This is Bob.
I’m in London (about to head to StanCon!), so I saw today’s opinion piece in The Guardian (a UK newspaper not immune to the following criticisms), which I think is a nice summary of the sorry state of the media (and courts) in the United States.
It has a classic strong open,
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power.
If you haven’t been following Mark Palko’s blog, West Coast Stats Views, or this whole storyline elsewhere, this article does a good job of framing the issue.
In the article, Jeff Jarvis, a former editor and columnist, is quoted as saying (er, tweeting [or do they call it X-ing now?]),
What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?
The article reprises what Mitzi Morris has been saying ever since she worked at the New York Times in the 1990s when it was first going digital. She was appalled by the entire organization’s highly misleading approach to their readership statistics and focus on click-bait. Her take agrees with the article’s,
In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
As Palko has been pointing out on his blog, the mainstream media, in part led by the New York Times, no longer seems concerned with candidates’ mental health and age now that they can’t criticize Joe Biden. Instead, you get what is described by the article this way,
They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over.
This whole trend goes back to at least the Clinton/Trump election. Their relentless focus on Clinton’s email while ignoring all of Trump’s malfeasance led me to stop reading the Times after that. Also, whenever I read anything I know about in the press, like epidemiology or computer science, the coverage is appallingly misleading.
There’s a lot more detail in the article. And a whole lot more on Palko’s blog if you want to do a deeper dive. On a related topic, I’d also recommend Palko’s coverage of Elon Musk’s shenanigans.
Thanks for posting this. The weird thing is, the MAGA folks think the mainstream press is biased against Trump. My MAGA neighbor and coffee buddy is a truly wonderful and generous man, but that is what he thinks. I think Arlie Hochschild gives a pretty good explanation for the hold MAGA has on so many people in Strangers in their Own Land, but what accounts for the behavior of the press?
What would be your guess for the percentage of people in the press that voted for Trump? Or perhaps the percentage of people making editorial decisions?
Also these recent posts:
The NYT sinks to a new low in political coverage
Again on the role of elite media in spreading UFOs-as-space-aliens and other bad ideas
For a very recent example, consider the media coverage of this totally bonkers post, properly reported on Talking Points Memo this morning:
“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation! Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again. We cannot let our Country further devole in a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Doners, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”
Search on Trump threat of Google News and you find some coverage, but nothing like what it deserves.
That story got quite a bit of the political coverage on NBC Nightly News tonight.
This evening the Times finally ran a better story on this threat and others, but it still does not capture how deranged Trump’s language is: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/us/politics/trump-prison-threats-opponents.html
What’s wrong with the courts (apart from the rampant statistical illiteracy)? I like the fact that after a century of ad hoc-ery the federal courts are into methodology.
If you liked the status quo of the last 50ish years, the last few years of Supreme Court decisions (overturning Roe v Wade, Chevron deference, etc) has upset that.
If you think the Supreme Court exceeded its proper role to establish that status quo in the first place, then it looks different.
And then there are the (probably few) people like me who believe e.g. that Chevron deference probably had relatively positive effects on-net but that its legal basis was shaky, so overturning it might be legally correct but have poor consequences.
Do we have any counterexample where a news media organization such as NYTimes could have survived the digital age if it didn’t go after clickbaits and phony readership engagement?
Eaman:
Private Eye is the only example I can think of offhand.
Is this really claiming the media has been biased in favor of Trump?
Both times I only knew he was running for office when all of their hit-pieces trickled down to me. That position is going to be a tough sell for people not obsessed with politics.
Anon:
I don’t think “the media” in general or the New York Times in particular has a consistent bias. They have problems in different directions with different sorts of stories. Not reporting Trump’s incoherent statements represents a bias in favor of Trump; focusing on the negative represents a bias in favor of the incumbent at any given time; other aspects of reporting will show a bias in favor of Harris. I expect that the executives at the Times feel that all this balances out; I’m with Bob in that I get annoyed at each case of misleading reporting.
I just searched and this was the first result:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/09/us/politics/debate-trump-age-capacity.html
The media lost credibility with me long before Trump though, so maybe you are right and I just never hear about all the pro-Trump content they’ve been producing.
There are many of these:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/09/09/trump-old-incoherent-biden-age-mental-fitness/75138026007/
So if an average person checks this claim it will immediately appear to be false. Its a tough sell to make.
Anon, you are missing the point (deliberately, I suspect). Let’s try it again: when Trump says something crazy or comes across as unhinged, and that is not reported or is blandly reported, that lack of reporting is pro-Trump bias. If the New York Times only highlights Trump’s nuttiness 1/3 of the time that it happens, but highlights Biden’s gaffes or Harris’s ‘left-wing word salad’ 2/3 of the time that it happens, that’s pro-Trump bias. Bob’s sense (which I am generally in agreement with) is that that is the case in fact. Trump goes on some rant about battery-powered boats and sharks and it doesn’t even get reported by the lamestream media, whereas if Biden or Harris did the same it would be trumpeted far and wide.
Then I searched “Harris Incoherent” and saw a couple articles from 2022 and 2023.
I don’t think either one being president makes a difference to my life. I am just pointing out how this claim looks to people not obsessed with politics.
I would guess it helps Trump to be honest.
Anoneuoid –
I just never hear about all the pro-Trump content they’ve been producing.
Do you actually not understand the difference between not reporting on his nuttinrss (which is what people are taking about here) and “pro-Trump” content?
Phil:
If Trump delivers an “incoherent rant” every day, when does it stop being “news”? The media reports “news.” You see it has the word “new”. They don’t report every day that streets are still made of asphalt. Is that a “pro asphalt” bias?
OTOH, the media has had it’s head burried in the sand so long about the Obama-Biden-Harris? admin that it’s just now discovering that they might be slightly imperfect, and may not be the True Socialist Gods as media had portrayed them. The idea that they might not be Gods Descended from Heaven seems new to the “news” media – e.g., it’s “news” – so they report it.
So the reporting is now shifting from Trump being news to Trump being old hat, and from the Obiden-(Harris) admin being the father the son and the holy ghost to them being slighly imperfect and possibly merely apostles and prophets.
I can see why you would call that “bias”. You’re so used to relentless praise for the True Gods of Socialism that anything other than foot kissing seems unfair. :)
I use ddg for search, which should give relatively default results.
I wonder if using google/facebook or whatever leads to seeing a news feed targeted to agitate you into clicking.
That would explain the distorted views of the world. Either its me or those mad the news doesn’t harp on Trumps BS as much as [democrat]. Something I found no evidence of after a cursory search.
Anon:
I don’t think Bob’s complaint is that the NYT “doesn’t harp on Trump’s B.S.”; I think the complaint is that the NYT reframes Trump’s BS to make it look less B.S.-y. Palko refers to this as “sanewashing.”
As I wrote somewhere else in these comments, this is not a claim about the totality of news reporting, or even the totality of NYT reporting. It’s one specific issue. Their reporting on UFOs is another. I complain about NPR promoting junk science. That’s not all that NPR does. Maybe on net NPR is doing good science reporting; I’m not sure.
Andrew –
Their reporting on UFOs is another.
This is a perfect example that (mostly) removes the political overlay to leave behind the structural problem.
You see the Times as reporting too much on UFOs. The Rogan and Tucker crowd sees a lack of reporting on UFO’s as evidence of a vast government coverup (it’s been going on for decades, doncha know. They have football field sized ships and alien bodies in storage and they’ve been hiding evidence of UFO’s from all over the globe since the 1920’s).
I’m not a fan of the Times’ reporting, in particular, but it’s kind of like the situation with public health – where if there’s little death and disease they overreacted and if there’s a lot of death and disease they didn’t do enough. People reverse engineer from their own biased perspective and blame “the MSM” for not meeting their expectations or preferences.
I’m not sure I buy the argument that the NYT is showing a pro-Trump bias. What I do believe is that every time Trump opens his mouth, there are a number of absurd/untrue/uncivil comments. It is “old hat” to the point that it is impossible to report on them all without succumbing to the obvious bias you find as in CNN. For a comparable bias, Fox News goes out of their way to publicize anything they can find critical of the Biden/Harris administration.
The media is failing us, but I’m not sure bias is the issue. We have clear biases on both (all) sides and perhaps the belief is that they cancel each other out. More likely, they just provide competing echo chambers and nobody really learns any truths from any of these. Critical and insightful media is the exception, not the rule. Objectivity is elusive in a polarized world. Here is an example: today it is reported that Florida police are interviewing households about the petition putting abortion rights on the ballot. Is this an example of offensive intimidation or a legitimate effort to ensure that the petitions were actually signed? My dislike of DeSantis would have me believe the former while many (most?) Republicans probably believe the latter. What is missing is any attempt to actually provide enough information to help me decide which is true. Instead I just fall back to my prior belief – echo chambers all around.
Or this example: https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/09/politics/republicans-vance-hatian-immigrants-pets-rumors/index.html. Now, I don’t know what to believe. I have no personal knowledge of the situation, but I am willing to believe that the quotes in the story are accurate, though perhaps somewhat out of context. The story makes me sick – I had little or no respect for these politicians (correction: really no respect) before and this story only amplifies that. On the other hand, since I “know” that I don’t really “know” the truth, I am willing to entertain the thought that perhaps there is truth to at least part of the story. What I am missing is any information to help me separate fact from fiction. Is this any different than in the past? Though I am old, I’m not old enough to be able to say. All I can say for sure is that the current polarized environment appears to leave no room for the media to offer “objective” information. It may have always been that way – I don’t know – but it is a sad state of affairs.
Joshua:
You write to me, “You see the Times as reporting too much on UFOs.” That’s not correct. My problem with the NYT and other elite media on UFOs is not so much with their frequency of reporting on the topic but that their reporting on the topic is misleading. Ultimately the judgment has to be on external grounds—that the reporting is misleading—not on personal preferences.
So the claim is that they do some positive thing (whatever that is) for Trump moreso than for [Democrat].
Can you post a screenshot of what search results you see if you type in “Trump Insane” vs “Harris Insane”? I would really like to get to the bottom of why this belief exists.
Anoneuoid –
So the claim is that they do some positive thing (whatever that is) for Trump moreso than for [Democrat].
The claim is that the ratio of bullshit, to reporting that it’s bullshit, is different (higher) for Trump. That doesn’t mean more “positive things” (articles) about Trump. It means fewer negative articles in proportion to his bullshit. How do you not get this?
Andrew –
That’s not correct. My problem with the NYT and other elite media on UFOs is not so much with their frequency of reporting on the topic but that their reporting on the topic is misleading.
Correction noted. But I think my point still stands. Say you think the NYT reporting on UFOs is too credulous, or applies a weak standard of rigor to the evidence, Tucker and Rogan think it’s too dismissive, and that it rejects a huge volume of evidence proving that UFOs exist. IMO, people’s own orientation is inevitably going to inform their reading as to where the reporting fails.
Concerning that ratio, there is a numerator and a denominator (numerator = number of BS claims highlighted; denominator = number of BS claims made). In Trump’s case, the denominator is huge – I think vastly larger than the (admittedly too high) value for Harris. But if Trump’s denominator is far greater than Harris’ (my claims) then the numerator ceases to provide much information – it isn’t hard to make the ratio smaller for Trump without any real attempt to bias. It just becomes too difficult to address all the BS. That’s the way I feel every day when reading statements made by politicians (though especially those made by Trump/Vance). It’s not that I think the Harris/Walz statements are true, but I find they pale in audacity compared with the opposition.
I don’t want to put words in Andrew’s mouth, but accepting that for now.
Then how do we quantify BS? To me all these candidates are 100% BS all the time. And this is no surprise, since BS is the primary requirement for success in politics.
So *I* have no need for finer quantification, the denominator cancels out, and we are left with the number of articles (or whatever) in the numerator. My search result show this is skewed something like 100 or 1000 to one against Trump.
Apparently others are making some more precise quantification of the amount of BS generated, but the methods used are unclear.
Anoneuoid –
Then how do we quantify BS?
Yes, well that’s the million dollar question. And we can predict how people will make that quantification.
Even among people who support Trump, there are those who will agree that his BS/non-BS ratio is off the charts, but who then will say that what he says isn’t what’s important – what’s important is what he does. Or they’ll say he just does it to own the libz, and that it’s hilarious.
I’ve thought a lot about this. What’s different about Trump? Is it that he lies more than other politicians? Maybe, but I’m not sure about that. It’s a very difficult thing to measure – particularly if you stick to a strict definition of “lying,” which in the end requires mind-probing capabilities. Is it that his lies are more substantive? Hmmmm. LBJ “lying” about the Gulf of Tonkin incident was pretty substantive.
Here’s my own tentative take. Decades ago, Trump and Roy Cohn and Roger Stone designed a deliberative strategy. Lie with impunity, don’t try to hide it. When called on it, double down, and accuse the person calling you on it of lying about the very same thing. I think there’s a difference there – the unrelenting and unashamed aspect of his lying. I’m not entirely sure how to evaluate whether or to what extent that’s “better” or “worse.” Maybe it’s better to be an open and proud liar than someone who lies and tries to hide it more. But I know that my emotional response is that it’s disturbing. There’s something disturbing to me about having the most prominent leader of the country I live in, openly and explicitly marketing and exploiting a dismissal at least pretending to be truthful.
BS is not binary. I’ll agree to the 100% of the time for politicians, but not all lies are created equal. Misrepresenting one’s national guard experience is not as serious as claiming that Haitian illegal immigrants (who are actually legal) are eating people’s pets and Harris wants them to come after you next. No doubt we can find serious breaches made by both parties, but the sheer volume, pace, and seriousness of Trump’s BS are bewildering. Equating these by saying all politicians produce 100% BS does not do justice to the actual content of the BS. It is exactly the problem with Bob’s original post – claiming the NYT is showing pro-Trump bias because it doesn’t keep pace with Trump’s lies fails to recognize the fact that it is virtually impossible to keep up with those lies, especially if we recognize that lies are not a binary measure.
Ok, so really there is no way to tell if the media is biased in favor of Trump then.
And normal people are going to just check the news and see a huge bias against Trump, making this nuanced and unverifiable claim look completely deranged and absurd.
Tough sell.
I’ve lost track of this train of thought. You say “making this nuanced and unverifiable claim look completely deranged and absurd” (presumably the claim that the media are biased against Trump?). What seems obvious is that parts of the media are clearly biased against Trump, parts clearly biased in favor of Trump, and parts where it is difficult to figure out, let alone measure, what bias there is. I think the search for a single declaratory statement about “the bias” in the press is futile. We can, and should, attack the press when it exhibits bias rather than attempting to report the truth. If the question is the narrow one of whether the NYT exhibits a pro-Trump bias by under-reporting Trump’s lies, then I’m not convinced. But I am convinced that the question is not particularly interesting.
Anoneuoid –
And normal people are going to just check the news and see a huge bias against Trump, making this nuanced and unverifiable claim look completely deranged and absurd.
It’s noble of you to speak on the behalf of “normal people,” but all kinds of people “just check the news” and reach all kinds of decisions. Some look at the NYT and see an anti-Trump bias. Some look at Fox News and see a pro-Trump bias. And some look at at the NYT and see a pro-Trump bias and some even see an anti-Trump bias at Fox News (he has often claimed such).
I don’t know by what means you identify which of those people, who believe what, are the “normal people,” other than as a reflection of some bias that you have about what “normal people” should think (coincidentally something that aligns with your own beliefs, no doubt).
Dale,
The only way to report on Trump that is *unbiased* would be to report something along the lines of:
“Deranged megalomaniac leader of the Fascist party in the US makes insane statements about Haitian immigrants eating pets and his opponent supporting cannibalism.”
anything less is bias in favor of Trump.
Anon:
Merriam Webster says
Fascism: “a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition”
Underneath the section you quoted from the wikipedia article was:
“The Manifesto in practice
Of the Manifesto’s proposals, the commitment to corporative organisation of economic interests was to be the longest lasting. Far from becoming a medium of extended democracy, parliament became by law an exclusively Fascist-picked body in 1929; being replaced by the “chamber of corporations” a decade later.
Eight-hour workday was introduced in 1925.[5]
Fascism’s pacifist foreign policy ceased during its first year of Italian government. In September 1923, the Corfu crisis demonstrated the regime’s willingness to use force internationally. Perhaps the greatest success of Fascist diplomacy was the Lateran Treaty of February 1929, which accepted the principle of non-interference in the affairs of the Church. This ended the 59-year-old dispute between Italy and the Papacy. ”
So, in reality, there was no benefit to workers, no democracy, no pacifism, and large corporations became the lawmakers. The country descended into war, and was destroyed rather than rejuvenated.
all that demonstrates just that raw power is happy to say whatever will get them support, but consistently does what it wants, and cares not a whit for “the people”.
Of course, that list leaves out the obvious consequences of centralizing the money/power into the hands of a few politicians and their cronies.
Ie, destroying the economy with inept planning and corruption then deflecting blame by pointing fingers internally and externally. Which, of course, leads to an oppressed population and war.
Point is the RNC is fascist but the DNC platform is literally the fascist manifesto. So calling trump leader of *the* fascist party is not really accurate (except maybe in a “uniparty’ sense).
Democratic platform may be similar to the Fascist Manifesto but actual Fascism was nothing like the manifesto. That was just a ploy by the fascists to get support.
Do the Dems in practice do the things that are the hallmarks of fascism? “exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition”
Not really, I mean, is Harris a “dictatorial leader”? Not really. Does she advocate “forcible suppression of opposition”. not really.
Is she a good candidate? No. Does she plan to continue to support a genocide? Probably. Does she advocate ignoring the 2nd amendment and passing laws that would clearly violate it? Yes. But I’d be extremely surprised if under her there are unmarked vans snatching people off the street, or she suggests that the military just “shoot protesters in the legs” or if she tries to sabotage Ukraine and hand the Ukrainians over to Putin, or if she tries to sell the identities of CIA agents to foreign powers or get contracts to pay her own personal businesses $500M or appoints her children to the cabinet or whatever total authoritarian bullshit Trump did routinely.
She’s a standard politician. Which means she’s a mildly authoritarian conservative advocate of a moderate police state run by a coalition of elites. She’s not a hard authoritarian advocate of a hard-line police state run by her personal whims alone.
I posted it before and highly recommend it to understand the nature of day-to-day fascism (suffocating bureaucracy): https://mises.org/library/book/vampire-economy
The whole book is there to download. At least check out the infographic on the third page from before infographics were a thing.
@Daniel: would you really describe Trump as favoring “severe economic and social regimentation” or likely to make the US more “centralized”? He’s absolutely an *authoritarian* (personally/governing style), and a nativist populist, but I think he’s much more of an agent of chaos/break the system type. Regimentation and centralization don’t strike me as that at all.
I’m leaving out direct links because they’ll make this comment go to the spam can but I’ll leave hints as to what sites I got them from:
“Trade wars are good, and easy to win” –Trump (Reuters Mar 2, 2018)
“Mark my words… [I will] build a great wall … very inexpensively… and I will have mexico pay for that wall” –Trump (Politifact July 15 2020)
Trump promised some Foxconn factory in Wisconsin… remember that one? (Trump Promised this Wisconsin town a manufacturing boom. It never arrived. The washington post Aug 22 2023)
Basically Trump just wants to declare which Billionaire will be a winner in his “Spend the taxpayers money to buy prestige and personal wealth for Trump” policy.
So yeah, I think he wants to personally “regiment” much economic stuff. I don’t really think he cares a whit about what individuals do, it’s all about which billionaire gets what favor from him and what those billionaires do in exchange… but yeah, all regimented through his personal choices.
Hmm. See, I agree with what you’ve said in that post, but I don’t think that’s compatible at all with a regimented centralized society. Rewarding personal allies with wealth sounds more like feudalism (about as decentralized as a government system can be without outright dividing).
I think the US is at much greater risk of destabilization than totalitarianism – and that this risk is destabilization will not go away in 2028. Short of a truly major political realignment that shifts the big city vs small town/rural battle lines in American society and/or massive changes in the media environment, the divide will persist. Right now the two halves of the nation live in different worlds, and that probably isn’t sustainable.
Confused: sure I am open to the idea that I’m misunderstanding what regimented means. M-W dictionary says “to organize rigidly especially for the sake of regulation or control”. I’d agree Trump is the last one in the world to “organize rigidly” that dude couldn’t organize his way out of a paper bag. But he could create a system where to have any success in business you have to buy special favors from him. He works more like the Mafia. “Organized crime” but only organized in the sense that whatever seems good this week, that’s what he’s doing and he’s having his flunkies do it and if they don’t like it they wind up in some bad situation.
What concerns me more is the people who have figured out that Trump is the poster child of NPD, and those people are fairly easily manipulatable. The republican elite who see him as a figurehead who can take the heat while they are in the back room dividing up the wealth is more of a concern.
Trump isn’t a concerted ideological fascist, he’s just NPD who sees fascist strongmen as role models.
>I’d agree Trump is the last one in the world to “organize rigidly” that dude couldn’t organize his way out of a paper bag.
Ok we agree on this then (though I’d add “has no interest in” to “couldn’t” as well)
What you are describing sounds like a bad outcome but lacking the regimentation/centralization tied to fascism; sounds more like high corruption.
(But I honestly am not fond of describing anything current as fascism/fascist, given the strong connection of that term to the 1930s-40s; WWII had such a huge impact on “the West” that the analogies of that era are obvious and easy, but I don’t think they fit well.)
In terms of organization. This is the group that booked “The Four Seasons” to hold a press conference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Seasons_Total_Landscaping_press_conference
Pretty much the only reason we didn’t have a totalitarian takeover in the US was because Trump wasn’t inclined to actually be an effective dictator or organize anything at all or understand how anything actually works.
I guess after this conversation I would characterize him as a kind of cross between Fascist and Stalinist. Stalin had that “worship me and dance when I say dance” kind of situation going on, he had political control over anything he wanted to control while not necessarily having any real effective broad organization. My impression is everything was just corruption and dependence on bribing people and being on the good side of whatever politburo member was in charge of your issue and whatnot.
At the same time, Trump likes to invoke the “us-vs-them” typical of fascists. He “others” immigrants and dark skinned people, and similar stuff to what the Fascists of Italy and Germany did. He holds up corporate interests and believes in big business for its own sake (fascist), applies pressure to The Fed to adjust loan rates to the benefit of financial class, he puts billionaires on the cabinet (De Vos in Dept of Ed for example). The emphasis on big business for its own sake as an inherent good is very fascist (and not at all Stalinist).
He’s definitely got his own brand, but it’s very fascist adjacent.
I remember the Four Seasons incident.
I think “totalitarianism” requires some sort of actual centralized control. Stalin had that from his predecessors.
I still think you are leaning too much on mid 20th century analogies.
> He holds up corporate interests and believes in big business for its own sake (fascist) […] The emphasis on big business for its own sake as an inherent good is very fascist (and not at all Stalinist).
Fascist regimes do not like big business for its own sake but because it simplifies the complete control of the economy by the state. It’s not an inherent good – it’s a tool for the good of the state.
I guess you guys have convinced me that Trump is really just a narcissist playing brown-shirt. I’m reminded of a great character from the Jeeves and Wooster TV series from the 90’s.
There are two ways a newspaper can go. The first is to stick to the omniscient neutral view they purported to have throughout my life. They often failed, and the actual opinions sometimes crept through, but they would always acknowledge that as a failure, a falling-short of their ideals. The problem with that is that it proved to be too boring to survive. (That’s on the public, not on them.)
The second route is to take a stand, forthrightly, and admit it, openly. You still have the obligation to be correct (in order to maintain your reputation) but you have no obligation to hide your bias. The problem with that route is that you will be trusted, but only by one side. The other side will ignore you (meaning you are largely irrelevant) and your own side will be haranguing you to be even more biased. I agree with anoneuoid above (and I don’t do that often!) Anyone who thinks the New York Times is too easy on Trump can’t understand what they are reading. At its most charitable, the critics take the vestiges of the historic approach of the previous paragraph and use them as cudgels against the newspaper itself. The biggest problem with the second route is that you will convince no one and, at best, be incentivized to provide fan service and, as a moneymaker, Wordle, Crossword Puzzles and Recipes.
I think the loss of the ideal of unbiased objectivity in media is a huge problem for social cohesion, perhaps one of the two largest factors in the current polarization of the US*, but i dont see how it can be fixed. Media either has to make money or be supported by the government or ultra wealthy patrons, which is certainly not unbiased!
*I’d argue the rapidly growing urban/rural divide is the other major factor; while it’s often discussed, I think it’s rarely fully understood since relatively few of the people discussing it have lived on both sides of the divide.
Jonathan so –
They often failed, and the actual opinions sometimes crept through, but they would always acknowledge that as a failure, a falling-short of their ideals.
Do you have any examples of that? I’ve seen biased reporting throughout lifetime and never seen it acknowledged. Which of course is different than acknowledging erroneous reporting.
Many of the corrections issued by the Times are obviously thinly veiled apologies, because you have to ask why the mistake was made, and the Times rarely answers why. The lawsuit by Sarah Palin about James Bennett’s reckless disregard for the motive of Gabby Gifford’s shooter is a pretty good example of this.
But Bennett himself in his Economist essay (12/14/23) after his ouster admits it:
“Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered.”
“More than ever, it seemed to me that a reporter gave up something in renouncing the taking of sides: possibly the moral high ground, certainly the psychological satisfaction of righteous anger.”
Bennet has only one “t”
Jonathan (ao) –
Many of the corrections issued by the Times are obviously thinly veiled apologies, because you have to ask why the mistake was made, and the Times rarely answers why.
But my point was that I doubt there’s a history of acknowledging bias. Acknowledging erroneous reporting isn’t the same thing. Of course, you’re free to impute bias as the reason for errors whenever you want. But this touches onto my belief developed over years of watching “both sides” being absolutely convinced that a bias in “mainstream media” (whatever that means) is what explains the public’s views on climate change.
I think people will read whichever bias they want into the “MSM” because they are an easy scapegoat. We see it right here where some are absolutely convinced that the Times shows an anti-Trump bias in its reporting and some are absolutely convinced it shows a pro-Trump bias. What can I know for sure about that? That I can (usually) predict a person’s ideological orientation towards an issue based on which sort of bias they seen in the Times’ reporting.
Pro-Israel folks constantly see an anti-Israel bias and pro-Palestinian folks constantly see an anti Palestinian bias. And on and on. And theories of cognitive bias explain why something like news coverage would be a Rorschach test of bias. Being a pretty hardcore lefty myself, I’ve always seen a centrist bias in Times reporting.
Anyway, back to my point, I don’t think there’s a history of journalism acknowledging bias, although undoubtedly there’s a long history of bias in journalism and a long history of journalism having to confront having made errors. At some level, of course making errors as a result of bias is inevitable in journalism just as it is in conducting science (or doing statistical analysis).
Remember the mea culpa about the reporting in the run up to Iraq? The Times acknowledged obvious error – but said it was because of an eagerness to get out exciting news and an over-reliance on government sources and government-provided information. That’s acknowledging errors from a kind of bias, but it’s not acknowledging errors that result from political bias.
Trump has created a problem for “the MSM.” Just reporting what he says without some kind of editorial commentary does seem unacceptable since he’s a firehouse of lying and gaslighting. They felt they got played in 2016 by not editorializing on what he says sufficiently. Of course, the problem is that when they editorialize on what he says, they likewise get played when he points to the obvious editorializing and plays the victim card and says how “unfair” it is and what “bad people” the “fake news” is.
So yeah, I think there’s been a kind of shift where the Times and other media have shifted in deliberate style of reporting to be more open about editorializing in “straight news” reporting on Trump – and I think that willingness to be more openly editorial has expanded recently. So in a sense I don’t disagree with you. But I do disagree that there was some kind of idealized openness and insight in the past to acknowledging bias. Nor do I think there’s really more bias today. Yellow journalism and complaints about victimhood of the bias in reporting is as old as the hills.
That’s a fair point. I may have interpreted lots of those “in our zeal to get things out mistakes were made” corrections as tacit admissions of bias — the “too good to check” phenomenon. And it is certainly true that the Times spilled a lot of ink denying any systematic bias in the past. But reread Bennet’s piece. A lot of discussions just like what I was describing used to happen internally, if Bennet can be trusted.
But the real problem comes from “They felt they got played in 2016 by not editorializing on what he said sufficiently.” First, to the extent that’s true, it’s not the Times that got played — it’s the voters. But more importantly, the solution isn’t to slide the editorials into the news, for exactly the reason you say.
The real obvious and inescapable bias in the news media is that it is 100% biased in favor of whatever makes it a lot of money and protects the billionaires and private equity companies that own the organizations.
The NYT, LA Times, WaPo, WSJ, CNN, Fox News, etc etc are all a complete and utter joke. They are the publicity arm of the global billionaire elite.
Daniel –
The real obvious and inescapable bias in the news media is that it is 100% biased in favor of whatever makes it a lot of money and protects the billionaires and private equity companies that own the organizations.
I don’t think there’s some kind of cohesive and collective bias in the manner you describe. I’ve seen some pretty good studies that indicate that the mechanism of causality and direction of causality are somewhat different. People tend to think that readers’ views are a result of the media they consume, and “the media’s” intent is to manifest that mechanism to bias consumers towards a particular end point. I think it’s more bi-directional, where people consume media based on what they want to read. And media outlets, understandably, produce the material that matches what the consumers want.
“The media,” as some cohesive, independent and cohesive entity, in reality comprises many individual actors with all kinds of intentions. It’s too diverse and multifactorial to really match your description, IMO. Of course there’s a component where the enormous entities that own the media corporations will exert some self-interested influence. But they aren’t monolithic entities that function as some kind of Borg to achieve a unified aim.
The NYT, LA Times, WaPo, WSJ, CNN, Fox News, etc etc are all a complete and utter joke. They are the publicity arm of the global billionaire elite.
As much as I dislike much of the reporting from those outlets, there’s also much there that I think is interesting and informative.
> I think it’s more bi-directional, where people consume media based on what they want to read. And media outlets, understandably, produce the material that matches what the consumers want.
You’re just saying the same thing. The media is biased towards itself and its profits. Pandering to the consumer is one mechanism for that bias to occur. And of course, its a necessary mechanism for the institution to stay afloat in the economic system we live in. But it’s still a massive bias. You won’t find the NYT saying “Genocide supporters in the current administration today sent 20 billion in arms to a vassal state that is perpetuating a genocide in which 100k children have been killed, starved, or died of preventable illness in the last 6 months ” because that doesn’t support their revenue and/or profit. You won’t hear them saying “Leader of the fascist party in the US threatened to use the US military to crush his opponents after his election, and made threats of a violent revolution if he is not elected” because, again, not making money off that.
Both of those are true factual statements of the reality of the world we live in though. Anything less is a bias. You don’t report in 1930’s Germany “Friendly leader of the Nazi party in Germany did nice things to little old lady today” and get away with any label other than Nazi supporter. Same thing today in the US.
The news media supports power, and is complicit in massive abuses of that power. You can choose to whitewash everything for profit, or you can be a credible news source.
Yellow journalism is certainly very old, but the argument Ive heard is that there was a mid to late 20th century era of greater attempted objectivity in journalism, after the peak era of yellow journalism (late 19th-early 20th) and the current early 21st century era of modern media.
I think there is some truth to this, but I am not sure how much of it is journalism alone vs the broader cultural effects of all of America watching the same couple TV channels, etc. The US was culturally fragmented pre-WW2 and is culturally fragmented now; but arguably in the post WW2/early TV era it was less so.
Daniel, your descent into unhinged lunatic fringe is something to behold. Kamala is genocidal, Trump is Hitler 2.0, and we’re slaves to our corporate overlords? Riiiiiiiight. You may need to take some time off from the internet for a while.
Jonathan:
One question is how a news organization in the mid-to-late-twentieth-century era of objective reporting would handle a politician such as Trump whose speeches are filled with incoherence and lies. There weren’t so many politicians like that in the old days–there were some incoherent politicians, but they’d avoid the TV cameras. But there is one example: Joe McCarthy, who, as we’ve discussed, has many similarities to Trump.
And the answer to how the press dealt with McCarthy is . . . it’s complicated. I read a book about this many years ago . . . ummm, here it is, and, as I recall, different newspapers reported on McCarthy in different ways. One parallel with the situation with Trump and his allies is that many newspapers were flummoxed by McCarthy’s willingness to lie so brazenly and not even try to maintain coherence. Their reporting model couldn’t really handle this sort of behavior.
I am not a journalist, and I am too young to have remembered McCarthy, but it’s unclear to me what would be flummoxing about him. Report what he says. Report what his opponents say. If you can *prove* a lie (rather than just using the weaselly adjective “unfounded.”) then prove it. Put opinions about McCarthy on your opinion page.
Trump surely provides challenges, some of them similar and some different (his almost complete incoherence, for example). But I would treat him the same way, and I would treat his opponents the same way.
When the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry reports some number of deaths, the Times reports the number and points out that the Ministry is run by Hamas and they have no way to verify the number. (Actually, they don’t always do the last….)
And if the foregoing paragraphs don’t prove I’m not a journalist, I don’t know what would.
Jonathan:
I don’t have that book here beside me, but I think the flummoxing thing was that the newspapers weren’t prepared to routinely describe a U.S. senator as a habitual liar and bullshitter. Sometimes they’d call out McCarthy on specifics, but they didn’t have a good way of reporting on his flow of lies. It just wasn’t how they did the reporting. Their job, as they saw it, was to report the news, not to prove that various speeches were full of lies. They did report what McCarthy’s opponents said, but then that turned it into a political battle, and the outrageous level of bullshitting on McCarthy’s part didn’t fully come through. Or, at least, that’s how I remember it from reading that book. And, remember, the press was a key part of McCarthy’s success. He could make speech after speech, but it was only when he got the national press attention that he became so powerful. So it’s not even that the press wasn’t set up to handle that level of lying; by not being able to handle it, they arguably made the situation worse.
Why do they care? If outrageous bullshit becomes popular, that’s not their fault, even if they spread the bullshit beyond the precincts in which it was uttered. The newspapers are making the mistake of conflating the job of reporting with the onus for the consequences of belief. In that case it’s exactly like Trump. Once you think you’re responsible for what people believe, as opposed to what they’ve heard, ruin follows. I admit there’s a certain Tom Lehrer “Werner von Braun” (‘Once the rockets go up who cares where they come down?’) vibe to what I’m saying here. but Werner had a point.
@Jonathan,
> Why do they care? If outrageous bullshit becomes popular, that’s not their fault, even if they spread the bullshit beyond the precincts in which it was uttered.
This is an interesting point. Should the press credulously report on the blood libel, if that was popular among a certain segment of the population? I ask because something not too dissimilar has come up regarding Haitian immigrants and domesticated animals. If the news couched these outrageous claims by a presidential candidate in equal terms to that of their opponent’s fudging of their early employment history, are readers being served well or not?
@nonrenormalizable (nice name)
The press shouldn’t “credulously” do anything, And the “among a certain segment” is more than a little vague. If some candidate called for the extermination of Jews, the press ought to report what they said. If some fringe character writes some screed on mass extermination, it can be ignored until its too big to ignore, ie “news”
Spending all this time on “couching coverage” is the problem. Trump thinks Haitians eat pets. That’s a five word sentence. Starting the sentence “Trump thinks” absolves the paper from a charge of credulity (unless of course there’s a question of whether or not this is really what Trump believes just because it’s what he says.) Their readers are served. They might potentially be better served by a six part expose of pet-eating allegations, but that might be (nay, is) a waste of reportorial resources..
What they shouldn’t be in the business of doing is predicting what future President Trump’s pet nonconsumption policy will be… because there is no possible way for them to know.
Regarding the Haitian pet consumption story: I think the press should report what Trump and Vance have said, where the origins of the story lie (social media gossip), clearly spell out that these are legal immigrants and why their immigration is legal (and if there is a dispute about whether or not they should be given legal asylum, that should be reported), and some information about who these Haitian immigrants are, what they are fleeing, and what they are doing. They could also report on the problems that these people have created for the communities they have migrated to. I think all these things are important – and just reporting the headline doesn’t educate anybody and only feeds the hype and emotions. I know – that’s a lot and the public’s patience might be worn out after the first soundbite, but reporting soundbites is simply not useful.
@Jonathan
There are a number of problems in what you’ve said as it pertains to the last decade or so in the US political media landscape.
First, about reporting on Trump. You seem to have inverted the old adage about Trump and arrived at “take him literally, not seriously”, which I think is not entirely useful. The man rarely speaks in precise, clear language, and while I agree with some commentary that what he articulates is often nonsensical, you can actually determine some meaning from his words — if you’ve followed what he has said before.
For instance, he recently gave a speech on his economic policy where he said something to the effect of “we will have more than enough money for child care by taxing foreign nations”. If you reported this alone, some people might nod in agreement, but this is nonsensical — how does one nation tax another? Based on his previous utterances, what I understand him to mean (and others agree) is that he wants to raise tariffs on imports into the US. But this is nonsense on another level — the charge from tariffs is not in the end paid by the country of origin, but by US consumers. (Tariffs may have a role to play in economic policy, but not as a revenue raiser).
The CNN article I linked to does a decent job of providing context to Trump’s words. But in some sense, it has also failed in that
(a) it has taken a semi-coherent statement from someone running for the most powerful job in the world, and translated it into something intelligible but faulty, making it appear as though the only thing wrong with Trump is that his views aren’t supported by some experts (and not that he is someone with a very limited view of how the economy works) — performing what some call “sane-washing”,
(b) by focusing on economic policy, when Trump’s prior actions and statements make clear that his election would irreparably damage the democratic process in the US, minimizes what’s at stake. The media can’t be entirely blamed for this, as the threat to democracy doesn’t seem salient to a large number of voters, and his opponents seem to have found that campaigning on more concrete issues is more fruitful.
What about just saying “Trump thinks Haitians eat pets”? A reader might think this is a bizarre thing to think, and quite possibly racist. What a reader might not understand, however, is that
– Trump has a history of discriminating against minorities in housing.
– Trump has made numerous statements denigrating immigrants and “shithole countries”.
– Trump has many allies and supporters in the right and far-right who similarly denigrate immigrants and want to exert violence against them.
– Similar allegations have lead to pogroms (in other countries) and lynchings in the past.
There is a very real risk of harm here, and there should be a cost to politicians who indulge in this kind of rhetoric. Simply reporting it as a statement of belief unmoored from context — “Hitler claims Jews responsible for Germany’s diminished status; Zeppelin named after late President involved in tragedy” — destigmatizes a dangerous worldview.
Secondly, the current media process is vulnerable to manipulation by the far-right (amongst others). Steve Bannon long ago espoused the strategy of “anchor left, pivot right”, in which mainstream outlets are spammed with stories related to his talking points, and the ones that stick and reported on are used as a way of promulgating far-right views. For instance, the discussion about “eating cats” story was used by J.D. Vance to push a story about a child being murdered by a Haitian immigrant — although this was also highly misleading, as the death was caused by a car accident — which the media had not picked up before. And soon the rate of immigrant crime might become (unless care is taken, or something else knocks it off) one of the predominant issues of the campaign.
Returning to Trump and predicting his future actions: if you viewed him as a threat to the normal democratic order and treated his statements as such, you would have had a better chance of anticipating the events of January 6th than if you said “let Trump be Trump”. It’s bizarre that this is even viewed as anything close to a normal election given his actions on that day, and part of that is the failure of the media to hold his allies in the political class accountable for their support. Maybe prefacing things as “Trump, who says he will be a dictator on at least his first day in office”, or “Trump, who says that his victory will mean ‘You will never have to vote again'” (both things he has said), might add some reminders as to the unnaturalness of his candidacy and what he really intends to do in office.
By the way, I’m not saying that appropriately contextualizing the news is an easy task nor one without risk of backfiring. The “fact-checking” industry, while maybe appropriate in the early years of the Trump era or in one in which mainstream candidates fought over the same ground, is by now largely ineffective: all politicians manipulate statistics and make iffy statements when creating a narrative, but Trump does this at a rate at least an order of magnitude higher. To compare him with other politicians would require a log scale on the appropriate axis — when really, you get all the information you need if you see he doesn’t fit in a linear plot. Similarly, repeatedly expressing the risks of his actions can make audiences turn off: if an alarm is always on, you learn to ignore it.
But in writing this, I’m slowly coming to a distasteful conclusion. I stand by what I say above about reporting — but people have been having this discussion for nearly a decade now, and there are some outlets trying their best to meet the moment, and some not. The issue now is: is it having any effect? Is it reaching the people to whom it would matter? Are there in fact enough people for whom it would make a difference? I am not so sure, and I don’t think it’s for a lack of trying. It might just be that there is a significant proportion of the population who are simply indifferent to these concerns, and can reconcile living under an undemocratic regime as long as gas is less than $3/gallon.
>>The media can’t be entirely blamed for this, as the threat to democracy doesn’t seem salient to a large number of voters, and his opponents seem to have found that campaigning on more concrete issues is more fruitful.
Not just more fruitful – focusing on that might even backfire. How many Americans believe our democracy doesn’t work? (Voter turnout is pretty low generally.) How many Americans have any real idea how nondemocratic countries actually work internally? And of those, how many are potential swing voters?
I think everyone concerned about the “Trump is a threat to democracy” issue is already voting for Harris, so campaigning on it has no upside and possible downside (if some disaffected people who otherwise would not vote take it as “Trump will break the system”, *want* that, and show up to vote.)
It’s worth bearing in mind that this is an opinion column and not representative of the Guardian’s editorial line and is written by an American for a British newspaper.
More pertinently, this is a good example of the need to regularly re-evaluate institutions and not rely on 20+ year old reputations but also to read multiple papers (in foreign affairs, preferably by writers from the country being discussed).
Couldn’t agree more. I read sources all the way from far left through far right on a regular basis. To me, the most startling evidence of all of their various biases is the frequency with which some story will be reported in some parts of the spectrum but not even mentioned, or deeply buried, in others.
I think it’s not that hard for people to perceive or figure out what’s going on with the way various mainstream media sources cover Trump and Harris, at least if they want to. But if you aren’t even getting any reporting of some events from your sources, that’s a bias that’s much harder for readers to recognize and overcome.
“they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles….”
This has been happening for far longer than the past couple of decades. Groupthink and nationalism are powerful forces, and we now have news corporation consolidation in addition. See Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent or Orwell’s (not initially published) preface to Animal Farm:
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/10/08/archives/the-freedom-of-the-press-orwell.html
N.b. the author’s name is “Solnit”, not “Soling”
The “dementia” issue strikes me as a situation where it’s arguably the case that the reporting is reflecting how the world “is”, but critics want it instead to advocate how the world “ought” to be. Biden’s problem is that his cognition appears to be intact, but his aging and fatigue interacts badly with his lifelong speech impediment, to make it harder for him to speak coherently. This *sounds* like he’s going senile, and comes across to some voters that way. I have to disclaim, it’s wrong, it’s not true, it’s not how a fair and just world would be, etc. etc. – but it is the reality of politics. He just sounds like death warmed over on some days (not every day, but enough to be very worrisome).
In contrast, Trump, well, let’s just say he doesn’t sound tremendously different from how he’s been before. It’s the Trump opponents who go on about, did you hear that ramble about boats and sharks and electrocution, how in the world isn’t everyone else running around like their hair’s on fire proclaiming how he’s unfit and insane, on and on. But it’s not his audience which is doing that.
There’s an appealing pundit narrative that the media could just create a similar vulnerability for Trump as for Biden if they said it enough times. But the details are simply different.
> There’s an appealing pundit narrative that the media could just create a similar vulnerability for Trump as for Biden if they said it enough times. But the details are simply different.
I agree. I think it’s appealing but completely wrong. How much did Trump’s conviction hurt his political support?
Trump is not Biden.
Biden was basically chosen in the 2020 D primary as the ‘establishment’ / ‘stability’ candidate to defeat Trump in a chaotic time for the country. Despite being a former president, Trump is essentially running as the anti-establishment candidate, claiming that the media and election system is biased against him, etc. One of these positions is much more vulnerable than the other to hostile media coverage.
Also, Democrats had a backup in Harris; rejecting Biden was possible. Replacing Trump with Vance not so much; Republican party leaders in Congress etc couldn’t convince Trump to step down.
(And I think that is key. I actually don’t think Biden on Election Day, were he still the candidate, would do *as badly* as polling trends were implying; he’d have lost the election, but I dont think we’d really have seen red VA and tossup NJ. Some Democratic voters would have come back to him once there was no alternative. The presence of an alternative is what really cratered his numbers IMO.)
Seth, thanks for pointing this out. After the June debate, everyone became an armchair neurologist and offered diagnoses based on their declining relatives. Last I saw neurology requires a long medical residency and neuropsychology a long training. I also received a fund-raising mail for a disease with a symptom list and thought ‘maybe Biden has this’. Besides stuttering, he also has a history of brain surgery.
None of this is new. The NYTimes pushed the “weapons of mass destruction” agenda like no one else. That was a long time ago. They pander to some combination of power and what a certain “elite” wants to hear. That’s their readership. Folks aren’t subscribing in order to read difficult truths, they’re subscribing in order to hear their biases confirmed.
Having worked in news media, it generally does not upset me that much when a newspaper gets it wrong: they try their best, but almost by definition they are writing about things that are developing, about which little is known, etc. so it’s not clear to me that they could just “do better”. Sometimes they get it wrong in a very peculiar way, as when a story gets a lot of attention because there’s an appealing narrative to it and the writer forgets to ask whether that narrative really fits the facts, and that’s worse. Sometimes they get it wrong because they desperately want to appear neutral and so must have an equal share of bad news about both political parties… and clearly that’s not great, but you can see how it’s awkward for a newspaper to just say “yeah, the gop has gone nuts, sorry, that’s just how it is” and I feel that attempts to deal with that awkwardness are not always sufficiently appreciated: Trump does actually get a lot of backlash for his lies in the NYTimes, there has been a lot more fact checking in the past 10 years, and so on.
But to me, what is most bizarre about how US newspapers and especially the NYTimes cover politics is that it’s almost entirely at the horse race level: for every article about policy or proposals, their context, what they are trying to achieve, whether that might work, what the experts think, there are another 10 about how those policies might be perceived, how it might affect the race, etc. That, to me, is a great pity, because there is just zero information in that reporting, it’s all just about who is ahead or might get ahead. For the past couple of weeks the shtick has been that Kamala’s campaigning is light on policy, but the great irony is that once again this is framed almost exclusively as a campaign strategy, and it is hotly debated whether that strategy may or may not work, but there is no real interest in finding out how a Kamala presidency might differ from a Biden presidency. It’s as if the newspaper has been hijacked by political scientists. (Sorry, Andrew!)
All the people who are claiming that they place no credence on what the main stream media publishes due to its biases and clickbait — where are you folks getting your news from? Is there a fifth estate that I am unaware of?
Specifically about Trump and the media:
Trump’s appeal is not based on the content of policy positions or even what we normally think of as a political ideology. It is emotional and responds to feelings of bitterness and resentment in much of the population. Insofar as any concrete political ideas matter, it’s about defining an “us” which is victimized by “them”. Immigration is perhaps the most convenient us vs them item to draw on, which is why far right politicians in Europe make a big deal of it the way Trump does. Bolsonaro had to draw different boundaries in Brazil. Insofar as newspapers and other media outfits tailor their reporting to more conventional political questions like policy, ideology, etc. they simply miss what is going on. But how would they deal with it?
Similarly with the issue of dishonesty. Trump just makes stuff up, and in a way he benefits from accusations that he’s a liar. (1) It shows that those doing the accusing are the true enemies of the people who have to be taken down. (2) It shows how powerful he is, that, like some Nietschean colossus, he stands above the limits society imposes on the rest of us. Only such a man can take on the “elites”, right? And again, how can the media respond to this? Fact-checking really would have no effect. Actually, is there any evidence that fact-checking *has* had a measurable impact when it has been employed?
I agree with Solnit (and Andrew and many others) that both-sidesism is a particular curse for news organizations that want to maintain the appearance of objectivity without its substance. This only compounds the problem posed by what you might call anti-Enlightenment politicians and movements. But even if this were dispensed with — and partisan news sources, for better and worse, *do* dispense with it — timely and accurate information is an insufficient defense against what we’re seeing.
I’ve been rereading “Rhinoceros” (Ionesco) recently.
“…but there is no real interest in finding out how a Kamala presidency might differ from a Biden presidency”
Isn’t it more important to find out how a Kamala presidency might differ from a Trump presidency?
Seriously, the only area in which the president has great latitude to act _sua sponte_ is foreign policy. Right now, the United States is involved in proxy wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine, and both of those have the potential for escalation into something much larger, including conceivably nuclear annihilation. We ought to care greatly about how an incoming president will manage those conflicts, and international relationships (think China, the other BRICS, and the global south generally), far more than we should care about domestic policy wish lists that are DOA in congress anyway.
In that regard, it is unclear to me whether there is any difference between the two candidates. While Trump campaigned against forever wars in 2016, once elected his national security team consisted primarily of neoconservative ideologues. While he did sometimes overrule them, and did not begin any new kinetic wars, it was he who began arming the Ukrainians and imposing massive sanctions on Russia. Trump withdrew the US from important arms control treaties with Russia. He campaigned on improving relations with Russia, but in the end, he tanked them instead. He campaigned against NATO, but actually enlarged it. And his devotion to Israel’s right wing was concretely manifested in several ways. He withdrew the United States from the nuclear treaty (JCPOA) with Iran. Biden’s policies in both of these regions are, I think, fairly characterized as continuations of Trump’s. (Even the withdrawal from Afghanistan was initiated by Trump, with Biden simply following through on execution.)
Kamala Harris has so far given no sign that she would do anything substantially different in this area from Biden, and the recently added policy page on her website seems to support this conclusion, at least to the extent it is specific enough to support any conclusion at all.
With Trump, there is a huge disconnect between his stated positions and his actions from 2016 through 2020. For Harris, we have the prior assumption that she will deviate little, if at all, from the status quo, and at most some vague position statements. But, with so little information to go on, it strains credulity to think that either of these two will deliver anything but standard neoconservative approaches to international relations.
As you might infer from my tone here, I consider both candidates completely unfit for office and I will indeed be voting for some third party candidate, or perhaps a write-in.
I think you will find that chipmunk disagrees with your assessment of the disconnect between Trump’s stated positions and actions. But I think you right to point out that the president alone has much less latitude than is often portrayed (though Trump’s aspirations, aided by the Supreme Court, might change that). My view is that the president is an important symbol and that symbolism matters. In terms of the symbol that Trump and Harris would display, I think there is a world of difference. Trump presented the world with an isolationist, self-indulged, uncaring, and untrustworthy image of the US. Biden (and I think Harris) portrayed a multinational country interested in rules-based international relationships. When Trump and his supporters talk about how “respected” the US was under his presidency, they mistake respect for fear. They feared Trump – as I do – not because he is powerful, but because he is untrustworthy and potentially maniacal. Biden restored some of the respect that the US used to enjoy. At least that has been my experience with the many people I interact with internationally. Now a big caveat: my interactions have all been with educated people in other countries. I can’t speak about the uneducated – perhaps the Trump line is true there.
Preach.
Strangely, although foreign policy is where we would hope they might be different, actually they seem completely similar there as you say. I think actually domestic policy is where the two radically diverge. Trump created chaos and used federal police in unmarked vehicles with no ID to snatch US citizens indiscriminately off the streets of Portland. He asked his military advisors to have the US military shoot protesters in the legs (they refused). He used chemical agents against US citizens so that he could march down the street and stand in front of a church with a bible for a photo opportunity. He signaled that his followers should mob the capitol and try to overthrow the countries election in 2020. He supported Nazis marching in the streets of the US with “fine people on both sides”. His entire domestic policy is basically “use bare power to promote his own narcissistic personality disorder” a quality he shares with such “fine people” as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, Jorge Videla, Rodrigo Duterte, and soforth.
Kamala Harris is a bastard who supports a genocide with weapons but she’s not a “send the military to shoot domestic protesters in the legs” bastard she’s basically GWB 2.0 and on that very very low bar, she’ll get my vote.
Trump tried and failed to steal the 2020 election. GWB succeeded at stealing the 2000 election.
GWB tortured with impunity, even his own counterterrorism czar said he and Cheney did war crimes.
GWB vastly expanded the unconstitutional surveillance of Americans.
The wars on terror killed over 1 million civilians directly and many more indirectly.
GWB is much worse than Trump.
I’m going to follow Clyde and vote 3rd party.
I rather agree with you that bipartisan US foreign policy is utterly terrible & probably makes both the world overall and the US population less safe on-net. (If you look at expected values, preventing WW3 is essentially the only thing that matters: saving 100k lives here in exchange for a 0.1% increase in the probability of a war that would kill 1B is definitely not a win).
I think US policy for the last 30-35 years (post Cold War) has missed the very fundamental change in how the world works with modern technology and the economy based on it. Conquest is hard and unrewarding now. The last really successful large scale conquest was, what, the expansion of the PRC around 1949-1950? The modern tendency has been to fragment nations, not to expand them.
(One could argue the change actually happened earlier – that the 1930s/1940s were the last time period where large scale conquest could actually benefit the country doing it, and that the Cold War was therefore largely unnecessary – but that is unfalsifiable.)
For the zillionth time,
JOURNALISM 101
“If someone says it’s raining & another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out of the f**king window and find out which is true.”
Should be updated to a more modern version:
“If someone says it’s raining & another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to ask Jeff Bezos which one he wants to see in print.”
This tweet about the debate kind of sums up this discussion, imo.
https://x.com/TimAlberta/status/1833696346076790851
Well put. Succinct. Who cares about the numerators when the denominators vary that much?
I casually reviewed some media coverage of the debate (not the NYT since I don’t have ready access to it and I am not really that interested in that one particular source). If you look at CNN and FOX you would believe that they were watching two different debates. AP is a bit more even handed, although they are more positive about Harris’ performance than Trump’s. Is that bias? I’d call it closer to objective reporting. Meanwhile the echo chambers offer no pretense at objectivity. It becomes more important than ever to know where people are getting their “news” from. And then there are those pet cats being eaten by (il)legal immigrants…
I think the prediction market is a reasonably unbiased way to assess public perception of the debate (you know, “normal people”). If you use that measure, Trump crapped the bed (as the kids like to say).
At Predictit, Harris was up 1 shortly before the debate and then up 10 shortly after. Here’s a real time snapshot to give a sense:
https://x.com/franklinisbored/status/1833686360722682229
That may be, but the change shown on that graph is well within the margin of error (underestimated as we know). I’m not sure where you get the up by 1 and then 10 since the graph appears to show a 3% swing. In any case, I suppose this is an opportunity to examine the selection biases in prediction markets since participants are likely not a random sample of the population. I’m not sure I buy it as “reasonably unbiased,” though probably more than the mass media – a fairly low bar.
Dale –
The “Predictit” site had Harris up by one point prior, and 10 points after. Polymarket had Trump up by 6 or 7 points prior and now has it tied. A aggregated take on the betting market at Real Clear had Trump up by @ 4 points prior (IIRC) and now has Harris up 5:
https://www.realclearpolling.com/betting-odds/2024/president
As for the unbiased nature of the betting makets – of course bettors will have biases as a group…but at least in theory they’re not betting based on their own personal views of how the debate went, so much as theie views on how the public saw the debate. At some point, a perception there becomes a degree of reality. They’re basing bets on talking to friends and observing the media and all of that. Plus, there’s a feedback loop.
Apparently Polymarket has it at 97% that Harris won the debate (or perhaps more accurately, Trump lost it).
I mean I think the whole idea of “winning” these kinds of “debates” is inane and childish. In my mind, I’ve never seen a presidential debate where I didn’t think both candidates lost, and most badly. But I’m just talking about the public perception.
And I guess I should have said relatively reasonably unbiased.
Can you explain to me what the deal is on the “Haitians eating cats” claim?
Like what is the democrat “accepted truth”?
Both candidates appeared to be completely culturally ignorant. I would expect that from Trump but thought a distinguishing feature of democrats was that they are supposed to care about that kind of thing.
To anyone still reading/commenting in this thread . . . I’m just bummed that youall keep going back and forth on this one, but nobody at all is commenting on the next two posts, on the Bayesian social science conference and the awesome online graph guessing game!
I liked the graph guessing game a lot. I tried 2 and got both right, so I’m a fan. I intend to use this in courses as it gets people thinking about measurement, magnitudes, and context. Maybe the lack of comments is a complement to the requests for more posts about good statistical practice. Negative comments usually are easier to come by than positive ones.
Politics is more interesting :(