I ignore the news, in part, because I deem it unreliable. That’s right, “I don’t trust the media.” But what exactly do I mean by this seemingly conspiratorial statement?
All things considered, when I hear the media report on direct observations, I believe them. If they say rioting is happening in DC, I am highly confident that rioting is happening in DC. If they quote a politician, I am highly confident that the politician said the quote. If they say that a person was convicted of a specific crime, I believe that the person was indeed convicted.
But my trust largely ends there. When the media makes claims about any of the following, I habitually roll my eyes.
1. Causation. I distrust media claims about causation – about claims like “X caused event Y” as well as “Event Y caused Z.” If the media says a politician won an election, I believe them. When they try to tell me why the politician won, however, I scoff. If they try to tell me what will happen as a result of the politicians’ victory, I scoff again. Why? Because causation is notoriously difficult to untangle, and few journalists have the slightest training in causal inference. (They are however masters of hyperbole).
2. Meaning. I distrust media claims about what events mean – about claims like “X shows Y” or “X is part of broader trend Z.” Why? Because putting any particular event in context requires long-term statistical reasoning, and few journalists have more than mediocre training in statistics. So if journalists claim that a notorious crime illustrates a general pattern about crime, I skeptically shrug.
3. Importance. Whenever the media cover a story, there’s a subtext. And the subtext is: This is important! The also goes when the media ignores a story. The subtext is: This is not important! Even if I knew nothing about the world, I would wonder, “What qualifies these people to adjudicate events’ importance?” And since I do know a great deal about the world, I am convinced that the media’s sense of importance is radically defective. These are the kind of people who would rather cover an insensitive tweet than Uighur concentration camps. They would rather report a fatality-free nuclear accident than the vastly greater health damage of coal. They would rather investigate the latest terrorist attack than discuss the global murder rate. These are not isolated shortcomings. The media’s main function is to distort viewers’ priorities.
4. Politics. Even on utterly apolitical issues, I consider the media deeply unreliable on causation, meaning, and importance. Once causation, meaning, and importance become political, however, I deem it absurdly, insultingly unreliable. Why? Most obviously, because of the media’s overwhelming left-wing bias. You can tell simply by reading the headlines; diction alone is a dead giveaway. Less obviously, because of the media’s unthinking nationalism. Despite their cosmopolitan pretensions, even very left-wing journalists are nationalists at heart. That’s why a minor terrorist attack against fellow citizens gets a hundred times as much attention as mass murder of foreigners. That’s why token cuts in domestic welfare programs outrage the media a hundred times as much as massive cuts in the admission of refugees. When critics attack the media as “globalist,” it’s a case of 99% nationalists lashing out at 90% nationalists.
Personally, I should add, journalists almost always treat me very well. When they interview me, they’re not just consistently fair and respectful; they also accurately report my positions. What gives? Much of the reason must be self-selection: Journalists who interview me tend to be favorably disposed. A secondary reason, though, is that journalistic vices are often a response to consumer demand. On some level, most journalists know that plane crashes are grossly over-covered; but alas, “If it bleeds, it leads.” In a one-on-one conversation, though, the media is more thoughtful and open-minded than their output suggests. Another possibility, admittedly, is that when you interview someone as averse to Social Desirability Bias as myself, you can get a good story without bending the truth…
READER COMMENTS
Steve
Dec 2 2020 at 2:50pm
I’ve had deep personal knowledge of a handful of ideas/events that have received a lot of press coverage over the years. Without exception, the media coverage for these have been horribly inaccurate with respect to analysis and is often littered with basic factual errors.
When viewing the media my choices are:
The media is accurate for all other topics, but just happen to be inaccurate for just those things that I have knowledge of, or
The media is just as inaccurate about everything, but I just don’t recognize it for other topics because of my lack personal knowledge.
2 seems a lot more plausible than 1.
robc
Dec 2 2020 at 3:11pm
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Alan Goldhammer
Dec 2 2020 at 3:58pm
Change media to college professors and make a couple of other stylistic changes in the text and you come up with a comparable article on why we should not trust college professors. I don’t, do you?
robc
Dec 2 2020 at 4:41pm
I think they are generally trustworthy in their very specific area of expertise. As soon as they veer out of that lane, not at all.
Jose Pablo
Dec 2 2020 at 8:28pm
Another discussion is whether or not this “very specific area of expertise” can, in some meaningful way, improve the future capacity of their students to perform any “real job” task (not “to get the job” via signaling effect, to perform the task better).
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/the-case-against-education
Mark Z
Dec 3 2020 at 12:36am
I think you’ve identified the key issue. Journalists are, by necessity, generalists, which inevitably means they rarely know what they’re talking about at any given moment. Alan is certainly right though, that if you ask a college professor in almost any field about the economy or the latest terrorist attack, you won’t get much better information than if you ask a journalist. But usually usually we only care what physics professors say about physics, what financial economists say about finance, etc. For journalists to be as reliable on what they write about as professors are about the things they (usually) write about, journalists would have to be experts on all the stuff that happened in the world in last 24 hours, which of course they aren’t.
And of course a professor’s audience (on his speciality at least) is usually much narrower and selected for informedness than the general public, the journalist’s audience, so the latter is trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, which also reduces reliability.
zeke5123
Dec 3 2020 at 11:22am
I am not sure it is because journalists are lacking because they are generalists but instead that they have no skin-in-the-game vis-a-vis being true (perhaps different compared to factually correct). In fact, I think it is the opposite because of consumer preference.
Weir
Dec 3 2020 at 5:28am
But then you think of the latest column from Paul Krugman, which originally began with the claim that “Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate.”
Somebody re-wrote the online version after it was published but this is the Krugman bailiwick. What field of expertise is he in, what could be more familiar to him, than the complaints of Democrats against Donald Trump? This is the back of Paul Krugman’s hand. Nobody pays more attention to angry Democrats railing against Donald Trump than Krugman. He breathes this stuff all day, and he has, in the past, quoted Democrats using that word.
So if even this genuine expert can’t remember well-known figures like Hillary Clinton and Jimmy Carter and Maxine Waters and Jerry Nadler and John Lewis and Joe Biden and Paul Krugman, then what is expertise, now? How did Krugman fall so short of his former standards when there is no subject on earth that he is more familiar with?
robc
Dec 4 2020 at 9:59am
No, I would say his area of expertise is something like international trade. I trust him on that.
Floccina
Dec 3 2020 at 11:56am
In my experience college professors are far, far better than journalists.
I mostly go with what I learned in college about nutrition and pesticides than the stuff dished out in the Media, who BTW seem to seek out the wackyest professors, like Paul R. Ehrlich who was actually out of his area of expertise when they quoted him.
Steve
Dec 2 2020 at 5:16pm
It’s astonishing to observe how little of the news is actually direct observation. I’m only 35 so I have no true memory of it, but I imagine “the evening news” back in the day just about covered all the “things that happened”, and now that we have to fill 24/7 news stations we just spend the other 23.5 hours discussing why or how the thing happened.
Or even worse we have news reports about what other news channels did or did not report.
Komori
Dec 3 2020 at 10:17am
Even when there is direct observation, the press likes to make the exact opposite of the correct conclusion, as evidenced by the whole Covington thing. I suppose that technically falls under Caplan’s point 4, but at this point, that means pretty much everything does.
Personally, I had to stop listening to NPR this year. They used to be pretty decent, even if they were too readily statist for my tastes. The stories that I had personal knowledge of were decent, if shallow, but the latter was no worse than you’d expect from the time constraints of the clip. But things have been going downhill for years. From being shallow but balanced, they started paying attention to subtleties/complexities… but only on side of the story (and the same lean every time). Then they started ignoring major, key points that went against their narrative. Then they started continually repeating known falsehoods, as long they agreed with their narrative. This last year they switched to full-blown ends-justifies-the-means activism and I just had to stop listening.
I also have to add, that aside from twisting direct observations, just as important are the things that are happening that they purposely omit. Contrasting Reason’s coverage of the Portland riots with the MSM’s is enlightening in this regard.
Walter Boggs
Dec 3 2020 at 6:14pm
I’m 65 and I think you’re right on target. I recall my elderly mom a few years back, telling me there had been a dozen mass shootings in the US the previous night. When we sat down together to check CNN, it became clear there had been one mass shooting that was getting reported or mentioned every ten minutes. No wonder people think things are much worse than they really are.
AMT
Dec 2 2020 at 6:50pm
Excellent post, I 100% agree.
Phil H
Dec 2 2020 at 10:06pm
I agree with everything Caplan said there. On the positive side, in the world of the internet, you no longer have to read the mainstream media. Bloggers, indie media, and social media are all even more unreliable than the mainstream media, but taken together, they start to represent a picture of events that you can piece together, if you have a little time and interest in a subject.
FantasiaWHT
Dec 2 2020 at 10:17pm
On “importance”, the somewhat recent trend of reporting not an event, but rather what people are saying about and how people are reacting to the event, truly boggles my mind. If I see or hear a passing reference to something that happened that I want to learn more about, and I do a simple google search, or go look at news websites to try and find out about it, it’s nearly impossible to find the most basic who/what/when/where reporting about it. Rather, all I can find is variations of “Here are 12 tweets about what just happened”
Julian
Dec 2 2020 at 11:01pm
I’d say that the typical left-wing person in America is, at best, a “semi-nationalist” or a soft nationalist:
– The typical leftie isn’t a nationalist in the sense that he goes around waving flags, talking about American Exceptionalism, constantly talking smack of the Chinese and others, touting a go-it-alone-policy on the international stage, resisting robust levels of immigration to the country, or making a big deal of people not standing to the national anthem or burning the flag. In that sense, you could say he’s a cosmopolitan by national standards, or at least, a non-nationalist.
It’s pretty hard to consider someone who’s generally cavalier about national symbols, who favors international consensus and supranational organizations, and is good with letting in high numbers of foreigners every year and giving them citizenship a nationalist.
– However, they do have a national bias in that, as you point out, they tend to be much more interested in the minor things that go on domestically (some white woman unnecessarily calling the cops on a black guy or something) than in the major things that happen abroad, like a very deadly earthquake in Bolivia. Actually, I would even say that, in this regard, even liberals seem to have a racial bias, in that they’re much less interested in violent conflicts in some sub-Saharan African country than in some labor-union street scuffles with the cops in France because of retirement reform.
blink
Dec 2 2020 at 11:10pm
Hmm… I think “The media’s main function is to distort viewers’ priorities.” is too strong and a bit of red herring. I see the media’s “main function” as providing entertainment so as to attract the greatest number of viewers and ad dollars. That is, their goals are much less nefarious and much more self-interested.
Weir
Dec 3 2020 at 5:23am
On the one hand there’s the “main function” of the media and then there are the individual goals that journalists have.
Providing people with a diverting way of marking the passage of time isn’t how they’re going to picture it. And even among individual journalists there are outliers.
Bari Weiss wasn’t enough of a team player, in the minds of the other staff at the New York Times. Andrew Sullivan at New York magazine, likewise, couldn’t be trusted to support the team. Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept was deemed to have insufficient enthusiasm.
Weir
Dec 3 2020 at 5:20am
Maggie Haberman is as reliable and loyal as any writer at the NYT but the social desirability mobs were furious with her for having linked to the famous New York Post story the same morning it was published.
This was early in the morning so it was still possible for her to tweet a link to it, before Twitter banned the story entirely.
And she only linked to it in the process of critiquing it. But no dice. Soon “MAGA Haberman” was trending as the angry villagers attacked her for linking to it, which no loyal journalists are allowed to do.
But now that the New York Times is run by its youngest staffers every journalist working there is on warning that although you can comment on stories published elsewhere that are embarrassing to the Party you must never give readers access to the story itself.
Weir
Dec 3 2020 at 5:44am
I suspect that being a journalist now must be like living in one of the earlier and funnier stories of George Saunders:
A memo, to Distribution:
Regarding the rumors you may have lately been hearing, it says. Please be advised that they are false. They are so false that we considered not even bothering to deny them. Because denying them would imply that we have actually heard them. Which we haven’t. We don’t waste our time on such nonsense. And yet we know that if we don’t deny the rumors we haven’t heard, you will assume they are true. And they are so false! So let us just categorically state that all the rumors you’ve been hearing are false. Not only the rumors you’ve heard, but also those you haven’t heard, and even those that haven’t yet been spread, are false. However, there is one exception to this, and that is if the rumor is good. That is, if the rumor presents us, us up here, in a positive light, and our mission, and our accomplishments, in that case, and in that case only, we will have to admit that the rumor you’ve been hearing is right on target, and congratulate you on your fantastic powers of snooping, to have found out that secret super thing! In summary, we simply ask you to ask yourself, upon hearing a rumor: Does this rumor cast the organization in a negative light? If so, that rumor is false, please disregard. If positive, super, thank you very much for caring so deeply about your organization that you knelt with your ear to the track, and also, please spread the truth far and wide, that is, get down on all fours and put your own lips to the tracks.
Floccina
Dec 3 2020 at 11:46am
IMO they are also to sloppy in their speech. EG I consider it inaccurate if some says 1 in 5 children in the USA live in poverty, which I often hear from he media. They do not live in poverty! They live in families whose market income before taxes and transfers is below the federal designated poverty line. IMO it’s not just nit picking because, they’re often advocaing for more transfers but they are using a measure that is BEFORE TAXES AND TRANSFERS ,so you cannot fix that with more transfers!
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-poverty-rate-income-and-consumption.html
David Henderson
Dec 4 2020 at 7:13pm
Really good point.
David Henderson
Dec 4 2020 at 7:14pm
Moreover, if transfers were increased, fewer people would work and some of those who do work would work less. Result: lower market income. Next result: 1 in 4 children live in poverty.
AMT
Dec 4 2020 at 7:21pm
Very good point, and I would agree that this level of inaccuracy is almost to the level of failing to accurately report direct observations, rather than merely interpreting the meaning. So I would amend my earlier 100% agreement with Bryan to more like 97%, because you can’t always trust them to even report the facts correctly, as you point out.
Another way I have always found them frustratingly sloppy is about economic growth rates. Very frequently they say something like “the economy grew by x percent in the second quarter.” Is that at an annualized rate, or what they literally said? Most of the time I presume that it is annualized (based on the number), but they don’t say that, so they are actually wrong by a significant amount.
Andre
Dec 10 2020 at 9:26am
Excellent, agree on most points.
However… “Despite their cosmopolitan pretensions, even very left-wing journalists are nationalists at heart. That’s why a minor terrorist attack against fellow citizens gets a hundred times as much attention as mass murder of foreigners. That’s why token cuts in domestic welfare programs outrage the media a hundred times as much as massive cuts in the admission of refugees.”
The primary reason they cover domestic stories over foreign ones is that they know their audience has little interest in overseas problems, compared with domestic ones.
I think attributing their domestically-oriented reporting to nationalism is 95% off the mark. (At heart, of course, we all care most about what is happening closest to us – so I’ll give you 5%.)
One other legitimate reason (which I think you tend to downplay in your foreigner-should-be-valued-same-as-countryman approach) to focus on domestic problems is that we actually have leverage as a society to make changes here. Whinging about some problem across the globe that we cannot influence seems impractical, and, if the goal is to make things better, well, it does the opposite – it’s attention and effort that could have been put to better use nearby.
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