This was a great read. You've accurately captured the long-running frustration that conservatives have had with legacy media that drove them to seek alternate news sources. It used to drive me crazy.
Really makes you wonder whether it's even possible to heal this divide when basic reality is up for debate
Suspect we need to think in terms of some anti-echo-chamber structures and regulations, perhaps revisiting the spirit of equal time act and fairness doctrine... with wisdom of hindsight about what didn't work.
"FREE SPEECH" be damned, one simply CAN'T have a democratic nation if you permit ANY interests (commercial, foreign adversaries) to tell one half one thing and the other the opposite.
Free stupid, destructive, hateful, deceitful speech is actually NOT needed. Yes there is a challenge in deciding what is what, but there should be NO QUESTION that, in principle, 'free' stupid, destructive, hateful, deceitful speech is actually NOT needed! And it may be more than worthwhile, possibly essential, to boldly enter the moral fray, and have some rules (rules can be changed) about what is good and bad. We do that in every other domain.
A nation needs some minimal amount of cognitive coherence, and a shared reality (accurate is less critical than shared), is essential. Shared belief is in fact MUCH more critical to national survival than accurate belief, in MANY domains and for most moments.
Appreciate this essay. I’ve had several moments in the past several years where I’ve asked myself, “how don’t people see what I am seeing?” My trajectory doesn’t exactly mirrors yours but I’m thinking we have arrived at the same ballpark.
It's genuinely perplexing when it's your friends who you know to be bright and inquisitive, so you can't write it off as them being dumb, so then you think they must be pretending for political expediency, and then it's shocking to realize that they actually were fooled because they didn't have any immune system for being lied to by their own institutions.
I shook by the accuracy of this and your essay above. For me, the past few years on Substack has been reading (largely) philosophers and a few psychologist who helped me challenge and shift my perspective
Very good article. I think you let leftists off too easy at the end. If you can become cognizant of GellMann amnesia, why can’t they?
For the right, a lot of the more insane conspiracists are perhaps less educated or lower IQ, but how does a leftist not self correct once they see their favoured reporter was dead wrong on Biden’s senility or whatever?
Honestly? Liberalism is more attractive to intellectuals, and intellectuals are very good at rationalizing things that they want to believe. They also like to look for counter intuitive explanations for things, it feeds their egos and their desire to solve puzzles at the same time. I only escaped because I had a weird interest that exposed some of their flawed thinking early, and I'm further to the right side of the bell curve than most of them.
Interesting, but it doesn’t explain their utter resistance when their worldview is actively deconstructed - something you’ve doubtless witnessed.
So it boils down to ego and cognitive dissonance and an unwillingness to admit one was wrong. But then that explains their current malaise and doesn’t really require your explanation of a poor epistemological immune response?
I think it's a bit of both cognitive dissonance in particular is a real bitch if your identity is tied up in believing certain things. And again, smart people are really good at rationalizing, you have to be extremely self aware in order to catch yourself doing it. I was "the smart kid" from a young age and so always had step siblings and classmates gunning for me to make a mistake that they could rub in for weeks, gave me a bit of a complex about self fact checking.
I think a need for social approval is also part of it. If liberals know that saying a certain thing will cause other liberals to turn on them, they just won't say it.
The few who are disagreeable enough to say it anyways get cast out and end up "politically homeless." Their ecosystem doesn't allow for dissent.
I'd say the vast majority of any political group aren't going to seriously reevaluate their beliefs and think about gel mann amnesia. It's nice when some people do but they're never going to be the majority of any political group, so we can't judge a political movement by whether they did serious self-doubting introspection. They'd all fail.
This is well-written. My triggers for canceling all my legacy media subscriptions and and donations to/feeds from NPR was their obvious cluelessness and intentional lying around anything involving military force. The research Ryan McBeth did on the dearth of veterans at WaPo, NYT and others only confirmed my suspicion that it’s stuffed full of clueless propagandists. https://open.substack.com/pub/ryanmcbeth/p/why-the-new-york-times-gets-it-wrong
Good golly - great way to end the old year and kick off the new. I look forward to reading more longer essays like this. I hope both libs, conservatives
and those not beholden to either ideology read it. Explains a good deal about our current situation and offers a way for reason to hopefully make some headway in public discourse (but you never know). Anyways thanks and Happy New Year.
Glad you liked it! What did you think of the length? I'm trying to find the sweet spot of getting the point across while neither gliding over important information nor inundating the reader with stats and links, I'm pretty happy with how this one came out.
I read the whole article so, that’s a good sign. It is my view far that too many creators on Substack drone on and on without either getting to the point or beating it to death and I have no patience for that. I’m not against long form (I still read books), and in a format like this get to the point already and make it interesting. And you did that. And I guess there is some bias on my part in your favor ‘cause I’m not religious as well (though I know a lot about some of aspects of it) and I tend pass on those who believe only JC can cure America’s ills - I find it is often simplistic, bombastic and not in alignment with my values.
About the 2024 Biden stuff: Part of that was that even if you were skeptical of left-leaning media and had a list of seemingly more fact-focused journalists, it seemed like a lot of the ones who still had being fact-based as their brand (centrally Matt Yglesias) were saying Biden's diminishing was overstated right until the debate. So it was tempting to assign more credence than was warrented to Biden's deminishment being over hyped, especially since his critics were also mostly notoriously unreliable.
(Part of this is my mistake for trusting Yglesias too much based on vibes. But it was an easy mistake to make - Yglesias has a reverse gell-mann effect where there's a few issues he really is better on, and it's easy to overgeneralize from them).
I guess that's part of what I'm getting at, that I'd had to learn a long time ago to always be skeptical, especially when what I'm being told clashes with what I can actually see or hear, while a lot of liberals never learned that lesson and got caught unprepared when their institutions deceived them. I'd also learned to be doubly skeptical if what I was being told seemed too good, I'd seen what had happened to conservatives who fell into their own bubbles that way, and I'm vain enough not to want to be embarrassed in public that way.
Yglesias is an interesting case because he generally is good, I pay for his newsletter for a reason, but he is an operative, and you always have to keep that in mind when reading him.
I'm a fairly normie center left person. I seldom saw Biden doing things on TV, so I had no particular reason to doubt him. I did see in my news feed articles by FOX about his decline, but discounted them as FOX doing it's usual hyper partisan schtick. Basically, FOX was never to be trusted. But, I was angry at Biden for running again as he was in general too old (so is Trump), and then I was shocked by the Debate, and gyrations after that. I still would not take anything FOX says seriously and certainly not the sources further right, but I make a point on Substack of reading those in the middle.
They read so much more intelligently than anything coming out of MAGA world, and I really am attracted to thoughtful writing, but yes, I can recognize the farther left influence.
Good piece. I come from the conservative side myself. A good example of how I view the same sort of thing you experienced is the trans issue.
I have the utmost sympathy for those who have been captured by the trans ideologues and have been destroyed by them. Most of them are children who were misled by those who should have known better. But there are basically no people I think more evil, deranged, and despicable than those who have profited off of and pushed it.
I feel sympathetic for those who are misled by media, and outraged at those who knowingly cause it (this is where I slightly disagree with you, there is plenty of out and out known falsehood in media, especially these days).
I will also admit that of course my sources aren’t infallible so I’m certainly oft deceived as well. I’m about at the point that my complete focus is just on bettering my own life and those of my friends and family, everything else be damned.
Without exception, every article I've ever read in a newspaper on a topic I knew a lot about has been totally full of shit and lies. I've also been quoted in a few newspaper and magazine articles, and in each one of them I was misquoted. I don't believe a word they write anymore. They make up whatever they want that fits their agenda, and count on most of their readers to be too gullible and uninformed to know the difference.
I've got a YouTube channel I watch that's really good for military history... As long as they are following their main format (week by week coverage of modern wars). If they ever go outside of that they'll get lots of stuff wrong (especially if they go ancient). Worst one so far is the time they said the Persian empire lasted until the Muslims... When Alexander conquered it, and then the Parthians conquered the result of that.
That wasn't the point of their video, the state of Iran in the cold war was, but that probably just made them sloppier because the simple background isn't where you expect your errors to come from.
They have some association with a channel named The Great War, but they split back in 2018.(Those people have a secondary general called real time history, and I haven't caught them making near the mistakes of time ghost)
The myth that bigotry flourishes on the right, or that right-wingers are primarily motivated by it, is perhaps the most damaging and popular myth of our time.
Good work, thanks. Matt Taibbi covered a lot of the same ground at length in Hate Inc. a few years ago. The downward slide of journalistic standards, a long term trend, won’t bottom out until a critical mass of consumers declare: a pox on both your houses!
I like Taibbi and I enjoyed Hate Inc, but I don't think he went into the structural reasons for the initial bias, and how the drip drip drip of one sided errors and bias gradually eroded the institutional faith of the right long before Fox and co showed up.
This was a lot of fun to read. I should add I basically agree with all of it. Even the parts where liberals are less resistant to spin--yeah, the 'think for yourself' liberal crowd of the 60s-80s is long gone.
My own journey began in a super-liberal area with somewhat-conservative parents back in the 80s. In childhood I trusted my parents, in adolescence my school and the media, until I got a copy of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' and found that all their secrets...had been covered ad nauseam by my heavily left-leaning urban private school!
So I was like, OK, you told me that people slant things to serve those in power. That makes sense, no corrupt politico tells the public they're stealing money after all. Around me and in the media the left is obviously in power--they endorse Democrats after all. So what is *the left* lying to me about?
I went through a whole phase of reading the NYT, the WSJ, and then the Nation and New Republic on the left and NR (I agree, their fuddy-duddy bowtie conservatism kept them somewhat honest) on the right. And, yeah, Reason, because they seemed like conservatives but more fun, and also because they were willing to call out government overreach on left and right. Add the Atlantic, used to read the Federalist but they got too into stupid conspiracy theories.
Then everything got paywalled sometime around 2020 and I defaulted to NYT/WSJ and whatever right-wing authors caught my fancy. (Steve Sailer has been a longtime favorite.)
The absence of a good fact-checked NYT-equivalent on the right has been a constant irritant. There's the WSJ, but they're still kind of woke except on business issues. I'm old enough to remember the New York Sun, but they went under. Tucker Carlson (yes, him) apparently tried to make one with the Daily Caller but it rapidly turned into another Fox News clone after they realized there was no money in it.
There just aren't enough people on the right who care about accuracy to support news organizations, I guess. What do center-righties do?
Thank you. This is the most accurate piece I've read on the issue that far. The only argument I may have quibbles with is that conservatives are more "immune" to media bias because they were victims to it for decades. I don't think that's true, in the sense that people in general are concerned about biases.
More intelligent people at least notionally declare they would prefer to have maximally neutral sources to get as closer to the truth as possible, even when their behavior doesn't match these ideals.
Less intelligent people don't even pretend to understand this concept or care about it. They think they already know everything they need to know, and they just want media to reflect their own biases and attack other people's biases.
I don't think they're immune to media bias, what I'm saying is that they've grown accustomed to it and so treat official sources with skepticism (for good and ill), while liberals are largely still getting used to the idea that their institutions regularly lie to them.
I understand your effort to assign blame both ways and agree both can do better, but I think you had to work hard to save the left from intent, rather than an unconscious bias. A couple of examples.
You seem to imply the traditional liberal makeup of the media is a natural occurrence due to those jobs being located in our cities. You also acknowledge almost all major errors in their reporting only skew to the left, but without explanation conclude those errors are likely good faith mistakes, not intent to deceive. When the errors only go one way, time after time, it suggests intent rather than good faith in the absence of additional evidence, which is not provided.
You say the right believes some crazy stuff and attribute it in part as sort of an understandable reaction to a media that consistently leans left. But you don't provide examples, and my guess is you would list some things that yes do have some adherents, but no are not widely shared among the right as a whole.
Contrast that with your specific examples on the left. Is there any doubt stories like Russiagate and very fine people were almost universally acknowledged as true by the left as a whole? Zero skepticism to be found anywhere. Even thoroughly debunked, I'm guessing way too many still buy into both. It's hard for me to attribute the left's reaction to stories like those as merely a misplaced trust in the institutions they relied on.
As for Biden's infirmity and the left's apparent shock learning of it that led to your conclusion, again that's hard to swallow. The evidence was the man himself not what any pundit, left or right had to say. Even a pretty hidden president like Biden (a clue itself) generates a lot of footage. My favorite reporter got it wrong, in good faith not intentionally, is just too hard to swallow.
Like I said to another poster, my intent here was not to damn the left but rather to call attention to a system that gradually drove the right to rely on unreliable sources of information, and increasingly is having the same effect on the left itself. I probably underplayed the actual thumb on the scale element in favor of the "these guys didn't know what they didn't know", but I mostly wanted to emphasize that I'm not positing the existence of some vast leftwing conspiracy to control the news, which is exactly the sort of conspiratorial belief that I have in fact encountered on the right. My target audience for this piece is not right wing people who already know they can't trust the media, but reasonable liberals who don't understand where the anger and the mistrust come from, and aren't looking to read a polemic.
Fair enough. I'm not willing to say, however, that left media consumers are likely well meaning but misled by well intentioned but biased journalists.
Using the decade since Trump came on the scene we've all watched as the media churns out story after story framing the right as engaged in some scandalous behavior. Many of those stories crumble but not until irrevocable damage is done.
Contrast the number of stories legacy media covered that hurt the left the past decade. Can you name one? Is it statistically possible that for a decade one side of the aisle engages in nonstop misconduct while the other remains scandal free?
More telling, when right media exposes something harmful to the left, not only do they not cover it, they attack the messenger and claim to have debunked the story every single time.
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but the evidence seems pretty strong in favor of a legacy media that's trying to intentionally shape a world view. Also call me skeptical of that media's audience. If they've seen this time and again but continue to rely on those same sources, I suspect they're much less interested in learning truth than consuming something that reinforces their personal views.
Oh no, the current media is not innocent at all, what I was talking about was how it became that way, that there wasn't a plan or a conspiracy to make the media liberal and then use it to benefit the Democrats and harm the Republicans, that came later after the selection effects had been at work for some time.
I was blessed with good instincts and started feeling things in my gut back in the Clinton Era. The Covid lockdowns were when I really started to see the light about what was really going on with what was "my side"....the Dems. NOTHING was adding up....the lockdowns, the vaccine, masking, keeping granny and gramps locked away. All of it seemed off and not very "scientific", yet we were told to "Believe the Science". The cherry picking of the data has been a problem for years.
This was a great read. You've accurately captured the long-running frustration that conservatives have had with legacy media that drove them to seek alternate news sources. It used to drive me crazy.
Really makes you wonder whether it's even possible to heal this divide when basic reality is up for debate
Suspect we need to think in terms of some anti-echo-chamber structures and regulations, perhaps revisiting the spirit of equal time act and fairness doctrine... with wisdom of hindsight about what didn't work.
"FREE SPEECH" be damned, one simply CAN'T have a democratic nation if you permit ANY interests (commercial, foreign adversaries) to tell one half one thing and the other the opposite.
Free stupid, destructive, hateful, deceitful speech is actually NOT needed. Yes there is a challenge in deciding what is what, but there should be NO QUESTION that, in principle, 'free' stupid, destructive, hateful, deceitful speech is actually NOT needed! And it may be more than worthwhile, possibly essential, to boldly enter the moral fray, and have some rules (rules can be changed) about what is good and bad. We do that in every other domain.
A nation needs some minimal amount of cognitive coherence, and a shared reality (accurate is less critical than shared), is essential. Shared belief is in fact MUCH more critical to national survival than accurate belief, in MANY domains and for most moments.
I think China is going to teach us this lesson.
your a bot fascist
Unlikely. But how would you know?
Appreciate this essay. I’ve had several moments in the past several years where I’ve asked myself, “how don’t people see what I am seeing?” My trajectory doesn’t exactly mirrors yours but I’m thinking we have arrived at the same ballpark.
It's genuinely perplexing when it's your friends who you know to be bright and inquisitive, so you can't write it off as them being dumb, so then you think they must be pretending for political expediency, and then it's shocking to realize that they actually were fooled because they didn't have any immune system for being lied to by their own institutions.
I shook by the accuracy of this and your essay above. For me, the past few years on Substack has been reading (largely) philosophers and a few psychologist who helped me challenge and shift my perspective
Very good article. I think you let leftists off too easy at the end. If you can become cognizant of GellMann amnesia, why can’t they?
For the right, a lot of the more insane conspiracists are perhaps less educated or lower IQ, but how does a leftist not self correct once they see their favoured reporter was dead wrong on Biden’s senility or whatever?
Honestly? Liberalism is more attractive to intellectuals, and intellectuals are very good at rationalizing things that they want to believe. They also like to look for counter intuitive explanations for things, it feeds their egos and their desire to solve puzzles at the same time. I only escaped because I had a weird interest that exposed some of their flawed thinking early, and I'm further to the right side of the bell curve than most of them.
Interesting, but it doesn’t explain their utter resistance when their worldview is actively deconstructed - something you’ve doubtless witnessed.
So it boils down to ego and cognitive dissonance and an unwillingness to admit one was wrong. But then that explains their current malaise and doesn’t really require your explanation of a poor epistemological immune response?
I think it's a bit of both cognitive dissonance in particular is a real bitch if your identity is tied up in believing certain things. And again, smart people are really good at rationalizing, you have to be extremely self aware in order to catch yourself doing it. I was "the smart kid" from a young age and so always had step siblings and classmates gunning for me to make a mistake that they could rub in for weeks, gave me a bit of a complex about self fact checking.
Be careful you do not fall into the same trap. Tread lightly here.
I think a need for social approval is also part of it. If liberals know that saying a certain thing will cause other liberals to turn on them, they just won't say it.
The few who are disagreeable enough to say it anyways get cast out and end up "politically homeless." Their ecosystem doesn't allow for dissent.
Also, I want liberals to read the article, so I can't be too hard on them, and I really do think it wasn't intentional in the beginning.
You did a great job.
Exceptional, actually.
I'd say the vast majority of any political group aren't going to seriously reevaluate their beliefs and think about gel mann amnesia. It's nice when some people do but they're never going to be the majority of any political group, so we can't judge a political movement by whether they did serious self-doubting introspection. They'd all fail.
Well, Keese’s original point is that the Right writ large did do this - that’s why they stopped trusting mainstream media.
It’s a pain reading comments from those who did not get past the first few paragraphs.
This is well-written. My triggers for canceling all my legacy media subscriptions and and donations to/feeds from NPR was their obvious cluelessness and intentional lying around anything involving military force. The research Ryan McBeth did on the dearth of veterans at WaPo, NYT and others only confirmed my suspicion that it’s stuffed full of clueless propagandists. https://open.substack.com/pub/ryanmcbeth/p/why-the-new-york-times-gets-it-wrong
Good golly - great way to end the old year and kick off the new. I look forward to reading more longer essays like this. I hope both libs, conservatives
and those not beholden to either ideology read it. Explains a good deal about our current situation and offers a way for reason to hopefully make some headway in public discourse (but you never know). Anyways thanks and Happy New Year.
Glad you liked it! What did you think of the length? I'm trying to find the sweet spot of getting the point across while neither gliding over important information nor inundating the reader with stats and links, I'm pretty happy with how this one came out.
I read the whole article so, that’s a good sign. It is my view far that too many creators on Substack drone on and on without either getting to the point or beating it to death and I have no patience for that. I’m not against long form (I still read books), and in a format like this get to the point already and make it interesting. And you did that. And I guess there is some bias on my part in your favor ‘cause I’m not religious as well (though I know a lot about some of aspects of it) and I tend pass on those who believe only JC can cure America’s ills - I find it is often simplistic, bombastic and not in alignment with my values.
About the 2024 Biden stuff: Part of that was that even if you were skeptical of left-leaning media and had a list of seemingly more fact-focused journalists, it seemed like a lot of the ones who still had being fact-based as their brand (centrally Matt Yglesias) were saying Biden's diminishing was overstated right until the debate. So it was tempting to assign more credence than was warrented to Biden's deminishment being over hyped, especially since his critics were also mostly notoriously unreliable.
(Part of this is my mistake for trusting Yglesias too much based on vibes. But it was an easy mistake to make - Yglesias has a reverse gell-mann effect where there's a few issues he really is better on, and it's easy to overgeneralize from them).
I guess that's part of what I'm getting at, that I'd had to learn a long time ago to always be skeptical, especially when what I'm being told clashes with what I can actually see or hear, while a lot of liberals never learned that lesson and got caught unprepared when their institutions deceived them. I'd also learned to be doubly skeptical if what I was being told seemed too good, I'd seen what had happened to conservatives who fell into their own bubbles that way, and I'm vain enough not to want to be embarrassed in public that way.
Yglesias is an interesting case because he generally is good, I pay for his newsletter for a reason, but he is an operative, and you always have to keep that in mind when reading him.
I'm a fairly normie center left person. I seldom saw Biden doing things on TV, so I had no particular reason to doubt him. I did see in my news feed articles by FOX about his decline, but discounted them as FOX doing it's usual hyper partisan schtick. Basically, FOX was never to be trusted. But, I was angry at Biden for running again as he was in general too old (so is Trump), and then I was shocked by the Debate, and gyrations after that. I still would not take anything FOX says seriously and certainly not the sources further right, but I make a point on Substack of reading those in the middle.
Have you started to realize that many of the mainstream outlets are just as partisan as Fox, just less clumsy about it?
They read so much more intelligently than anything coming out of MAGA world, and I really am attracted to thoughtful writing, but yes, I can recognize the farther left influence.
Good piece. I come from the conservative side myself. A good example of how I view the same sort of thing you experienced is the trans issue.
I have the utmost sympathy for those who have been captured by the trans ideologues and have been destroyed by them. Most of them are children who were misled by those who should have known better. But there are basically no people I think more evil, deranged, and despicable than those who have profited off of and pushed it.
I feel sympathetic for those who are misled by media, and outraged at those who knowingly cause it (this is where I slightly disagree with you, there is plenty of out and out known falsehood in media, especially these days).
I will also admit that of course my sources aren’t infallible so I’m certainly oft deceived as well. I’m about at the point that my complete focus is just on bettering my own life and those of my friends and family, everything else be damned.
Without exception, every article I've ever read in a newspaper on a topic I knew a lot about has been totally full of shit and lies. I've also been quoted in a few newspaper and magazine articles, and in each one of them I was misquoted. I don't believe a word they write anymore. They make up whatever they want that fits their agenda, and count on most of their readers to be too gullible and uninformed to know the difference.
Interesting!
I've got a YouTube channel I watch that's really good for military history... As long as they are following their main format (week by week coverage of modern wars). If they ever go outside of that they'll get lots of stuff wrong (especially if they go ancient). Worst one so far is the time they said the Persian empire lasted until the Muslims... When Alexander conquered it, and then the Parthians conquered the result of that.
That wasn't the point of their video, the state of Iran in the cold war was, but that probably just made them sloppier because the simple background isn't where you expect your errors to come from.
Which channel is this? Perun?
It's actually a cluster of channels.
World War II (yeah, they got that name for real)
The Korean War
Timeghost
They have some association with a channel named The Great War, but they split back in 2018.(Those people have a secondary general called real time history, and I haven't caught them making near the mistakes of time ghost)
Followed there ww2 content for a bit, but fell off around Stalingrad
The myth that bigotry flourishes on the right, or that right-wingers are primarily motivated by it, is perhaps the most damaging and popular myth of our time.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-bigoted-republican
The left has cleverly defined their own bigotry as something else, part of why they're so fond of language games.
Good work, thanks. Matt Taibbi covered a lot of the same ground at length in Hate Inc. a few years ago. The downward slide of journalistic standards, a long term trend, won’t bottom out until a critical mass of consumers declare: a pox on both your houses!
I like Taibbi and I enjoyed Hate Inc, but I don't think he went into the structural reasons for the initial bias, and how the drip drip drip of one sided errors and bias gradually eroded the institutional faith of the right long before Fox and co showed up.
This was a lot of fun to read. I should add I basically agree with all of it. Even the parts where liberals are less resistant to spin--yeah, the 'think for yourself' liberal crowd of the 60s-80s is long gone.
My own journey began in a super-liberal area with somewhat-conservative parents back in the 80s. In childhood I trusted my parents, in adolescence my school and the media, until I got a copy of 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' and found that all their secrets...had been covered ad nauseam by my heavily left-leaning urban private school!
So I was like, OK, you told me that people slant things to serve those in power. That makes sense, no corrupt politico tells the public they're stealing money after all. Around me and in the media the left is obviously in power--they endorse Democrats after all. So what is *the left* lying to me about?
I went through a whole phase of reading the NYT, the WSJ, and then the Nation and New Republic on the left and NR (I agree, their fuddy-duddy bowtie conservatism kept them somewhat honest) on the right. And, yeah, Reason, because they seemed like conservatives but more fun, and also because they were willing to call out government overreach on left and right. Add the Atlantic, used to read the Federalist but they got too into stupid conspiracy theories.
Then everything got paywalled sometime around 2020 and I defaulted to NYT/WSJ and whatever right-wing authors caught my fancy. (Steve Sailer has been a longtime favorite.)
The absence of a good fact-checked NYT-equivalent on the right has been a constant irritant. There's the WSJ, but they're still kind of woke except on business issues. I'm old enough to remember the New York Sun, but they went under. Tucker Carlson (yes, him) apparently tried to make one with the Daily Caller but it rapidly turned into another Fox News clone after they realized there was no money in it.
There just aren't enough people on the right who care about accuracy to support news organizations, I guess. What do center-righties do?
Thank you. This is the most accurate piece I've read on the issue that far. The only argument I may have quibbles with is that conservatives are more "immune" to media bias because they were victims to it for decades. I don't think that's true, in the sense that people in general are concerned about biases.
More intelligent people at least notionally declare they would prefer to have maximally neutral sources to get as closer to the truth as possible, even when their behavior doesn't match these ideals.
Less intelligent people don't even pretend to understand this concept or care about it. They think they already know everything they need to know, and they just want media to reflect their own biases and attack other people's biases.
That is, at least, my personal experience.
I don't think they're immune to media bias, what I'm saying is that they've grown accustomed to it and so treat official sources with skepticism (for good and ill), while liberals are largely still getting used to the idea that their institutions regularly lie to them.
I understand your effort to assign blame both ways and agree both can do better, but I think you had to work hard to save the left from intent, rather than an unconscious bias. A couple of examples.
You seem to imply the traditional liberal makeup of the media is a natural occurrence due to those jobs being located in our cities. You also acknowledge almost all major errors in their reporting only skew to the left, but without explanation conclude those errors are likely good faith mistakes, not intent to deceive. When the errors only go one way, time after time, it suggests intent rather than good faith in the absence of additional evidence, which is not provided.
You say the right believes some crazy stuff and attribute it in part as sort of an understandable reaction to a media that consistently leans left. But you don't provide examples, and my guess is you would list some things that yes do have some adherents, but no are not widely shared among the right as a whole.
Contrast that with your specific examples on the left. Is there any doubt stories like Russiagate and very fine people were almost universally acknowledged as true by the left as a whole? Zero skepticism to be found anywhere. Even thoroughly debunked, I'm guessing way too many still buy into both. It's hard for me to attribute the left's reaction to stories like those as merely a misplaced trust in the institutions they relied on.
As for Biden's infirmity and the left's apparent shock learning of it that led to your conclusion, again that's hard to swallow. The evidence was the man himself not what any pundit, left or right had to say. Even a pretty hidden president like Biden (a clue itself) generates a lot of footage. My favorite reporter got it wrong, in good faith not intentionally, is just too hard to swallow.
Like I said to another poster, my intent here was not to damn the left but rather to call attention to a system that gradually drove the right to rely on unreliable sources of information, and increasingly is having the same effect on the left itself. I probably underplayed the actual thumb on the scale element in favor of the "these guys didn't know what they didn't know", but I mostly wanted to emphasize that I'm not positing the existence of some vast leftwing conspiracy to control the news, which is exactly the sort of conspiratorial belief that I have in fact encountered on the right. My target audience for this piece is not right wing people who already know they can't trust the media, but reasonable liberals who don't understand where the anger and the mistrust come from, and aren't looking to read a polemic.
Fair enough. I'm not willing to say, however, that left media consumers are likely well meaning but misled by well intentioned but biased journalists.
Using the decade since Trump came on the scene we've all watched as the media churns out story after story framing the right as engaged in some scandalous behavior. Many of those stories crumble but not until irrevocable damage is done.
Contrast the number of stories legacy media covered that hurt the left the past decade. Can you name one? Is it statistically possible that for a decade one side of the aisle engages in nonstop misconduct while the other remains scandal free?
More telling, when right media exposes something harmful to the left, not only do they not cover it, they attack the messenger and claim to have debunked the story every single time.
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you want, but the evidence seems pretty strong in favor of a legacy media that's trying to intentionally shape a world view. Also call me skeptical of that media's audience. If they've seen this time and again but continue to rely on those same sources, I suspect they're much less interested in learning truth than consuming something that reinforces their personal views.
Oh no, the current media is not innocent at all, what I was talking about was how it became that way, that there wasn't a plan or a conspiracy to make the media liberal and then use it to benefit the Democrats and harm the Republicans, that came later after the selection effects had been at work for some time.
I was blessed with good instincts and started feeling things in my gut back in the Clinton Era. The Covid lockdowns were when I really started to see the light about what was really going on with what was "my side"....the Dems. NOTHING was adding up....the lockdowns, the vaccine, masking, keeping granny and gramps locked away. All of it seemed off and not very "scientific", yet we were told to "Believe the Science". The cherry picking of the data has been a problem for years.