Provided it can stick to that, I'm all for it. But the landscape has become a lot more partisan/ideological in the last 10 years, particularly at universities, so I understand why people are skeptical/concerned. One also wonders what's going on in journalism programs around the country that is allowing for so much unabashedly propagandist content to be pushed out under the guise of "journalism"?
What if the propagandists are portraying it that way, in order to create that skepticism/concern. They do delegitimize one institution after another: Journalism, education, government, etc. - these are the big ones.
> so much unabashedly propagandist content to be pushed out under the guise of "journalism"?
If you are talking about opinion columns/segments, I agree it's there. But most straight news from major sources is impressively straight, IME.
Younger journalists are less likely to see their job as being a neutral arbiter of truth and more likely to see themselves as part of the culture war.
I'm a liberal but just as the ACLU is not the same organization it was 20 years ago, neither is The Gray Lady.
That's a great way of phrasing it, because it speaks to the economic reality.
You don't get hired as an independent or investigative journalist anymore, at the start of your career.
You do get hired as a content magnet for eyeballs.
This has always been a tension, but it's been exacerbated by the destruction of traditional news funding models and substitution of Facebook and Google ad networks.
So quite literally, the job is fanning the flames of culture war, regardless of how you feel personally. Because that's where the money is. And that's what you're being paid to do.
Bias exists in media to be sure, but one "side" in this country is completely off the rails; assaults truth, trafficks in conspiracy theories, and has generally adopted the fomenting of distrust, fear, hate and anger as its MO in its efforts to accumulate power.
Any effort to counter their disinfo or merely state the truth results in accusations of bias and aggressive attacks.
At the end of the day, any remedy relies on some degree of good faith on the part of the actors and, thus, some adherence to a social contract.
Otherwise, everything (including things meant for the public good, like objective broadcasting) gets ground through the culture war machine. And that's where we are in the U.S.
I’m a liberal American, and our public broadcasting (NPR and PBS) absolutely do have a liberal bias. It’s not as extreme as some outlets, but it’s certainly left-of-center (relative to the US political spectrum).
> Bias exists in media to be sure, but one "side" in this country is completely off the rails; assaults truth, trafficks in conspiracy theories, and has generally adopted the fomenting of distrust, fear, hate and anger as its MO in its efforts to accumulate power.
I agree with this as a statement of fact (though I frame it as an epistemological crisis brought on by the aggressive politicization of left-dominated institutions) but I really hate how my side uses it as an excuse to backslide. “We only have to be a little bit better than the other side, no need to move forward, blame everything on the Republicans no matter how tenuous.” This sort of race-to-the-bottom thinking is exactly what is wrong with American politics. The Republican side is broken and the Democrats will deflect any constructive criticism by pointing at the Republicans (and similarly progressives/liberals deflect to conservatives). We have to destroy the Republicans before we can consider improving/restoring ourselves.
> You do get hired as a content magnet for eyeballs
I get the idea and can imagine it, but I wonder what the reality is. Do you happen to be in journalism?
Journalism as a field maybe can help us arrive at some truths eventually, but it's an iterative process of correction and evolving understanding that never ends. However, individual journalists being arbiters of the truth is just not what part of their job description. How could it be? They cannot collect all the facts, and even if they could, they couldn't report them all to the public because there are too many. So by definition journalists have to decide which stories to pursue and which facts to report, and also how to report them. You can say they should do so in as unbiased a way as possible, and I agree, but the very nature of their job involves making biased decisions.
Also, not all journalists are reporters, just as not all programmers are webdevs. There are all kinds of journalists including editors, curatorial journalists, investigative journalists, opinion columnists, photojournalists etc. Yes straight facts are nice, but I also need some analysis to help me form a nuanced opinion. A fact can tell you something, but it won't lead you to all the implications of that thing.
I think photojournalism is a great example of what I'm talking about. On its face, a photograph is a straight fact. It's a picture of a thing that happened. But the framing, composition, and editing of a photograph essentially encodes a bias, and can equally obscure or reveal the truth. And that's a good thing IMO, I want to see through the photojournalist's perspective when I look at their work. But it's still just one perspective, so I realize it may not be the truth. Recognizing that bias exists, all people have it, and to some degree it always comes through in their work, is part of finding the truth.
So, if there were two sides in a story and, say, an investgative journalist unearthed and presented some fact that resolved the matter, then you might loosely say that journalist was an arbiter of truth on behalf of the public by simply presenting the fact. This was true even as little as a decade ago. And it might have even been considered pedantic to distinguish between journalist as presenter or arbiter.
But this is no longer the case. We are now in an age where people actively refute facts and deny reality itself. They sell the idea that the audience can choose what's true. So when the same journalist presents a fact, he is then accused of bias and becomes a part of the story. Thus, even simple truths have now become debatable to the point that merely presenting them can be cast as arbitration, as if these facts are subjective, thus there is still some matter to be decided.
It's just the Northeast of the US: NYT, WSJ, Washington Post; and of course NY is the center of journalism (as with many things), and Washington and NY are the leading centers of power and therefore news. There are no equivalent west coast or southeast news sources.
However, don't forget that the largest 'publication', or publisher, is Murdoch: Fox, Wall Street Journal, etc. And that is right-wing and the most biased.
The influence of the coasts has been remarked on for a long time, but I think with the Internet it's actually a much improved situation: People easily get news from all over the country and the world. Everyone can read the BBC and much more (including Russian sources, without even knowing it! :) ), and they also get their news, for good or ill, from random people worldwide! :P
> journalists for the largest publications are overwhelmingly far more left-wing than the rest of the country
That assumes the personal political beliefs have a large effect on their jobs.
Now a days, it’s become a circle jerk on who can get the most twitter likes, they follow and retweet people of their same political side, get multi million salaries, have zero idea of what the common peasant is going through, journalists sit in their ivory tower and look down upon the peasants for not doing the same “sophisticated” things. Smugness and being condescending is a norm in journalist circles.
The best journalist of modern world is rotting in a prison cell in the UK being extradited to the US while the journalists carry water for politicians and how mean tweets is somehow a threat to their press freedoms of lies. They lie and flip flop on all issues and then when the facts come out, they act as if they were never wrong and corrections are printed ignored by everyone, damage is already done.
"The battle is won when the average American regards a corporate journalist exactly as they regard a tobacco executive." - Michael Malice
I won't dispute that someone like Assange is good to have around, but I'm not sure I would ever consider him the best journalist in the world. Part of being a good journalist is looking at the motivations of your sources and looking for and examining the information you're not getting as much as the information you are. To accept and release everything uncritically while also hiding sources reduces some of the useful information that people would use to slot that information into where they think it should go.
For example, if CNN were to start regurgitating information directly provided by Google's or Apple's PR departments without criticism and people found out, they would be justifiably upset with those organizations for failing to do their job. That's why it's important that information from those entities is attributed to them.
That's not to say I think confidential sources should be outed, just that Wikileaks ended up inadvertently scrubbing a lot of this information from the data presented. Presenting everything you have is a noble goal, but only really works as intended when it's what you've uncovered yourself, and not what someone else gives to you.
Employment and salaries in journalism have dropped precipitously.
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/347691-matt-lauer-and-and...
https://www.thestreet.com/lifestyle/highest-paid-news-anchor...
https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/don-lemon-chris-cuo...
Also not exactly salary but the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> “The Atlantic needs to make $50 million in annual subscription revenue in order to break even, according to Thompson. Hitting that target has become more complicated since Trump left the White House and the pandemic let up. New subscribers are coming in at about a quarter of the rate they did last year (10,000 a month, on average), and the magazine faces challenges keeping some of its existing audience, which may have less of a need for The Atlantic’s journalism in a post-Trump, post-Covid world. Without Trump or the pandemic, the path to $50 million is significantly harder. Since February, the magazine has brought in about 10,000 subscribers a month — roughly analogous to its growth rate before the pandemic. Meanwhile, its retention rate for existing subscribers is about 75 to 80 percent, Thompson said. The net result, according to Thompson’s presentation, is not growth. It’s a static or slightly declining subscriber base.”
> the operating budgets of these corporations is massive.
> $50 million
$50 million is not a massive budget.
The right likes to push this idea of universities as brainwashing factories, but there's very little of that going on given that its usually a struggle to get everyone to do the assigned reading, let alone try to brainwash people.
I understand some students are lazy. But that's what an F is for. Even in undergrad, I valued my time and tuition dollars more than that.
As my father told a student who complained about a D in his course: "No, I didn't give you a D. You earned a D. I would have given you an F."
(Went to GT and had family who taught undergrad and grad, so might have different perspective on expectations)
Wow. I would say IME people were transformed from unengaged and ignorant to skilled critical thinkers. YMMV, and it it may depend on college and major, but they couldn't make it through liberal arts classes "brainless and all thinking the same things"; they'd fail.
People do realize that you don't have to choose between the regressive, anti-intellectual right and the regressive, anti-intellectual left, correct? Every time someone criticizes the left, some left-wing person argues that the right-wing is worse as though there isn't a moderate option. We have to choose between overt left-wing propaganda and overt right-wing propaganda--we can't have a media apparatus that at least pays lip service to objectivity and neutrality like we have had for the last few decades.
I agree with 'don't'; the idea that everything is politicized propaganda is a tool of the propagandists, like a liar saying 'everyone lies'.
The right-wing opinion on universities and college graduates shifted around the same time that college graduates stopped being a strong GOP constituency.
I personally think both of these have happened. I bristle at the inference that only one of them is taking place.
Many, including possibly you based on comments so far, are enchanted with the idea that one side is correct always and another side is wrong always.
I think this is the root of the problem - a meta problem where communication has broken down - because the go-to discussion technique is to quote a gish-like succession of cherry-picked examples so the conclusion of the conversation can be one side is always wrong and another side is always right.
Said another way, any conclusion that ascribes traits to "the left" or "the right" is exactly the sort of stuff I would hope a News Literacy course teaches you to discredit.
I think the problem is twofold, political parties are followed as if they are sports teams, and due to shrinking advertising revenues the news media dishes everything with a massive helping of hyperbole. For example, which US political party has a majority of its registered votes in support of gay marriage? The answer is both, but that doesn't get acknowledged in the media.
The article is a few years old, but by most measures, the Democratic party has been moving from the center-right toward the center-left, making it a relatively centrist party on the global stage, while the Republican party has remained firmly right-wing.
Your comment appears to be true, but what we're seeing may simply be America rebalancing herself for the first time since the lead-up to the Cold War.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/solutions-to-political-...
It would seem unsurprising that the end result of this, upon pulling the "center" of each party towards its own extreme, is essentially what we've seen -- ~50% of conservatives now believe in vaccine/pandemic conspiracy theories, vs liberals support some extremists at the local level, but also continue to support centrists like Biden at the national level.
They wouldn't be pulled to extremes, they'd already be there. However, most research shows it's the right that's moved far. Look at Trumpism and compare that to prior conservative leaders, such as GW Bush, GHW Bush, Reagan, Ford .... Biden fits right in with Clinton and Obama.
> liberals support some extremists at the local level
What extremists? There are people farther left than Biden, but nobody trying to seize power from the people, letting a deadly pandemic spread for political reasons, backing arrest and brutality toward their political enemies, etc.
It's not balanced; if Amy punches Bob, it's not even-handed to blame both of them. If Amy burns down the house, it's not even-handed to say 'we're all crazy'.
I see Trumpism as a cause, not a symptom.
The right was casting about for a leader after McCain and Romney (both centrists) lost to Obama. Trump (and allies) spoke loudest, and so pulled the "party truth" to the right for the Republican party.
Those Republicans who disagreed (of whom there were many) left politics or stopped speaking publicly about their disagreement. Or, over time, began to agree with the party line. Little tent politics.
> What extremists?
There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
My comment wasn't sharing blame. It was remarking on the fundamentally different organizations that the right and the left run, and who they allow to speak.
Fair enough, and I think that's a valuable point. However, I think the following is too:
>> What extremists?
> There's a well known group, who you can probably find by seeing who's on the Fox News homepage right now, who says things would would be considered far left.
> And yet, Biden still calls these people crazy and says no to the more extreme policy proposals. Big tent politics.
I don't think they are extremists, but if you can name some and their extreme policies, I'd go with it. Fox isn't a great source for deciding what is 'far left'.
But to talk about policies, I would call defunding all police, complete student loan forgiveness, banning nuclear power and crude exports, and opposing market based carbon taxes extremist.
This post is an excellent example of information to not trust.
That depends on all of the time frame (are you talking from the height of the mid-to-late-1990s “neoliberal consensus” where the DNC had shifted sharply right on economic issues compared to its previous positions, and when—due in part to the economic boom, broader in reach down the distributional ladder than subsequent expansions—racial issues were at a historically low salience, or some other time), and your political frame of reference (a fix set of policy stands defining degree of left/right-ness, or comparison to evolving global or developed-world standards), and what you are calling “the left” and “the right” that have moved (are you talking about the nth-percentile position in the electorate, are you talking the median position in each of the major parties [and, if so, are you looking at the party-in-the-electorate or the party-in-government], etc.)
And, as with most identity-charged issues, standard selection tends to be biased by the desired outcome (either directly and consciously, or because of worldview, e.g., a conservative will be biased toward the constant-policy rather than evolving-international-norms standard in measuring how far to the right or left things in the US are.)
It doesn't take too long in research-land to appreciate that ideologies are merely abstractions; they're tools to help us understand and discuss the real world.
The people with blind ideological faith are mostly uneducated (and perhaps undergrads), but the academics know how messy the world actually is and love to talk about the jagged, contradictory bits that don't line up with our current models of thought.
What if it's not?
> What if cutting taxes doesn't pay for itself?
If only we had some kind of experiments in the 20th century that showed what systems lead to impoverishment and hunger. Or better yet two centuries of scientific inquiries and refutations of crank economics on logical grounds. Like you know, Marxism, whose incoherency is shown by left, right, and center authors alike. Or imagine, we knew MMT is neither a theory nor modern but a reincarnation of some disproved ideas of old.
It’s basically the same logic as selling merchandise at low cost. How does the government make money? Volume!
Seriously. The argument is that cutting taxes will spur economic growth that will grow the economy so much, that the loss in revenues will be made up by economic growth. i.e Tax cuts pay for themselves.
There is actually ample evidence that this doesn’t actually work, or at least hasn’t worked in 40 years. (Diminishing returns and whatnot.) I’d go so far as to argue that some supporters of this policy even know this because it gave cover for their real goal of simply cutting social programs under the guise of “we can’t afford it”.
> The argument is that cutting taxes will spur economic growth
So what do I care for some abstract growth? If my well-being isn't rising, and it isn't if you take away through taxes, excises, indirect taxes half of what I earn with hard toil, not interested.
> cover for their real goal of simply cutting social programs under the guise of “we can’t afford it”
And that's a good thing.
I find the government functions very well given it's necessarily a large institution (which all are bureaucratic and inefficient, including businesses) and perpetual (it can't go out of business and be replaced, but we do replace management!). Transportation infrastructure (roads, airports, etc.), food safety, education, science (NASA, NSF, NIH), courts, military, regulation of banks, national parks, etc. etc. Think of NASA - the greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody even close - is a government agency.
Government's biggest problem is the lack of participation from citizens and obstruction from the GOP. The post office delivered my mail fine for my entire life until the neo-reactionaries got hold of it and (intentionally, I think) ruined it.
"Too bad, but it's your monarch. He's anointed by God. You must care about him".
Not really a very strong argument.
> Think of NASA - the greatest explorers in the history of humanity, with nobody even close - is a government agency.
USSR had dozens of space projects, all by a government ministry. Doesn't mean you'd want to cherish the regime and all its inefficiencies & injustices.
And the Chinese government was building huge ghost cities where no-one lives at the greatest pace in human history, with nobody even close. Yet that isn't considered a positive achievement.
The thing is governments are taking resources out of economy. People don't devour money, they'd spend them or invest anyway (using their own scale of preferences). They could go to a cafe, sponsoring this industry, to a journey, buy a new car, start a new business. But after the central authority takes that much away, there will be that much less for the industries of people's preference. That means new people wouldn't be hired, new car models created and produced, new enterprises started; no new building would appear that otherwise could. And the central authority will at best build something useful at twice the price; because private citizens are motivated to be efficient, the state bureaucrats don't. And at worst, the funds will be squandered, directed to their oligarchic pals, stolen.
> "Too bad, but it's your monarch. He's anointed by God. You must care about him".
It's not a monarch. I assume you live in a democracy. The reason you think people are anointed is that you don't participate. I promise: Participate, especially in local politics, and you'll see how much government depends on citizen participation, and how powerless most people make themselves by bizarrely excluding themselves.
Get off Parler, or whatever and read a history book, because Reagan’s economic policies echo even today. Even without a labeled time axis, there are countless economic charts where you can easily pick out 1981.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, use the site as intended from now on, and drop the ideological warfare please. (No, we don't care which ideology you like or dislike. Either way, it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
Actually you're way, way over the bannable line already but I don't want to ban you and not the other person when as far as this thread goes you were behaving equally badly. If you don't want to be banned on HN, please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, use the site as intended from now on, and drop the ideological warfare please. (No, we don't care which ideology you like or dislike. Either way, it destroys what this site is supposed to be for.
I can afford to be more consistent. What attracted my attention to your post specifically (knock at conservative values aside) is the mentioning of tax cuts as if that's something terribly wrong. It's not.
The paper you've linked that allegedly is supposed to impress Americans, wouldn't anyone else. Authors' assumption for some reason (was it what Republicans promoted?) is that government doesn't have to be more thrifty and less wasteful. It reads: look, the government was just an inefficient juggernaut as usual, and the tax cuts put this behavior under risk.
Insatiable appetites of governments aside, tax cuts do pay off. And not only economically, but also in terms of bringing greater justice and better satisfaction of all but communists.
What do they mean by 'left-leaning'?: My professors might have been left-leaning, but I rarely knew their politics. The question is what the students are learning.
Also, conservatives have moved far rightward, which might make others relatively more leftish.
Also, reactionaries politicize lots of things, such as climate change. Education and research isn't affirmative action for conservatives - they need to prove their ideas. Climate change denial lacks the science behind it; it shouldn't be taught. That doesn't make climate change education biased toward liberals.
How does the book address those issues? Also, why do you trust that book (an honest question - I haven't heard of it)?
I don't think this is true, I think the left-wing media has fixated increasingly on the far-right or exaggerating the extent to which individuals on the right are "far-right" which gives the impression that the right is drifting, but it's just the media changing how it represents the right. To be clear, the right is changing, but it's not perceptibly drifting to the right.
> Also, reactionaries politicize lots of things, such as climate change. Education and research isn't affirmative action for conservatives - they need to prove their ideas. Climate change denial lacks the science behind it; it shouldn't be taught. That doesn't make climate change education biased toward liberals.
2 things:
1. We don't even need to invoke conservative beliefs (certainly we don't need to cherry-pick the most overtly anti-science of conservative beliefs), we can look at moderate liberal beliefs, like colorblind approaches to combatting racism which are equally vilified and actively suppressed.
2. If we're talking about "ideas competing in some marketplace" then why are the left so frequently resorting to cancellation of intellectuals rather than debate? E.g., consider all of the petitions to have professors fired or to have papers deleted from journals. And I'm not talking about dumb kids circulating petitions to have their professors fired, but university faculty circulating petitions to have their colleagues fired for ideological (not factual) transgressions.
But every time we talk about this, left-wing folks pretend that the debate is whether or not to allow creationism or climate denial in the classroom. This seems transparently disingenuous to me.
It would be convenient to denigrate those facts in some way, but they are there: Conservatives (generally) back climate change denial, which will cause generations of catastrophe.
> colorblind approaches to combatting racism which are equally vilified and actively suppressed
I don't agree they are "equally vilified" as the overt and covert racism of many on the right. I think "actively suppressed" lacks much basis or meaning except conservative repetition.
There is debate on left, that's true, and that's a good thing.
> why are the left so frequently resorting to cancellation of intellectuals rather than debate?
I don't agree that it's a phenomenon of the left; conservatives repeating that claim doesn't make it true (any more than climate change denial). Look at the conservative efforts to silence protestors (laws limiting protests, legalizing striking them with cars), professors (such as the right-wing donor at UNC, threats to and reductions of tenure at major universities), students (e.g., the football players at U of Texas), etc. Look at Colin Kaepernick, who the President of the United States attacked and who lost his career. Look at many executive branch employees, in Washington and the states, who were fired for telling the truth and following the law, and judges who were attacked for the same. Right-wing politicians and journalists who are destroyed for challenging Trump or reactionary dogma. Etc.
On the left, far-left voices are also getting louder, but I don't think the centrist-left voices have gotten quieter as much as their centrist-right counterparts.
The end result is that "the right" seems more right (in terms of speech) while "the left" seems... conflicted (in terms of speech).
Even if that's masking the underlying counts and beliefs.
I don't know if it's more or less charitable to suggest that they're primarily driven by revenue. The incentives are basically the same in that model, except the lean is audience-generated rather than centrally controlled. You'd expect more extreme positions on both sides, which is consistent with what you're saying.
A combination of both best fits the evidence, I think. You write controversial articles about both sides to get clicks, and write about the center of your side to get political support. So you get people on both sides with very skewed views (the far) of the other, and who think of their own side as idealogically diverse (the far) but grounded in reality (the center). If the media landscape is primarily liberal, you'd expect it to look the way you're describing it.
I really like that conclusion, because it's perfectly consistent with my experience. I don't really have evidence to support this, though, and I'm not sure how to go about getting any.
The "your centrist, but no other" political motivation (even if not economic) is a piece I missed.
I’m not a partisan. I spent most of my life as a registered Democrat and read the NYT every day as recently as 2012-2013. But wokeness has definitely taken over and the pretense of objectivity has been abandoned entirely.
[1] Other good examples: the “Asian hate crime” stuff. It was wall-to-wall “cultural studies” professors blaming “white supremacy” on CNN for weeks. As a card carrying asian it actually caused me to have a bit of an episode where I was questioning my own grip with reality. I literally reached out to Asians I know in NYC to be like “wait, you think this is mainly about homeless people and you want more police, right?” Like if you had just watched CNN coverage you wouldn’t even understand the forces (crime) that led to Eric Adams overwhelmingly winning the democratic nomination in NYC.
As an aside, in the legal profession, it’s probably the most monumental shift in legal ethics in centuries. E.g. proposed rule 8.5 which thankfully was voted down: https://reason.com/volokh/2020/01/06/a-new-aba-model-rule-8-.... I’ve heard internal gossip from the ACLU and similar organizations where younger lawyers are rebelling against representing longstanding clients for social justice reasons. It’s really quite remarkable.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/02/14/the-aclu-would-not-...
It’s bad. Professionals inserting their personal political views into their jobs is destroying public faith in other professions. We can’t risk the legal profession coming to be seen as yet another way for the liberal elite to tilt the very systems of society in favor of their political ideology.
Well, that guy did say that, whoever he is.
Fox News news was traditionally (and still is, from what I can tell) actual news. What's not declared is the transition from a "news" segment to an "opinion" segment.
People who weren't around forget than CNN up until ~1995 was literally just news, 24/7. Here's what's happening in the world.
Once Fox News launched and trends became clear, all 24/7 news channels switched to a blend of news and commentary. Because that's what the market preferred.
I think the move to opinion is more about influencing decisions of the viewership than giving them what they want. Fox started it right around 9/11 as an approach to drum up support for war, and it worked, and the rest saw how effective that was and adopted it cautiously, of course the common thread and my implication is that there are agendas that they all have that this approach helps them achieve better than just delivering information would.
> But most straight news from major sources is impressively straight, IME.
Your attitude is exactly why so many posters here are skeptical of the idea of "News Literacy". Whatever right-wingers are saying, there are good reasons to distrust institutions, including journalistic ones.
Any genuine "News Literacy" course will end up teaching radical skepticism. It certainly won't teach fealty to the noble and honorable professional journalists, which is what you seem to be suggesting.
> Most straight news from major sources is impressively straight
I haven't heard that. Do you know any research on it (edit: I understand if not)?
IME moderate liberals just adopt a position between the left and right, regardless of the positions. It's navigation, not opinion.
The progressive left thinks the NYT, for example, is conservative and corporate.
I'm sure some are, but in many cases they aren't. First of all, it's obvious to anyone observing from the outside, even absent propaganda. But it doesn't suffice to trust our intuition, so we can look to organizations like Heterodox Academy whose members are ideologically diverse academics that support their positions with empirical research. Beyond that, we can do our own homework--look at the ideological composition of the media, academy, etc. If they're growing more ideologically homogeneous over time (they are) it supports the idea that these institutions really are becoming more partisan rather than "it's just Fox News making you believe they are more partisan" (as though moderate liberals put much stock in Fox News).
> But most straight news from major sources is impressively straight, IME.
Perhaps insofar as "most straight news" isn't political, but IME most political coverage is highly partisan (I don't know how anyone can argue the contrary with a straight face following last year's BLM coverage). To be clear, I'm a moderate liberal and I find the media coverage to be very biased as do many other liberals that I know, and of course the conservatives--really the only people who think the media is on the right course are the left-most ~10% IME. Note also that a supermajority of national journalists live in the left-most of left-wing strongholds, so I really don't think it's a case of "90% are wrong about media bias".
A quick point: You'll recall Trump got incredible amounts of coverage from the major news outlets.
But here is my hypothesis from a former 'moderate liberal', but not a partisan:
* The neo-reactionaries (the extreme reactionary conservatism that now dominates the GOP and right wing) politicize everything, especially anything having to do with racism.
* 'Moderate liberals' are defined most by 'moderate', not belief: They chose their positions by looking for a spot between current left and right, regardless of where those two are, where they can sound reasonable to all. It isn't dependent on values or beliefs, so as the conservatives shift far to the right, they moderates navigate to the right to some degree, to stay between their shoals (moderates of the 1990s, I think, would nearly be progressives now in many ways).
Why? In MLK's 'Letter from a Birmingham jail', he says his biggest obstacle is white moderates who want peace over justice. Absolutely read it - it says it far better than I do - and I believe he has it exactly right. They hate progressives because progressives bring what moderates hate most - tension, conflict. These days, where the conservatives have adopted a hyper-aggressive position, the 'safe' response is to not support it, but to not confront it and provoke them - that brings conflict. It's like telling people not to stand up to the bully because it might provoke them - just keep your head down, about racism, about climate change, etc.
I used to be a moderate. Then I realized: How could I keep head down about racism, about climate change, etc? Why was I doing it? I knew speaking up would alienate many people I know, I would be beyond the pale, which happened - I think that corroborates my hypothesis. More important than their relationship with me, than the truth of these issues, was their moderation; I violated their norms.
But once you shake loose from the moderate mental shackles it's actually quite clear. There's not much question of the issues. I'm not really progressive; I don't read the dogma or follow a cause; but you can't really argue with their positions.
In my view, you see 20-30% of Americans won't take the vaccine that is patently obviously far better than catching COVID. This is a massive self-inflicted wound due to the misinformation and disinformation of bad actors, charlatans, and Russian agents.
Even with a non-objective teacher, we NEED to give space for debate and discussion on news sources, otherwise we will continue to allow our "freedom" to consume garbage content to overpower our education to process that content. I'm all for freedom of speech, but we should pair that with robust education on information diets, biases, logical fallacies, lying, etc. The fact that still, 60% are educated on vaccines and trust doctors, that is a hopeful sign, that in future generations we can banish this ridiculous anti-expertise narrative rampant on the political extremes.
It takes two to tango. People get propagandist content because they willingly consume propagandist content. They like it. If people really wanted to be informed, they would watch C-Span all the time and the usual networks would be relegated to niche interest.
More like that content creates engagement and ad money, and people respond to it even though they feel worse. (Not exclusive to news, social media too)
By the way people also like hyper-palatable processed food and that doesn’t mean we get to ignore the material consequences of the obesity epidemic.
In the words of Obama (paraphrased from Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee), when asked about how smart people in Congress are: 'You've got good people on both sides. You've got a lot of foolish people, but you've got some smart folks too.'
... Unfortunately, everyone gets equal time to speak.
Is it coming from the universities directly or is it reality shock on the j-school graduate’s first job where they learn that pushin leg narratives is the only way to earn a salary?
To an outside observer of US discourse, the phenomenon appears to be market segmentation and control, not really "ideology".
As former president Trump (a person who says whatever he pleases, without consistent principles) said when Fox failed him, "you have forgotten the golden goose."
https://nationalpost.com/news/world/they-forgot-the-golden-g...
While the staff may have political inclinations, the majority of US universities are operated professionally.
Most people I know who went into the course just for credits came out with a greater appreciation for the course in general.
The fact is there's selection bias in people who even take these types of classes, and there's really no way to know how effective it is in reducing ones propensity to be "misinformed" (by whatever measure).
> there's really no way to know how effective it is in reducing ones propensity to be "misinformed" (by whatever measure)
It seems straightforward to research it.
Most regular English classes have a very similar curriculum and almost certainly any English teacher on the high school level will say part of their learning objectives for their students is to improve critical thinking skills.
> It seems straightforward to research it.
How would you? Seems very difficult to me.
If the question is "How effective is a course in reducing ones propensity to be "misinformed"?" then that's a pretty basic (and cheap) experimental psychology study.
Set up a control group (diverse, large enough) that goes through a traditional curriculum. No added class.
Set up a test group (diverse, matched, large enough) that adds the additional class.
Afterwards, present both groups with a battery of defensible and indefensible information, with and without source identification.
See what the statistics say.
Some psychology is hard or impossible to study, but this is relatively straightforward.
What’s something objectively indefensible that would require a course on misinformation to identify?
I also don’t really see how you can setup a control group - either this class is required in which case a control is not possible, or you introduce the massive selection bias.
The best way would be to assign people to taking this class, which I suppose could be straightforward. I sincerely doubt there would be any effect once you control for grades in something like English.
Off the top of my head?
- Susie says the sky is blue. The sky is blue, because Susie says so.
- Frank says climate change is real. Frank is a convicted pedophile. Therefore, climate change is not real.
- Among all animals, only man is rational. Women are not men. Therefore, women are not rational.
- All humans are alive, therefore life begins at conception.
- Hacker News is the best source of informed commentary, because informed commenters comment on Hacker News.
And I've seen real world analogs of all of those on cable news shows.
> massive selection bias
This is something that experimental psychology has been solving for about 100 years. They're not bad at it.
You don't have a yearning to be part of a tribe, unless you feel like you're missing one.
cue histrionics
I was at that game, it it was all very normal, maybe with higher than average attendance, leaving a bit of a mess. The only way I could imagine the news being written as it was, was that the reporter wasn't there, talked to a few people, and extrapolated making the story exciting. There may also have been a motivation to make a school look bad. In any case, the jig was up for the value of in-black-and-white.
For instance, NPR talks about news literacy here, and I'm sure most of the people at NPR "know" how to be critical, but their level of reporting often doesn't reflect that.
For another example, there's a podcast I listen to by journalists that often point out poor reporting and misinformation spread by other journalists. But they'll usually uncritically repeat the "common sense/everyone knows" ideas that permeate the media outside of their wheelhouse. I only saw a realization of this issue once, when they were talking about the Gell-Mann Amnesia affect, then a couple of minutes later were talking about news reports showing XYZ, and they gave some throw away disclaimer to the effect of "although, I suppose going by the Gell-Mann Amnesia idea, we perhaps shouldn't trust these reports 100%."
In the end, it seems that news for most people serves as a form of infotainment. Infotainment that spreads a lot of disinformation, but leaves people with the illusion they're informed. I think most people would do well to take a few months off from the news and see how it effects the things they actually have control over (usually a lot less than they assume), or how out of place they'll feel when they jump back in (usually not much, since it seems most news items are forgotten within a few weeks).
After thinking about it (circa 2008ish?), I switched to the BBC for my base American news source, then check both US liberal and conservative media if it's a topic I'm interested in.
If you really want the facts, you shouldn't have any opposition to objectively reading someone from the other side, trying to make their case.
I'm always annoyed when the media sites "anonymous intelligence sources" for a story. You're telling me that you trust spies to tell you the truth? Spies are probably pretty damn good at lying.
The media will cite the Pentagon with a straight face completely forgetting its lies to the whole world about WMDs.
And finally somehow both the Army and Pentagon both agreeing on a version of a story means the story is verified. It's not like they communicate with each other and have the same objective!
Critical thinking is a general thing, not something for news stories. Besides the idea that school teach critical thinking in anything is laughable in this day and age.
What should be taught is history of news and why it exists. Not how to decipher good "news" from bad "news" because there is no good or bad "news". There is only agenda. Schools should also teach the history of modern school systems and the education department. Quite eye opening.
By your comment, it's apparently clear you didn't learn anything valuable in your class. But then again, it's Stony Brook.
Im sure my views on media arent popular, but i think differently and paid media that controls peoples lives has no place in my life! Its too easy to tweak the truth an inch or more for money/greed.
Though if there are now classes where part of the class is teaching if that news source is telling the full truth i guess my views on media aren't that crazy. Either way its tuned out and I listen to no boogieman only my friends who work in hospitals across the country.
In retrospect, I think the story of the pandemic is going to be how much was concealed from the public, and the impact those images that did break through had (e.g. Dr Li Wenliang's selfies, hooked up to oxygen support).
It's easy to live in an abstract world, until you've seen someone struggling for breath or being put under for intubation.
After two months into the pandemic I was done with it and went about living my life with a mask on. Some very close family members struggled with Covid .. it is real for sure but this pandemic is a human experiment where the real truth and facts will come in time. Time will prevail and help us best deal with it ... even at this point i feel we are still in the experiment walking blindly as they change things .. get vaccine no mask.. wait now wear mask if vaccinated ..oh wait your gonna need a booster shot .. lol
We are all gerbils even the ones pushing out the dynamic information!
Science is a verb, not a noun.
It's easy to forget that when it's taught as a series of facts, pre-discovered long ago. Most students are never faced with the unknown edge of science (until grad school).
Because fundamentally, usefully, that's what science really is -- a method for systematically exploring the unknown.
What that actually looks like in practice -- fits and starts, ideas and experiments and retractions, conflicting data resolution, framework guesses and confirmations and rejection -- has largely been forgotten (after ~1990, in the developed media?).
And becoming used to reporting on scientific discoveries is fine... until we're mode switched to reporting on scientific research, and neither media nor public understand the distinction.
Science is always wrong. Until it's not. And that's its strength.
If you believe everything you are hearing as fact one day the facts change/the science which it does then cool.. I'm on the fence waiting with a mask on as needed to hear the real science and facts as of now they change quickly so and again I'm waiting for it all to work itself out. Not anti vaxxer or anti science here just a realist
It was taught in more the general sense of how to apply critical thinking to judge news stories. To the people saying that this just instills propaganda about specific news sources: consider learning a little bit more about the class.
It teaches about how to tell journalism apart from other kinds of information, like entertainment and opinion; the hallmarks of good reporting, like transparency; discerning assertion from verification, and evidence from inference; the idea of seeking out multiple sources and how to reconcile them, etc. It's more a toolbox of how to inform oneself, regardless of any specific source.
It definitely included examples of bad reporting from all sorts of sources, because the message is that its ideas are applicable to any source of information.
Ideas: https://www.centerfornewsliteracy.org/what-is-news-literacy/
Class: https://www.centerfornewsliteracy.org/stony-brooks-center-fo...