.