In a Washington Post editorial from 1983, former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously wrote, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” This used to be a seemingly uncontroversial idea.
I think that train has left the station. It is a spiral where the bubbles grow ever more impenetrable. You missed the most important source of different sets of facts. That is when the media decides what is newsworthy or not. If it is they cover it. This process has been corrupted for partisan purposes. If an issue gets coverage, people can try to suss out facts. If there is just silence, who knows. Traditionally, the MSM made this call. Think back to when they just ignored the ongoing genocide of Indians (as they are called south of the Rio Grande) until Russell Means shamed them into it. Today they would just double down. This sort of thing has led to the development of alternatives which cover entirely different things. A sort of reciprocal cones of silence.
Exactly right. Selective reporting is one of the main methods of media bias. As Prof. Reynolds has often said, when Republicans screw up, the screwup is the story. When Democrats screw up, the Republicans' reaction is the story--"Republicans pounce".
As usual, a great article by John Halpin and The Liberal Patriot. Yet I believe there is one glaring omission in Mr. Halpin's analysis; i.e. the declining ability of the citizenry/electorate to apply critical thinking to the "facts" at hand. The proliferation of news sources, especially relative to when Moynihan made his famous remark, and the bias inherent in many of those sources, make the need for critical thinking, well, critical!
As an example, a recent piece here on Substack pointed out the small percentage of the population capable of making sense of basic statistics. As the amount of available information, as well as the complexity of that information, increases, the ability to understand basic statistics, and apply critical thinking, will be crucial skills if we are to avoid further decline into a polarized society where "facts" are no longer relevant.
I despair to think what the future holds under such circumstances.
Whatever you do, just don't let social media be your source of information. My rule of thumb is to favor primary sources when possible, (want to know inflation trends? Check the CPI or PCE, not Twitter) then favor high-end publications with an international lens (Economist, looking at you), then, when you want to get the overtly liberal or conservative take, read the smart guys. The National Review and the Claremont Review of Books (the latter more MAGA populist-ish, the former more old-school William Buckley) will give you legitimate conservative arguments rather than hysterics and strawmen, and for the leftist lens the Atlantic or the New Yorker is worlds better than slop like, I don't know, Salon.
Unfortunately, for the populace at large, more and more people just find it's just easier to live off the algorithmic social media morphine drip and its ideological bubbles. For sure, it's comfy there. Every piece of information that doesn't favor your preconceived notions and the narrative you want to hear is suppressed, every piece that does is amplified. You get to turn your brain off. You get to call anything that makes you uncomfortable 'fake news' or 'Russian propaganda'. But you're actively making society worse when you do it.
I, for one, am unimpressed by what The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker have become. They always had viewpoints and an overall thrust, which is fine, but there's a way to do that. I learned it college: present two arguments for your view, and one against, and show through fair analysis why your argument prevails.
Those publications have become monotonous, predictable, and one-sided in every article. They are no longer intellectual or "high end" in my estimation.
The Economist used to be such an excellent publication. At some point journalists confused reporting the news with imposing their opinions. You really are on your own today, and most people don't have the time or interest to check multiple sources to find out what the truth is.
Reporters are smart, well-educated, young, and they don't make a ton of money. What spin do you think that causes? In 2005 I read a book on radicalization in Egypt. The author pointed out that young men were well-educated and didn't have jobs. They sat around coffee houses and fomented radicalism.
With the complexity of some of today's issues, journalists without deep subject matter expertise in their areas of coverage are of little use to the reader. Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm.
I'm not buying the complexity argument as a general rule. Yes for some subjects, but that's always been the case. I think that the collapse of the fact-centered pursuit of objectivity is caused by other factors.
Good detectives as well as reporters assemble facts first, then draw conclusions. The other way around leads to error. I could read three articles and then write an "intelligent" seeming article of my own, and I think that is what is done today. Not enough primary research, not enough shoe leather deposited on the sidewalk, and not enough cell phone minutes expended (on the actual telephone). All that takes time, though, and with smaller staffs and productivity demands, maybe it's too hard.
Actually what used to happen is that most stories were sourced from public records, like the police beat or election results or a hearing. That's still the case, but now there a spin gets added.
If the crime is white or white, or black on black, or black on white, usually the media ignore it. If it's white on black, then the story is primarily about the racism. The point being that there's usually a spin.
I don't think "climate change" is very complicated. The media have bought into a hypothesis without examining it. What amuses me is how they lecture about "the science" and then ignore biology on the trans issue. To me, that dichotomy vividly illustrates the collapse of the journalism that dominated the 20th century.
I had a progressive member of my family sit in my living room and say that killing people such as Brian Thompson (CEO of UnitedHealthcare) was justified because he killed thousands of people. She also stated that Bezos and Musk should also be killed.
Interesting combination of villains. Certainly not similar ideologies. The only common thing I can see is they are mega rich and powerful. They are using their money and power to influence government policy, although UnitedHealthcare is not so obviously political. UnitedHealthcare is part of a dysfunctional medical system that uses lobby money very effectively to distort government policies in their favor, resulting in poor outcomes for many of their customers.
You probably haven't had the personal misfortune of needing to interact with UnitedHealthcare. Those who have fought UnitedHealthcare often have a gut-level rush of sympathy for someone who appears to have fought back, however irrationally. I've been replying to that sort of comment as follows. --
I've dealt with UnitedHealthcare, as have many friends who are medical providers. The consensus is that the insurance provider is a very toxic organization, only interested in profits which they obtain using any semi-legal process they can skate by with. Providers, patients and small businesses who deal with UnitedHealthcare widely report negative experiences.
So, I really understand why people who have been damaged by UnitedHealthcare are so angry. I can personally say UnitedHealthcare doesn't seem to understand the concept of a fair contract, using all sorts of dodges to delay and deny.
And that said, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? We have a court system with class action civil remedies, we are NOT a country of vigilantes. If you think UnitedHealthcare needs to be punished, then start a class action against their most egregious processes. Lots of people agree with you. It's not as quick, but only after being denied a legal remedy can a moral person begin to consider force.
I agree with everything you said …. I do though think the center right and center left are the majority and we do have a lot in common , but the extremes get the attention I don’t know how to fix that either
It's almost impossible to simply read a good source. All of the highbrow sources are looking for clicks, just like everyone. The style of the writing and who the writer works for can be as much of a guide as anything else. Emotive word choice, use of interviews of individuals to promote a story that might not be true for the other millions of people, journalism is a mess since advertising went online. I can't name one source I trust, excepting TLP of course ;-)
Our local paper (consisting mostly of AP news) recently had two headlines, one about Trump "luring" and "enticing" people into applying to be ICE agents and one about a local politician arrested two months after receiving a DWI (four times the limit). For the second article I have to play the game I play call "find the party." You just know if it's a Democrat you have to go elsewhere to uncover that info, if it's a Republican that fact is in the headline.
As MG says below, facts about an event are suppressed or cherry picked if it involves a group that is favored or disfavored. We recently had a shooting that injured two people that occurred at 2:30 a.m. It involved a group of 200 people who had gathered outside a bar. Very few facts were revealed. Who got shot, who were the people, what sparked the shooting, what bar, etc. Then, 20 people tried to get into the emergency room, and the hospital was locked down. Who were they? What was their motive? Events involving good done by a disfavored group, or bad done by a favored group are suppressed.
The trend that both you and MG mentioned has actually been tabulated and quantified with large data sets from all major news sources as well as the paper of record. It's not just a couple of instances.
Most of the people writing for major outlets are graduates of the elite schools attended by the top 1% of students. So you have the 1% reporting on and reflecting the biases of the 1%. https://fair.org/home/journalism-of-by-and-for-the-elite/
A concerned citizen must follow a diverse set of information sources from across the political spectrum. Following the most reputable and long-standing sources will provide a biased view. The main political divide today in the Western world is between Globalists (the establishment) and Populists. Reputable and long-standing sources will provide the establishment facts.
Great points, all. Halpin has definitively laid out one of the clear reasons our current political divisions will not be easily reconciled. I seriously doubt AI will solve the problem, given the established record of media bias and government disinformation, two critical sources for AI factual regurgitation. Multiple source checking and reconciliation may be the better answer.
And then there is this, underscoring how AI can be abused to advance agenda "journalism."
Jim Acosta interviews ‘made-up’ AI avatar of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver | Parkland, Florida school shooting | The Guardian https://share.google/Th6A0m4i4fR9qbYh8
I strongly doubt that the legacy media will go that far, but obviously we have websites that will. For now, Acosta only shows what a hack he is and always was. The future? Who knows? One result, weirdly enough, could be a revival of analog recording and video. Kodak could have another moment.
For a media source that explicitly and credibly presents left, right, and center views on important issues I recommend Michael Smerconish on CNN on Saturday mornings. He also has an online daily show with news from multiple sources and commentary at Smerconish.com. His continuing political “agenda “ is to get people to “mingle” with others with different viewpoints (although I confess to preferring centrists like myself).
I recommend the Free Press. The articles are well-written, mostly, by experienced reporters who fled the MSM. Some will be left, some right, and many will reflect facts that support both sides.
They have gotten my attention. Looks like journalism, but I don't want to get sucked in too quickly. I might someday even pay for a subscription there, but don't tell anyone. LOL
I subscribe to NYT and WSJ, along with the Oregonian. It's like reading about an event or issue on two different planets. I don't listen to social media, nor do I believe much of the MSM. I need to do deep dives (they take time) to figure out what really happened. We are starved of any objective reporting. A lot of the time, the MSM simply lies (this is beyond cherry picking or use of adjectives). I'm near the center, politically, and what do people like me do to figure out the facts? I could subscribe to media that is "dignified" and scholarly, and I would be reading half the day to get through dense articles.
A crucial issue is that journalism as we have known it -- the search for objectivity -- has pretty much died in the legacy media. It was journalism, that search, that kept the rest honest, or at least nominally within some guardrails. But it's a shadow now. What facts the media present are cherry picked to fit this or that pre-existing conclusion, leaving audiences confused and justifiably cynical and resentful.
I have a journalism background going all the way back to high school, and have been increasingly critical of the media for 25 years. The dam was crumbling throughout the 1990s (see below for why), and I think it broke after 9/11 when the New York Times ran Judith Miller's phony material about Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" in the subways under Baghdad. I don't think Miller was smart enough to make it up, but rather she and her editors ran unverified crap that others had invented. After that came the deluge. Not all at once, but the Rubicon had been crossed.
I could go on and on about what has happened, and why. The roots are financial. Almost 40 years ago when I was in business school (Wharton -- hate me now), I wrote a finance class paper tracking the decline of the Wall Street Journal and its then-parent, Dow Jones. If there's one factor that stands out above the rest, it would be the internet having taken the source of the newspaper industry's profits AND independence, advertising.
First the classifieds (Craig's List, EBay -- I did a followup analysis in B-school about that) and later the display ads. Not only did they pay the bills and then some (quite a lot, in fact), but they were buffers against readers. Today, what's left of newspapers, i.e. WaPo, WSJ, NYT, are financed by reader subscriptions (like LP is), making them adhere to reader sentiments, facts be damned. They are slaves to their readers, no longer able to tell them the unpleasant facts and truths.
As the financial pillars of journalism collapsed, the intellectual underpinnings followed. Journalism never really had formal rules, but only conventions, which are easily summarized by three maxims that I learned early: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out"; "Never assume anything"; "Keep yourself and your opinions out of your stories." All three of those have all but vanished along with any worthwhile academic analysis or criticism. Take a look at the Columbia Journalism Review sometime. Holy smokes, what a collapse!
I think the public is hungry for the sort of journalism we once knew. The time is coming when someone is going to make a very large pile of money going back to the future.
Jim James, one of the clearest facts about the news biz is that Democrats in the MSM vastly outnumber Republicans. Has that always been true or is this a recent development?
This has been true at least since the 1930s, when most newspaper editorial pages were anti-FDR but most reporters were pro-FDR. What held all of it in check were the journalistic conventions I mentioned in my long comment elsewhere in this thread.
And where does “transgender women are women” and “biology is a social construct” and “non binary is a thing” and “kids know their real gender” and “there’s no data that transgender women (men) have an advantage in sports “ fall?
In the end, facts or claims are always run through the prism of one's life experiences. The saying X party is trying to have not believe what your eyes are telling you. I just watched the head of the DNC say the actions for redistricting in Texas are illegal and unconstitutional. Really?
The system is already in a correction mode. The Republican party just made a radical change in who and what they are. We shall see if it works. The Dems will go through theirs also or perish. The issue to me is the ridiculous and damaging claims of doom by politicians, media and pundits. IMHO the last administration has been the closest to a government coup there has ever been. Yet the system and the country survived.
The partisans appear to be winning. But all one has to do is open their eyes. They are not and are actually withering away. I don't find it hard to find the information I need to understand what is going on and what is fact or truth. But then again, the citizens were stopped from being critical thinkers a long time ago. But the correction, school choice and diminished influence of the university system is working also.
My #1 rule for what to believe, if one party is talking about the other party, it isn't true.
Even a little, so disregard and move on. You can usually learn something from almost all sources of information. If nothing else, what those people are thinking, or not.
Have you watched Bill Hemmer in Gaza? What about Colbert confronting Pritzer on the gerrymandering in his state? Pritzer is dumb he thinks anyone but his base, believes what he is saying. Two national leaders of the Dems and neither is worth listening too. Keep putting them out there to remain the losers the Dems have become. SMH
I'm afraid that there are no simple rules to be applied. As a former professional journalist, I do a few things to try to defend myself, but I don't imagine I can emerge unscathed. All I can do is try.
First, I read paragraph by paragraph and ask whether what's being presented is accurate both in factual terms and in the broader sense, i.e., is this a fair picture? Often, the tone and presentation are good clues.
Second, I check. The internet, when used correctly, is an excellent research tool. The legacy media operate as if nothing has changed in 50 years. They're wrong; no longer are they "gatekeepers" of information. They can be checked, and I check. I'm far from alone in that, as the media's collapsing trust ratings show.
Third, I use a crafty, evil little technique that I learned a long time ago. If it's presented as opinion, skip to the final paragraphs, usually the last three, right away. They will tell you what the writer's opinions are. If it's not labeled as opinion but seems like an editorial, do the same thing. If the final three grafs summarize the "news story," it is an editorial in disguise.
Works pretty well, but it has a big downside: It is very effective at exposing the rampant horseshit all over the place. I tell people that it's a good thing that I live a thousand feet down a gravel driveway in the sticks, or I'd be dangerous. LOL
p.s.: In 2016, I believed everything bad that Hillary said about Trump, and everything bad that Trump said about Hillary. That year was when I cast my first write-in vote for president in a general election, something I repeated in '20 and '24.
I had quit voting for a few cycles before resuming on Trump 1. As far as I was concerned, it was as close to an third party as we could get for now. I've always believed HRC was an entitled sleazebag. At least her husband, for all his faults also, accomplished somethings good for the country.
Having been a federal employee for 25 years. FAA, my philosophy was simple. both sides screw you just in different ways. Thus voting was a waste of time.
I can't bring myself to abandon voting entirely, but I have "thrown away my vote" for president lately. When I lived in Seattle, I'd occasionally write in "North Korea" in local races, so I think we might be close enough for horseshoes. LOL
p.s.: Republicans red / Democrats blue / Neither of them / Give a shit about you
Ha Ha, me too. Until recently I voted for Ralph Nader, not because I agree with any of his positions, but he seemed more transparent. That can be disputed too. I would add to your rules one more: you need to understand the general bent of the medium, right or left.
I go into it with the discount factor, but still go story by story, probably because I had a journalism career and anyone who did it is story-centric. And you know what? Sometimes a blind squirrel (NYT, WaPo, The Hill, Politico, CNN) does find an acorn. Going story by story helps me find the acorns in unexpected places.
Not only that, but the legacy media, which is uniformly and boringly liberal, are "worthwhile" in the same way that Pravda was "worthwhile" for Soviet subjects: a good way to know what the putative rulers will do next.
It is very clear to me that the vast majority of people take a set of what may or may not be facts and interpret them according to preconceived ideology or beliefs !that is to say that on any given issue there is a large base on each side of the issue that is not going to change its opinion. Yes there are a few things that a majority will agree on as fact. But these are not the main issues that face our country. Clearly, we are divided country.
To be fair theoretically objective journalism was mostly a construct of the 20th century. Spinning for the point of view of the newspaper’s owner is the long term standard.
Yes, on steroids. I am all over this thread talking about journalism, and the only reason I didn't make that point is because this is a comment section not a place to puke out a dissertation. I will elaborate more in edits, but you are absolutely correct.
With all respect, 'the facts about modern warfare' are currently the topic of extremely radical disagreement. The United States and allies have spent decades developing exquisitely designed extremely potent weapons platforms, e.g., nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, F-35s. The experience of the Ukraine War is that these systems, which cannot be made rapidly in large numbers, can be argued to be the losing war plan, while cheap, single-use, unmanned munitions are the path of future warfare, however little they are accepted by American forces,e.g., X-47B.
Great post; I hope you would go one step further and recommend sources of information that you do find trustworthy, or at least try to give you a fact-based POV, right or left, that allows the reader to make judgments. The good news is that there seems to be a proliferation of emerging news organizations that are trying to fill this void (demand, even), including News Nation, The Flyover, and several more.
Even if a source mostly gets it right when they cover a topic, that's NOT enough.
Our major problem is media elects to cover certain types of negative (disasters, shootings).
They don't cover other issues, such as contamination of our food by pesticides and chemicals, which harm more people.
A policeman shoots a person of color...ICE picks up illegals, wall-to-wall coverage. Black gangs and migrant gangs kill people of color - ho-hum, no big deal.
CNN used to do international coverage. Now it's just talking heads giving opinions about politics or asking victims "how they feel about their ordeal". Voyeurs'. You have to watch BBC and NHK to see international. Even Al Jazeera seems to do better.
How do we find reliable people who tell us what media tries to make sure we don't pay attention to?
Alas, Moynihan himself developed his own "facts" in "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action". Controlling for poverty and urban residence there was no significant difference between Black and White families in the risk of single parenthood at the time when he wrote this. But it just shows that "facts" are not clearcut and understanding them is complicated. And "facts" can change with new data and new discoveries. This is a difficult message to get across today when people look for simple explanations.
I think that train has left the station. It is a spiral where the bubbles grow ever more impenetrable. You missed the most important source of different sets of facts. That is when the media decides what is newsworthy or not. If it is they cover it. This process has been corrupted for partisan purposes. If an issue gets coverage, people can try to suss out facts. If there is just silence, who knows. Traditionally, the MSM made this call. Think back to when they just ignored the ongoing genocide of Indians (as they are called south of the Rio Grande) until Russell Means shamed them into it. Today they would just double down. This sort of thing has led to the development of alternatives which cover entirely different things. A sort of reciprocal cones of silence.
Exactly right. Selective reporting is one of the main methods of media bias. As Prof. Reynolds has often said, when Republicans screw up, the screwup is the story. When Democrats screw up, the Republicans' reaction is the story--"Republicans pounce".
As usual, a great article by John Halpin and The Liberal Patriot. Yet I believe there is one glaring omission in Mr. Halpin's analysis; i.e. the declining ability of the citizenry/electorate to apply critical thinking to the "facts" at hand. The proliferation of news sources, especially relative to when Moynihan made his famous remark, and the bias inherent in many of those sources, make the need for critical thinking, well, critical!
As an example, a recent piece here on Substack pointed out the small percentage of the population capable of making sense of basic statistics. As the amount of available information, as well as the complexity of that information, increases, the ability to understand basic statistics, and apply critical thinking, will be crucial skills if we are to avoid further decline into a polarized society where "facts" are no longer relevant.
I despair to think what the future holds under such circumstances.
Great point, Peter. Most young people are not grounded with critical thinking skills. Ignorance is the enemy of freedom.
By design.
All well said.
Whatever you do, just don't let social media be your source of information. My rule of thumb is to favor primary sources when possible, (want to know inflation trends? Check the CPI or PCE, not Twitter) then favor high-end publications with an international lens (Economist, looking at you), then, when you want to get the overtly liberal or conservative take, read the smart guys. The National Review and the Claremont Review of Books (the latter more MAGA populist-ish, the former more old-school William Buckley) will give you legitimate conservative arguments rather than hysterics and strawmen, and for the leftist lens the Atlantic or the New Yorker is worlds better than slop like, I don't know, Salon.
Unfortunately, for the populace at large, more and more people just find it's just easier to live off the algorithmic social media morphine drip and its ideological bubbles. For sure, it's comfy there. Every piece of information that doesn't favor your preconceived notions and the narrative you want to hear is suppressed, every piece that does is amplified. You get to turn your brain off. You get to call anything that makes you uncomfortable 'fake news' or 'Russian propaganda'. But you're actively making society worse when you do it.
I, for one, am unimpressed by what The Economist, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker have become. They always had viewpoints and an overall thrust, which is fine, but there's a way to do that. I learned it college: present two arguments for your view, and one against, and show through fair analysis why your argument prevails.
Those publications have become monotonous, predictable, and one-sided in every article. They are no longer intellectual or "high end" in my estimation.
The Economist used to be such an excellent publication. At some point journalists confused reporting the news with imposing their opinions. You really are on your own today, and most people don't have the time or interest to check multiple sources to find out what the truth is.
I had to cancel my subscription to The Economist.
Reporters are smart, well-educated, young, and they don't make a ton of money. What spin do you think that causes? In 2005 I read a book on radicalization in Egypt. The author pointed out that young men were well-educated and didn't have jobs. They sat around coffee houses and fomented radicalism.
Journalistic conventions used to keep that in check, but no longer. Today, I think what's left attracts activists of various sorts.
With the complexity of some of today's issues, journalists without deep subject matter expertise in their areas of coverage are of little use to the reader. Unfortunately, that seems to be the norm.
I'm not buying the complexity argument as a general rule. Yes for some subjects, but that's always been the case. I think that the collapse of the fact-centered pursuit of objectivity is caused by other factors.
Good detectives as well as reporters assemble facts first, then draw conclusions. The other way around leads to error. I could read three articles and then write an "intelligent" seeming article of my own, and I think that is what is done today. Not enough primary research, not enough shoe leather deposited on the sidewalk, and not enough cell phone minutes expended (on the actual telephone). All that takes time, though, and with smaller staffs and productivity demands, maybe it's too hard.
Actually what used to happen is that most stories were sourced from public records, like the police beat or election results or a hearing. That's still the case, but now there a spin gets added.
If the crime is white or white, or black on black, or black on white, usually the media ignore it. If it's white on black, then the story is primarily about the racism. The point being that there's usually a spin.
Good point. I was thinking of areas like energy/climate change and COVID/epidemiology, that are a bit more complicated.
On something like Russiagate or Hunter Biden Laptop, it shouldn't be that hard to report on what is/isn't known.
I don't think "climate change" is very complicated. The media have bought into a hypothesis without examining it. What amuses me is how they lecture about "the science" and then ignore biology on the trans issue. To me, that dichotomy vividly illustrates the collapse of the journalism that dominated the 20th century.
Moynihan's ideal works in a high trust society. We are no longer a high trust society.
I don't think that genie is going back in the bottle.
Red and Blue America really don't like each other all that much, and I don't know what changes that.
I had a progressive member of my family sit in my living room and say that killing people such as Brian Thompson (CEO of UnitedHealthcare) was justified because he killed thousands of people. She also stated that Bezos and Musk should also be killed.
What do you do with that??
Call them an Uber?
Interesting combination of villains. Certainly not similar ideologies. The only common thing I can see is they are mega rich and powerful. They are using their money and power to influence government policy, although UnitedHealthcare is not so obviously political. UnitedHealthcare is part of a dysfunctional medical system that uses lobby money very effectively to distort government policies in their favor, resulting in poor outcomes for many of their customers.
You probably haven't had the personal misfortune of needing to interact with UnitedHealthcare. Those who have fought UnitedHealthcare often have a gut-level rush of sympathy for someone who appears to have fought back, however irrationally. I've been replying to that sort of comment as follows. --
I've dealt with UnitedHealthcare, as have many friends who are medical providers. The consensus is that the insurance provider is a very toxic organization, only interested in profits which they obtain using any semi-legal process they can skate by with. Providers, patients and small businesses who deal with UnitedHealthcare widely report negative experiences.
So, I really understand why people who have been damaged by UnitedHealthcare are so angry. I can personally say UnitedHealthcare doesn't seem to understand the concept of a fair contract, using all sorts of dodges to delay and deny.
And that said, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? We have a court system with class action civil remedies, we are NOT a country of vigilantes. If you think UnitedHealthcare needs to be punished, then start a class action against their most egregious processes. Lots of people agree with you. It's not as quick, but only after being denied a legal remedy can a moral person begin to consider force.
I agree with everything you said …. I do though think the center right and center left are the majority and we do have a lot in common , but the extremes get the attention I don’t know how to fix that either
A catastrophe or event that causes us to band together. Unfortunately, most of these events are bad.
I thought the same thing until COVID.
It's almost impossible to simply read a good source. All of the highbrow sources are looking for clicks, just like everyone. The style of the writing and who the writer works for can be as much of a guide as anything else. Emotive word choice, use of interviews of individuals to promote a story that might not be true for the other millions of people, journalism is a mess since advertising went online. I can't name one source I trust, excepting TLP of course ;-)
Our local paper (consisting mostly of AP news) recently had two headlines, one about Trump "luring" and "enticing" people into applying to be ICE agents and one about a local politician arrested two months after receiving a DWI (four times the limit). For the second article I have to play the game I play call "find the party." You just know if it's a Democrat you have to go elsewhere to uncover that info, if it's a Republican that fact is in the headline.
As MG says below, facts about an event are suppressed or cherry picked if it involves a group that is favored or disfavored. We recently had a shooting that injured two people that occurred at 2:30 a.m. It involved a group of 200 people who had gathered outside a bar. Very few facts were revealed. Who got shot, who were the people, what sparked the shooting, what bar, etc. Then, 20 people tried to get into the emergency room, and the hospital was locked down. Who were they? What was their motive? Events involving good done by a disfavored group, or bad done by a favored group are suppressed.
The trend that both you and MG mentioned has actually been tabulated and quantified with large data sets from all major news sources as well as the paper of record. It's not just a couple of instances.
Most of the people writing for major outlets are graduates of the elite schools attended by the top 1% of students. So you have the 1% reporting on and reflecting the biases of the 1%. https://fair.org/home/journalism-of-by-and-for-the-elite/
A link in the article goes to the study on who the elite schools are. https://www.journalofexpertise.org/articles/JoE_2018_1_1_Wai_Perina_Mar3.pdf No doubt Amherst and Bowdoin happy to make the cut.
A concerned citizen must follow a diverse set of information sources from across the political spectrum. Following the most reputable and long-standing sources will provide a biased view. The main political divide today in the Western world is between Globalists (the establishment) and Populists. Reputable and long-standing sources will provide the establishment facts.
Great points, all. Halpin has definitively laid out one of the clear reasons our current political divisions will not be easily reconciled. I seriously doubt AI will solve the problem, given the established record of media bias and government disinformation, two critical sources for AI factual regurgitation. Multiple source checking and reconciliation may be the better answer.
A.I. seems like Wikipedia. Fine for anodyne basic facts, but the minute anything is controversial? Forget it.
And then there is this, underscoring how AI can be abused to advance agenda "journalism."
Jim Acosta interviews ‘made-up’ AI avatar of Parkland victim Joaquin Oliver | Parkland, Florida school shooting | The Guardian https://share.google/Th6A0m4i4fR9qbYh8
I strongly doubt that the legacy media will go that far, but obviously we have websites that will. For now, Acosta only shows what a hack he is and always was. The future? Who knows? One result, weirdly enough, could be a revival of analog recording and video. Kodak could have another moment.
For a media source that explicitly and credibly presents left, right, and center views on important issues I recommend Michael Smerconish on CNN on Saturday mornings. He also has an online daily show with news from multiple sources and commentary at Smerconish.com. His continuing political “agenda “ is to get people to “mingle” with others with different viewpoints (although I confess to preferring centrists like myself).
I recommend the Free Press. The articles are well-written, mostly, by experienced reporters who fled the MSM. Some will be left, some right, and many will reflect facts that support both sides.
They have gotten my attention. Looks like journalism, but I don't want to get sucked in too quickly. I might someday even pay for a subscription there, but don't tell anyone. LOL
I subscribe to NYT and WSJ, along with the Oregonian. It's like reading about an event or issue on two different planets. I don't listen to social media, nor do I believe much of the MSM. I need to do deep dives (they take time) to figure out what really happened. We are starved of any objective reporting. A lot of the time, the MSM simply lies (this is beyond cherry picking or use of adjectives). I'm near the center, politically, and what do people like me do to figure out the facts? I could subscribe to media that is "dignified" and scholarly, and I would be reading half the day to get through dense articles.
The shrinking Oregonian. I increasingly turn to Willamette Week for investigations.
A crucial issue is that journalism as we have known it -- the search for objectivity -- has pretty much died in the legacy media. It was journalism, that search, that kept the rest honest, or at least nominally within some guardrails. But it's a shadow now. What facts the media present are cherry picked to fit this or that pre-existing conclusion, leaving audiences confused and justifiably cynical and resentful.
I have a journalism background going all the way back to high school, and have been increasingly critical of the media for 25 years. The dam was crumbling throughout the 1990s (see below for why), and I think it broke after 9/11 when the New York Times ran Judith Miller's phony material about Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" in the subways under Baghdad. I don't think Miller was smart enough to make it up, but rather she and her editors ran unverified crap that others had invented. After that came the deluge. Not all at once, but the Rubicon had been crossed.
I could go on and on about what has happened, and why. The roots are financial. Almost 40 years ago when I was in business school (Wharton -- hate me now), I wrote a finance class paper tracking the decline of the Wall Street Journal and its then-parent, Dow Jones. If there's one factor that stands out above the rest, it would be the internet having taken the source of the newspaper industry's profits AND independence, advertising.
First the classifieds (Craig's List, EBay -- I did a followup analysis in B-school about that) and later the display ads. Not only did they pay the bills and then some (quite a lot, in fact), but they were buffers against readers. Today, what's left of newspapers, i.e. WaPo, WSJ, NYT, are financed by reader subscriptions (like LP is), making them adhere to reader sentiments, facts be damned. They are slaves to their readers, no longer able to tell them the unpleasant facts and truths.
As the financial pillars of journalism collapsed, the intellectual underpinnings followed. Journalism never really had formal rules, but only conventions, which are easily summarized by three maxims that I learned early: "If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out"; "Never assume anything"; "Keep yourself and your opinions out of your stories." All three of those have all but vanished along with any worthwhile academic analysis or criticism. Take a look at the Columbia Journalism Review sometime. Holy smokes, what a collapse!
I think the public is hungry for the sort of journalism we once knew. The time is coming when someone is going to make a very large pile of money going back to the future.
Jim James, one of the clearest facts about the news biz is that Democrats in the MSM vastly outnumber Republicans. Has that always been true or is this a recent development?
This has been true at least since the 1930s, when most newspaper editorial pages were anti-FDR but most reporters were pro-FDR. What held all of it in check were the journalistic conventions I mentioned in my long comment elsewhere in this thread.
And where does “transgender women are women” and “biology is a social construct” and “non binary is a thing” and “kids know their real gender” and “there’s no data that transgender women (men) have an advantage in sports “ fall?
In the end, facts or claims are always run through the prism of one's life experiences. The saying X party is trying to have not believe what your eyes are telling you. I just watched the head of the DNC say the actions for redistricting in Texas are illegal and unconstitutional. Really?
The system is already in a correction mode. The Republican party just made a radical change in who and what they are. We shall see if it works. The Dems will go through theirs also or perish. The issue to me is the ridiculous and damaging claims of doom by politicians, media and pundits. IMHO the last administration has been the closest to a government coup there has ever been. Yet the system and the country survived.
The partisans appear to be winning. But all one has to do is open their eyes. They are not and are actually withering away. I don't find it hard to find the information I need to understand what is going on and what is fact or truth. But then again, the citizens were stopped from being critical thinkers a long time ago. But the correction, school choice and diminished influence of the university system is working also.
My #1 rule for what to believe, if one party is talking about the other party, it isn't true.
Even a little, so disregard and move on. You can usually learn something from almost all sources of information. If nothing else, what those people are thinking, or not.
Have you watched Bill Hemmer in Gaza? What about Colbert confronting Pritzer on the gerrymandering in his state? Pritzer is dumb he thinks anyone but his base, believes what he is saying. Two national leaders of the Dems and neither is worth listening too. Keep putting them out there to remain the losers the Dems have become. SMH
I'm afraid that there are no simple rules to be applied. As a former professional journalist, I do a few things to try to defend myself, but I don't imagine I can emerge unscathed. All I can do is try.
First, I read paragraph by paragraph and ask whether what's being presented is accurate both in factual terms and in the broader sense, i.e., is this a fair picture? Often, the tone and presentation are good clues.
Second, I check. The internet, when used correctly, is an excellent research tool. The legacy media operate as if nothing has changed in 50 years. They're wrong; no longer are they "gatekeepers" of information. They can be checked, and I check. I'm far from alone in that, as the media's collapsing trust ratings show.
Third, I use a crafty, evil little technique that I learned a long time ago. If it's presented as opinion, skip to the final paragraphs, usually the last three, right away. They will tell you what the writer's opinions are. If it's not labeled as opinion but seems like an editorial, do the same thing. If the final three grafs summarize the "news story," it is an editorial in disguise.
None of this is foolproof, but it does help.
Sounds like an excellent and trust worthy system.
Works pretty well, but it has a big downside: It is very effective at exposing the rampant horseshit all over the place. I tell people that it's a good thing that I live a thousand feet down a gravel driveway in the sticks, or I'd be dangerous. LOL
p.s.: In 2016, I believed everything bad that Hillary said about Trump, and everything bad that Trump said about Hillary. That year was when I cast my first write-in vote for president in a general election, something I repeated in '20 and '24.
I had quit voting for a few cycles before resuming on Trump 1. As far as I was concerned, it was as close to an third party as we could get for now. I've always believed HRC was an entitled sleazebag. At least her husband, for all his faults also, accomplished somethings good for the country.
Having been a federal employee for 25 years. FAA, my philosophy was simple. both sides screw you just in different ways. Thus voting was a waste of time.
I can't bring myself to abandon voting entirely, but I have "thrown away my vote" for president lately. When I lived in Seattle, I'd occasionally write in "North Korea" in local races, so I think we might be close enough for horseshoes. LOL
p.s.: Republicans red / Democrats blue / Neither of them / Give a shit about you
Ha Ha, me too. Until recently I voted for Ralph Nader, not because I agree with any of his positions, but he seemed more transparent. That can be disputed too. I would add to your rules one more: you need to understand the general bent of the medium, right or left.
I go into it with the discount factor, but still go story by story, probably because I had a journalism career and anyone who did it is story-centric. And you know what? Sometimes a blind squirrel (NYT, WaPo, The Hill, Politico, CNN) does find an acorn. Going story by story helps me find the acorns in unexpected places.
Not only that, but the legacy media, which is uniformly and boringly liberal, are "worthwhile" in the same way that Pravda was "worthwhile" for Soviet subjects: a good way to know what the putative rulers will do next.
It is very clear to me that the vast majority of people take a set of what may or may not be facts and interpret them according to preconceived ideology or beliefs !that is to say that on any given issue there is a large base on each side of the issue that is not going to change its opinion. Yes there are a few things that a majority will agree on as fact. But these are not the main issues that face our country. Clearly, we are divided country.
To be fair theoretically objective journalism was mostly a construct of the 20th century. Spinning for the point of view of the newspaper’s owner is the long term standard.
Here are some great snippets of Thomas Jefferson’s love hate relationship with the press. https://intellectualtakeout.org/2015/08/thomas-jefferson-had-some-issues-with-newspapers/
Yes, on steroids. I am all over this thread talking about journalism, and the only reason I didn't make that point is because this is a comment section not a place to puke out a dissertation. I will elaborate more in edits, but you are absolutely correct.
With all respect, 'the facts about modern warfare' are currently the topic of extremely radical disagreement. The United States and allies have spent decades developing exquisitely designed extremely potent weapons platforms, e.g., nuclear attack submarines, aircraft carriers, F-35s. The experience of the Ukraine War is that these systems, which cannot be made rapidly in large numbers, can be argued to be the losing war plan, while cheap, single-use, unmanned munitions are the path of future warfare, however little they are accepted by American forces,e.g., X-47B.
Great post; I hope you would go one step further and recommend sources of information that you do find trustworthy, or at least try to give you a fact-based POV, right or left, that allows the reader to make judgments. The good news is that there seems to be a proliferation of emerging news organizations that are trying to fill this void (demand, even), including News Nation, The Flyover, and several more.
Matt Taibbi is doing an incredible job covering the very, very complicated "Russiagate" story. He has receipts. He is being pilloried by the left.
Even if a source mostly gets it right when they cover a topic, that's NOT enough.
Our major problem is media elects to cover certain types of negative (disasters, shootings).
They don't cover other issues, such as contamination of our food by pesticides and chemicals, which harm more people.
A policeman shoots a person of color...ICE picks up illegals, wall-to-wall coverage. Black gangs and migrant gangs kill people of color - ho-hum, no big deal.
CNN used to do international coverage. Now it's just talking heads giving opinions about politics or asking victims "how they feel about their ordeal". Voyeurs'. You have to watch BBC and NHK to see international. Even Al Jazeera seems to do better.
How do we find reliable people who tell us what media tries to make sure we don't pay attention to?
Alas, Moynihan himself developed his own "facts" in "The Negro Family: The Case for National Action". Controlling for poverty and urban residence there was no significant difference between Black and White families in the risk of single parenthood at the time when he wrote this. But it just shows that "facts" are not clearcut and understanding them is complicated. And "facts" can change with new data and new discoveries. This is a difficult message to get across today when people look for simple explanations.