Second best. The best is selective reporting. Even if every story is reported 100% accurately and objectively, by choosing which stories are promoted, and which buried, you can set any agenda you want.
This to me is the most important thing, and has been for decades. When people complain about liberal bias in the news, they’re looking at the small picture - how a particular story was written. They don’t see that what stories are told in the first place get decided by people with a lot of power and money. Instead of focusing on “How should we handle immigration in the US?”, the first question is, “Why are we talking about immigration in the US instead of something else?”
This is the sort of thing The Last Psychiatrist used to rant a lot about. Taking a step back from the content of the message lets you think about the framing and underlying structure being implied by the fact that the message exists at all.
The best comment that I heard about media bias was from a conversation I had with a major news anchor nearly 20 years ago. Off the record she says, "We are biased both ways. Most reporters are liberal, and most owners of the media are right-wing. So most stories slant left, but on the big ones we're forced to slant right.*
This was before Fox News became so powerful, and media became more explicitly ideologically divided. I sometimes wonder how much it has changed since.
But given how any left-wining news outlets Rupert Murdoch owns, probably there remains a lot of truth to the observation.
Depending on which issues matter to you, there are a lot more than 4 dimensions.
I'm a fun example. Of the major candidates in the last election, preference list read (best to worst) Ted Cruz, Bernie Sanders, (big gap) John Kasich, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton. This does not fit with ANYONE's idea of the political spectrum.
Why that order, and how do the most oppositely polarized candidates wind up on top? My top issue is NSA surveillance. Ted Cruz opposed NSA surveillance and has publicly voted and taken a stand on it. Sanders has questioned it and been luke-warm against it. Kaisich at least made some comforting noises about controls. The only good thing to hope for about Trump is that he will be incompetent. The remaining two are strongly pro-NSA and bureaucratically competent enough that they would have been able to push the NSA agenda forward.
That said, people like me are weird. As survey data shows, the parties are polarizing along the traditional left/right divide. See https://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarizati... for data showing that now over 90% of Democrats/Republicans are farther left/right than the average Republican/Democrat. While back in the mid-90s, there was a much, much larger overlap of views.
It seems like even personally identifying as conservative or liberal is a fairly new (last 30 years) change. Time was it meant "stay the course" vs "shake things up", which are reasonable things the change your mind about from election to election, or federal vs state elections. Now the parties are just sports teams, and you support your side as a matter of personal pride.
Look at Reagan's last election - he was hugely popular, and won by a massive margin in the electoral and popular votes. A big chunk of the country was happy voting for a democrat before Reagan, and went back to voting for one after him. I can't imagine a scenario like that these days.
In the US we have only two political parties that are able to regularly elect people to national offices. So yes, its pretty one-dimensional politicking here.
To be fair we were told the immigration crisis was fake by the media until Trump story rating dips and immigration story rating spiked. Basically after the Muller report turned up nothing it went from full on media gas lighting to now front page on every outlet.
This discussion is falling to a trap where "Fake News" is diluted to synonym for all influencing in and propaganda.
Fake News is propaganda that consists of deliberate disinformation or hoaxes. Nothing mentioned mention here falls into a category of Fake News. Fake News creates cognitive dissonance and distrust. More subtler methods work differently.
"But mainstream media also does Fake News" arguments are whataboutism.
I've upvoted you because you make a good point, but I disagree. IMO, Fake News, in your restrictive definition, is to modern propaganda what Bootstrap is to modern frontend dev. It's an easy shortcut, widely known, and even talented operators are going to use it because it's the easiest way to control a (domestic or foreign) population. But resources are there, funding is there, to build much more subtle/complex systems if needed. Cut away Bootstrap, and you don't particularly dent the startup ecosystem. Cut away fake news, and you don't particularly dent the ability of troll farms to get work done. We're in a new era, fake news or not.
The drive to dilute the term is putting a lot of energy into making fighting fake news more difficult. There can be more than one bad thing happening in the world, but lumping them all together is just an excuse not to do anything about any of them.
Fake news was initially popularized in reference to hoaxes and propaganda being spread on the internet under the guise of legitimate news, and the effect that increasing public trust in such stories had on the recent Presidential campaign cycle.
Trump supporters found themselves more strongly associated with such stories than the Democrats (not surprising given his support among right-wing social media,) so they attempted to reframe "fake news" as, itself, a fake phenomenon invented by the left to discredit alternative media out of fear of the threat it presented to the leftist media establishment status quo.
This to further the narrative that the mainstream media was little more than a propaganda wing of the DNC and its globalist masters, and that any Trump-critical stories from the MSM were likely to be fabrications and thus not to be trusted (but you could trust those stories on your Facebook feed about HRC having Parkinsons' disease or running a child sex slave ring out of a pizza parlor.)
And then Trump himself picked up on it somehow and now likes to label anything and anyone that criticizes him as fake news.
Ironically, the least likely thing to be called fake news nowadays is news that is actually fake.
Right on. I've seen an incredible amount of misunderstanding, unusual for hackernews, in these comments.
If FOX news runs front-page mugshots non stop every time an immigrant commits a crime, that shows a massive bias and leads its readership to an incorrect worldview, but it's not "fake". If Honest Truth Online runs a story that a missing girl was murdered by an immigrant based on miniscule to no evidence, that's fake news.
I've been following the Andrew Yang campaign since his appearance on the Joe Rogan show and so far as I can tell MSNBC has been at it for months now.
The gall still astonishes me: 20 candidates qualified for the debates, he now polls in the top 8 and betting markets even place him in the top five, and they substitute someone who did not even qualify for the debate for him.
They didn't replace him in the debate, the mistakenly omitted him from a graphic on screen and later corrected it.
He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good. I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.
I didn't mean they dropped him from the debates. Of course they cannot do that, this is already decided by the DNC.
What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him.
Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.
What the hell?
> He only barely cracked the top 8 as of two weeks ago, and with a paltry 2% with a net favorable of +8 in Monmouth's latest poll, which is not very good.
I respectfully disagree with your assessment because it misses the context of these numbers. Top 8 in a field of 24 candidates, most of whom established career politicians with national platforms, is huge for someone who was virtually unknown until only a few months ago. The Rogan podcast in February put him or his ideas on the radar of many people and his twitter acct went from less than 40k to over 400k followers. He qualified for the debate stage earlier than most of the field, and the "paltry" 2% polling (a criterion for the later debate stages) beats many national politicians like Gillibrand etc. It should also be viewed in context with his still very low name recognition. 2% national polling when most Americans still don't even know you exist is remarkable. It means there is huge potential.
>I don't really know much about the guy, but he's not making much of a showing in the polls so I'm not surprised that networks aren't focusing on him.
I was blown away by the sheer amount of sense and rationality when I first heard him speak. It is so unlike a politician, and of course it should be because he isn't one. More than this almost, I was blown away by the responses of other people across the political spectrum. Specifically, it made me see that I had a completely wrong image of Trump voters. He seems exactly what America needs -- a uniter around ideas, not identities -- and I mean this as an outsider who wishes America well (but is deeply concerned about what you are doing to yourself). I really, really hope that more Americans will hear him out and listen with an open mind.
This was a targeted attack at one of the most interesting candidates this primary so far and it only serves to suppress a viable alternative to establishment candidates that are featured regularly on the network.
That's a pretty incredible claim, and requires some pretty serious proof if you expect anyone here to believe that. As a counterpoint, they give plenty of air time to a candidate who is literally running as an independent, who the party machine specifically, systematically disadvantaged last time. Why would they cut Yang if he got ratings?
It also sounds a lot like what people said about Bernie Sanders. Nobody took him seriously, and a lot of the press was along the lines of "lol bernie bros" because left-of-center infighting sells ads. I would be curious to see if the people who say this about Yang said the same about Sanders.
I think the truth is more that news goes for what sells, and a candidate who hasn't yet proven they can sell ads is not worth covering by their metrics. See: the $2b+ plus free press Trump got.[1] He was a known quantity no one expected to win, so covering that spectacle was easy and safe ad money.
My take is basically the same. The cable news media covers what their audience watches.
It's also worth noting that while MSNBC is the 2nd or 3rd most watched network (depending on the month) there are only about 1.6 million people regularly watching and that number is down 14% year over year. So even if they snub your candidate, it may not matter much at all.
Polls, as we've discovered in 2016, are also largely fake news. To me Yang seems to be the only sane candidate on the left, and the only one who'd be able to give Trump a hard time.
This needs a citation. There was a lot of people spinning polls or making bad predictions off polls in 2016 (like every election year), but polls are not fake news. They certainly weren't proven to be fake news just because some people were surprised by the outcome.
Hey, posting an LMGTFY is basically always extremely condescending and unnecessary. Here's a link that explains the quality of polling in 2016 and talks about some of the misconceptions both before and after the election: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-polls-are-all-right...
Trump lost the popular vote. National polls captured that perfectly.
The polling failure came in the rust belt where the polling models were not tuned to turnout correctly. Turnoit model is the secret sauce of political polling and the most likely source of failure.
I was betting on the election and this proved an expensive failure for me. However, your notion of deliberately skewed polls by 'oversampling' Democratic areas is utter hogwash.
You don't understand what oversampling means in the context of that email.
They were oversampling to get larger than necessary sub groups so that they could get statistically meaningful results of those subsamples.
As for your first comment swing state polling was more mixed. The RCP polling average gave Trump a lead in Florida. Which he won. It gave him a lead in Ohio which he won, it gave him a lead in Nevada, which he lost.
The polling failure was in the rust belt. Where similar demographics met similar flawed turnout model and result in identical polling failure across the States.
But the irony was the polling failure was over estimating Clinton support not under estimating Trump. Trump got less votes than Romney in Wisconsin yet still won because the Democrats vote collapsed spectacularly.
I didn't say they dropped him from the debates. Of course they cannot do that, this is already decided by the DNC.
What MSNBC did, and has been doing for months now, is "conveniently", "innocently" not show him in graphics where he would belong. For example, when they show literally all other candidates except him.
Or, when they discussed the Monmouth poll, showed the list of the top eight names (AY is now 8), went through (again, literally) all names on the list up to number seven and then "conveniently", "innocently" on to the next slide.
Yup, I've noticed that too. Unfortunately it seems he's making too much sense and others are trying to bury him by not covering him. It was a breath of fresh air when I discovered him. I'm somebody that absolutely hates politics because everyone's saying what people want to hear just to get votes rather and only talking about issues at surface level. You can sense the sincerity in Yang's voice, he's not a lifetime politician, he comes from a social work background, he's going after real root-cause issues, provides data to back up his arguments, talks about issues instead of trying to gain popularity by demeaning the opponent, etc etc.
1980's Republicans supported sanctuary cities, gay marriage, free college, and socialized health care? No, they didn't.
Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data:
The Republicans did not shift leftward, they shifted far to the right. In the 1980s, the Dems and Reps overlapped quite a lot. If you go back far enough, they even switched position (Eisenhower was effectively a social democrat, for example, while pre-WW2 Dems were racists). The US didn't even have a meaningful left in the 1980s, and has recently been developing one because people were horrified by how far the country had moved to the right.
Taxes. Since 1980, they have lowered taxes to ridiculous extremes. Deregulation of businesses. Doing everything to give large businesses, CEOs and large shareholders free reign, while undermining the middle class. Income of the middle class has been pretty much stagnant since about 1980, while incomes of the top 1% has gone through the roof since then. Wealth inequality has gone way up.
I recently read that in 1970, Republicans still supported Basic Income.
This is a comments section. If you want citations, read articles. It's impolite to demand someone here be held to that standard. We know from context that these are opinions, and everyone has the opportunity to provide citations if they want to, but don't demand them.
Sanctuary cities didnt need to be a thing because Republicans didnt care until the 90s. Buchanan wasnt the norm, he was out there. College was practically free then. And ever hear of Nixoncare?
The left today is a caricature of the left in the 60s and early 70s.
As a Canadian, it's crazy that anyone could think of the Democrats as far left. Our Conservative party stopped fighting against gay marriage before the Democrats did.
> Data shows that the American left shifted far leftward over the last 30 years, with the left edge going the furthest. The Republicans shifted leftward only a small amount. Here's Tim Pool covering the data:
No it doesn't [1], using data from [2] and [3].
Maybe double check information you get from youtube pundits, especially those with an egregious agenda.
Atlantic's chart from Poole says the Republicans now are far more right-wing than they were in 1955. That was during Jim Crow and Operation Wetback, when the US's immigration policy was formally, "whites only".
I mean, seriously?
Moreover, they ignored everything since 2012, when the social justice movement really gto going only in 2013 [0]. Which means they're not even really addressing the meaningful recent leftward lurch. This is exactly the kind of obvious manipulation I'm talking about. Leaving out 7 years of data that are the core of the entire argument.
The Pew data, which is what Tim Pool was working from, and which comes from an extremely reputable source, stands strong and it reinforces what I've said.
> Leaving out 7 years of data that are the core of the entire argument.
The study was published in 2014, and it's not uncommon to have no finalized data for the year prior on all sources you want to aggregate. There is no grand conspiracy.
> The Pew data, which is what Tim Pool was working from, and which comes from an extremely reputable source, stands strong and it reinforces what I've said.
Again, no it doesn't. And how could it if it was published in 2014, going by your assertion?
Poole used congress voting records, and racism isn't the only (do I even need to state this?) conservative metric.
Regarding your link I don't know what you think it means. That terms and concepts that come into the discourse are discussed more? I'm not shocked.
Ironically, on a meta level, OurWorldInData itself isn‘t immune from that. While I personally love how they build a positivist and fact based counterpoint to a world not built for a 24h news cycle, they are selectively confirmation biased as well. All their facts are aimed towards their main message of „in the grand scheme of things, everything is good“ and they conveniently underreport on climate change and growing inequality.
If aliens invaded earth tomorrow and the local news decided to go with the story of someone's Aunt Mary who just won a cobbler bake-off for the third straight year, you'd be shouting "WTF" at your TV. But the subtler ones just go right past your filters.
This is why I always try to read newspapers from both ends of the spectrum.
At first it is often very annoying to confront yourself with the different viewpoints and opposite spin.
But you train yourself to read everything more critically, recognize how easy it is for your preferred media outlets to blur your "vision", and discover that the truth usually is somewhere in the middle.
I'm pretty sure "the best" fake news comes from state actors who have paid employees, and budgets, and a clear and clean mission statement (disrupt our enemies). Most news organizations are not these secret cabals where everyone is indoctrinated and working on some dupe-the-masses approach.
Not that I fundamentally disagree with their results, but the study seems like it has significant bias itself. In what context is Fox News only slightly right-leaning?
Anything critical of the current administration is not left-leaning either. In the past, most of these organizations have been critical of the Obama administration, but they weren't considered right-leaning then.
"Our Media Bias Ratings represent the average judgment of Americans. They are based on blind surveys of people across the political spectrum, multi-partisan analysis and other in-depth analyses as well as tens of thousands of user ratings. Our scientifically-generated ratings are fluid and subject to change over time as new information is gathered and biases change.
Unless otherwise noted as editorial content, all bias ratings are based on online versions of news coverage, not TV, print, or radio content."
Well I suppose that makes some sense. I have felt that Fox's online presence is slightly more neutral (though somehow more sensationalist) than their TV presence.
Edit: I do think the separation of their opinion pieces from their regular news reporting is a little bit of a cop-out though.
You're thinking of the old Fox, and possibly predicting a future Fox. Former DNC chairwoman Donna Brazile works for Fox now.
Politically, Fox does not stay put. To maximize market share, they always want to be just barely to the right of their main competition. Since that competition has gone quite a bit left in recent years, Fox has followed. By some measurements Fox is now even slightly to the left of the average American. Fox will immediately move back to the right if the competition moves right, because Fox can't risk crossing over.
You can't possibly compare the endless, breathless, full-court attack on Trump from the mainstream media with their occasional symbolic quibbles with Obama. The covered for Obama for years, all through his drone strikes, his kids in cages, his tear gas at the border, his gunwalker scandals and so much more.
It's hard to imagine a mindset where you see media treatment of Obama as comparable to that of Trump. It's night and day in every possible respect. And the donation and poll numbers from these organizations, which are generally 90-95% Democratic-leaning, confirm that.
There is a dramatic difference between the two presidents. At least as far as I know, left-leaning vs right-leaning isn't supposed to be support-blue-team-at-all-costs vs support-red-team-at-all-costs.
It's supposed to mean, would you treat blue-team or the red-team better for the same behavior?
> drone strikes
This was heavily covered. This was probably the number one thing that Obama was criticized for. I think most people agree that this is bad (for various reasons), though technically it is protecting American soldiers lives. Oddly, we don't hear much about the fact that Trump administration has relaxed rules and is performing more drone strikes [1][2].
> tear gas at the border
I also remember his immigration policies being heavily criticized. Yet, if you look at the policies of the current administration, they are objectively far worse. If the policies are far worse, it is consistent with a neutral position to be more critical of the current administration's policies than the previous administration's.
> gunwalker scandals
While they tried to pin Gunwalker on Obama, Gunwalker was really a Bush administration scandal that wasn't discovered until Obama [3][4]. That was an attempted political hit during an election year, equivalent to Benghazi. Despite that, it was covered even by the crazy "leftist" CNN [5][6].
If Obama had been meeting secretly with the Kenyan government to gather dirt on his political opponents, defending them every chance he got when it was discovered that they spent significant effort to influence our elections, and trying to remove sanctions against them, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this would be heavily criticized and covered by both CNN and MSNBC. I do believe MSNBC leans left.
This analysis only looks at whether or not the source is 'left' or 'right', and not on the quality of the source.
Google also rarely[1] promotes Chinese and North Korean state-sponsored media sources as 'top news', or Marxist-Leninist publications, or the moral and political degenerates behind New Trotskyism[2], but for some reason, that analysis doesn't take issue with this lack of 'balanced reporting'. It's only upset that a very particular, very narrow political spectrum of ideas isn't getting 50/50 coverage.
[1] Never?
[2] Isn't it obvious that we'd be better off without listening to them? /s
Google US I think it’s obvious would have little reason to promote Granma or RT. But they should have a pan-US org like USA Today and WSJ more evenly distributed. Also The Miami Herald is a pretty good paper, better than some on that list. It should also be higher ranked.
Why not? After all, as the article posits, a diversity of opinion is important for the health of democracy. What better way to introduce diversity of opinion, then news that doesn't neatly fall into the socially-left-us-exceptional-pro-business-anti-human and the socially-right-us-exceptional-pro-business-anti-human buckets?
You don't even have to turn to foreign news for that. There's no shortage of diverse domestic ideas, that for some unfathomable reason aren't being promoted.
Oh I agree we should have more diverse domestic news sources for sure. We mainly get the take from large coastal metro areas but many inland areas and some big areas (like Chicago or All of Texas) are ignored. As I mentioned, the Miami Herald is a great paper. Not only does it serve Florida well, but it also has great international coverage, specially LatAm and Caribb.
Your source is interesting, but devoid in those stats are human values, which are much harder to measure and add a weighting to each of those bins that may shift the histogram. I don't even think the framing shown here is without some level of bias, for example, they put all types of cancer into one bucket, they treat road fatalities the same as falls and other accidents. It's very hard if not impossible to color the results somewhat, and it's a struggle we have to always deal with and be mindful of.
Sure, and while biased reporting can certainly promote an incorrect worldview, it doesn't quite meet the standard of being "fake". The game is much more about outright fabricated stories that gain credibility.
There can be more than one bad thing happening at once, and it's not necessary that everything address all of them.
I'd say no. But people should be very aware that the news gives a non-representative picture of reality. And I don't think they are, or not enough.
I used that example because it's the only one I have on hand. That's the trouble with biased story choice - it takes a lot of work and statistical analysis to reveal.
Edit: See https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-i... for an example.