Some Thoughts on Media and Media Consumption
I’ve had a few conversations over the past week or so on Facebook and in real life about media bias and misunderstandings in the media. I started responding to some things from one person in particular and it got really long, so I’m restructuring my response a little and writing this. It’s kind of long, but hopefully helpful.
So here we go…
Media Bias
There is a bias in the media. A lot of the traditional news outlets lean slightly left. The NY Times, WaPo, NPR, AP, Reuters, BBC, etc… Even within those, there’s a spectrum of their leanings. I don’t know if that’s a problem or just a natural outcome. Journalists tend to be college educated and college educated people tend to lean left, according to studies — and that’s not really that controversial. However, there’s another argument in there about indoctrination. I understand that indoctrination and professors with an axe to grind do exist, but I don’t think it’s systemic. My experience in earning a history major for my teaching certificate is that as we are exposed to more history and more experiences we tend to naturally become more liberal in many areas of life. I was talking about this with a Mormon friend who said it was the case for many people he knew at BYU. I have friends who went to other Christian colleges and have had the same experience. All of that to say that it makes sense to me that there would be more left-leaning people in journalism. And being human, those biases would come out unintentionally.
I’m a teacher, and while I typically try to be apolitical in the classroom, it can be hard to totally hide my bias, especially when teaching social studies. So, I get it.
Anyway, I’d say there’s a slight left bias. I don’t think that means they’re all out to get Trump or part of a vast conspiracy to denigrate Republicans or conservatives. I don’t think it means they can’t be trusted. I don’t think it means they’re unfair. It’s that they sometimes say true, but unnecessary things. Here’s what I do think it means…
- They sometimes use more negative terms to talk about one side and more neutral terms for the other. For example, this morning I was listening to a Reuters thing on my Alexa and it said something like, “In an uncharacteristically sensitive moment, Trump did something…” This sounds negative, and is probably an unnecessary adjective. However, it’s also accurate. He can be downright cruel to people and even his supports say that about him — “I didn’t elect him to be nice, I elected him to get stuff done — No more bullshit, Trump 2020” or “I know he’s an asshole, but he’s just saying what we’re all thinking (I’m not thinking that).” These are common refrains from Trump supporters.
- If given the choice between a positive Trump story or a negative one, they might give the negative one a higher spot on the page or they might talk about the negative aspects of the story before the positive ones in the copy. For Biden, they might put the positive story higher and lead with the positive. In both instances factual news is being reported, but editorial choices show a slight bias of the reporter/editor.
I could give more examples, but this is already stupidly long, so I won’t. But in both instances, it’s not fake news. It’s not lies. It’s not propaganda. It’s factual information with a slight bias of the reporter/editor coming through. That’s almost impossible for anyone to avoid because we’re all human.
My concern in the media landscape is that there isn’t anything really comparable on the other side that leans right, but provides easily consumable content. If you look at a media bias chart, you’ll find several interpretations, but most of them put the sources I usually consume (NY Times, WaPo, NPR, AP, Reuters, Axios) into the neutral to slightly left of center, but factual reporting. Things in that same region but slightly right of center are The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, The Economist, Christianity Today and a few others.
The problem (if you think it’s a problem) is that the slightly right stuff tends to have less easily digestible content. NPR is easy to find and listen to. The Times and The Post offer quick, easy-to-digest information. Axios offers lots of short videos that explain what’s going on. The right-leaning outlets don’t offer nearly as much easily digestible material, so people look for more of that. That’s where we end up with right-wing stuff — FoxNews, Breitbart, NY Post, Washington Times, OAN, Newsmax, The Daily Wire, etc… They bill themselves, and are consumed by many as, an alternative to things like NPR, WaPo, NY Times, etc… when they’re actually alternatives to Mother Jones, Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, etc… None of which I would take at face value either.
Media Consumption
I’m pretty critical of the media I consume. I don’t share a lot of editorial content, mostly just straight news with my own perspective, and I try to avoid sharing editorialization and analysis out as hard news. I listen to Pod Save America — that’s about the only pundit-y thing I listen to, and I regularly roll my eyes at some of the hyperbole I hear. I’ve tried listening to different right-wing commentators in the past to get that perspective and the amount of eye rolling I have to do gives me a headache in about three minutes. From my perspective they tend to latch on to minor points and miss the overall big picture. They miss the forrest for the trees.
I also read things people share out from places like the NY Post and Washington Times and Breitbart and Fox News. I typically read them in full. Here are some of my issues with those media outlets…
NY Post & Washington Times stories often have sensational headlines and images. Then I click on the link and generally find that the image doesn’t match the reality of the story and the headline blows things way out of proportion. I see the headline thing with all media outlets (that’s kind of the point of a headline), but these guys take it to a next level, yellow-journalism style stuff. Since most people don’t read past the headline and image before sharing, what this says to me is that these organizations are trying to tell the story in their headline and image — which isn’t the story in the article. It’s incredibly misleading and unethical, particularly in our current social media ecosystem.
When it comes to Fox News, my problem is that the stories are generally lacking perspectives and details (also typical of the above two sources). There have been several times that I can remember in the past few months and much more over the past few years, where I saw a Fox News article on FB that looked pretty damning. So I clicked through and read it and thought, “that sounds really bad… but I feel like it’s missing something.” So I Google the topic and find stories from NPR, CNN, NY Times, WaPo, etc… about the exact same thing (I even look at their homepages sometimes because people say the MSM isn’t reporting it and sure enough there’s the story right on some of the homepages, but nobody actually checks, they just assume… but I digress…). The story will have all of the information that the Fox News one had, but also more perspectives and more details that make the whole thing make sense. I don’t always come out of that thinking that the left is right or the right is wrong or that the thing Fox said is a problem isn’t a problem — but I feel much more informed after reading things from NPR, NY Times and WaPo. So I typically don’t waste my time with FoxNews simply because I’ll just have to look elsewhere to get the full story anyway.
Something I’ve been seeing from Breitbart lately is that they post what are essentially memes without a link. It’ll be a salacious headline and an image. It’ll look really sharp and legitimate. But it’s the kind of headline that make your brow furrow because it sounds pretty bad. So then I click to read more… but it’s just the image. That’s telling to me. It communicates that they want to share the headline, but not the story. It tells me they’re trying to hold something back.
An example from the other day is one about boilermaker unions chastising Biden for saying they endorsed him. So, being a good media consumer, I googled “Biden boilermaker unions” and found an article right away. At the town hall he said, “Boilermakers overwhelmingly endorse me, okay? So, the Boilermakers Union has endorsed me because I sat down with them and went in a great detail with leadership exactly what I would do, number one.”
The local union endorsed Trump. The overall union hasn’t endorsed anyone. The first part of that is fine — I’m sure that the overwhelming number of boilermakers he’s talked to support him. It’s not really verifiable or unverifiable and it’s the kind of thing people running for office say. He goes a bit far in the second part when he says the union endorses him. Now, you could get mad that the MSM isn’t covering this — but I’d point you to two things…
- WaPo does discuss it in their factcheck of the town halls: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/15/fact-checking-dueling-town-halls-trump-biden/ — They’re probably not the only ones, but I’m not looking at every site.
- They MSM didn’t really say much about Trump’s comment about the sheriff of Portland endorsing him even though that’s not an actual position and the county sheriff said he doesn’t and won’t endorse Trump. These are very similar gaffes. The MSM treated them both as tiny blips. The right-wing media is only stressing one of them.
As far as listening to what Trump actually says at his rallies in in long interviews, I’m not about to spend time listening to an entire rally or something. I’ve got too much to do with my life (and this is already taking way more than I’d intended). I’ve certainly seen the snippets of him saying demeaning and petty things. And the crass and sometimes offensive nicknames and bluster aren’t amusing to me. But they tell me a lot about his character. Mature, reasonable people don’t speak like that. I wouldn’t let my kids speak to or about people like that — why should it be okay for the president?
Beyond that, he was in my town this past weekend and when people started chanting “lock her up” about my governor, he laughed and said, “lock ’em all up.” Now, I get how people can look at those statements and say, well, he’s just kidding — or whatever. And when my people around me say it, I go — “whatever…” But the president has to be held to a higher standard and any kind of talk about locking up your political opponents because you don’t agree with their policy (or you label their policy as illegal) is dangerous to our society and government.
From what I can gather, if you watch him on a fully national stage he’ll obfuscate and distract and demure and just not give clear answers. Then he’ll give a somewhat clear answer at rallies or in a Fox News interview or something. I should just be able to get a clear answer by watching his nationally televised statements. I shouldn’t have to dig to find him denouncing white supremacy while he claims to not know who the proud boys are. I shouldn’t have to dig to find him denouncing QAnon when he pretends on stage not to know what they are, but points out the “positive” things he’s heard about them. It’s all smoke and mirrors with him. So even if there are things I might agree with him about, he’s probably said the exact opposite somewhere else. He’s just confusing and inconsistent.
But all of that being said, I will readily concede that his comments are sometimes taken out of context and/or blown out of proportion. When I see that, I often comment on it and get ripped apart by people on the left. I’m not into the whole my-side-versus-your-side thing. I’m all about seeing problems and finding good solutions that take a holistic approach to try to account for a lot of potential issues. I’ve voted for both major parties and third parties. But I’m not lock-step with anyone. However, I think Donald Trump is an existential threat to America and the world because of the division and discord he promotes and fails to denounce. That doesn’t extend to all Republicans or all conservatives, but the thing that a lot of people like about him is exactly why I find him terrifying.
But back to the media bias…
A lot of this particular discussion was centered on the New York Post article about Hunter Biden’s emails and the claims of a hypocritical media bias around that.
Hunter Biden
People keep bringing up Hunter Biden because of what he did with Burisma in the Ukraine. I’m not going to defend his choice to do that, but there’s a narrative out there that the MSM doesn’t care and won’t report on it and just wants to hide it. The reality is that it’s been investigated and there’s just no there there…
The Hunter Biden stuff has been known for years and was reported on at the time by most of the heavy hitters in mainstream journalism. There was probably more, but it’s a lot of sift through and I’m not a professional researcher and don’t have time to pretend to be, but here’s a sampling or articles about Hunter Biden from 2015…
Here’s another article I found while searching. It’s by a former NY Times reporter who wrote about the Burisma stuff back in 2015 and he explains the story from the time and explains why thethe stuff being pushed by the right-wing media isn’t proof of some untoward media bias of the mainstream media, but rather a smear campaign by rightwing media.
The story isn’t being buried or ignored by the mainstream media, there’s just no there there as far Joe Biden being corrupt and Hunter Biden isn’t running for anything.
Now, if you want to talk about the massive problem in someone with no experience getting paid boatloads of money because of their name and political connections — that’s a different conversation. I think that Hunter Biden accepting that position was stupid and created a massive potential problem for the US government. I also think that the Trump kids running international companies while also being the President’s kids and having official government positions is incredibly problematic.
I’m all for fixing corruption in government. That’s why I backed Liz Warren through the primaries, I think she had the best plan to actually keep opportunists out of Washington. There may be a better plan, and I’d be open to hearing it. But I haven’t seen one that goes that far.
However, when it comes to the adult children of officials, that’s a bit tricker. All we can really do is make sure people are paying attention and investigating things that look wrong. That happened in this case, and while maybe not totally ethical in the big picture, there’s no evidence that any laws were broken or that anything against American interests happened or that Joe Biden had anything to do with anything Hunter did there… although the new allegations are rightfully being investigated by the FBI.
Blocking the NYP story
Figuring out the role and responsibilities of Social Media in our overall media landscape is a big, amorphous question that we’re all dealing with right now. I’m not really interested in defending their decisions to attempt to stop circulation of the story. So much baseless stuff flows around social media already, it seems like a bad decision to make from an optics standpoint.
That said, I disagree with the premise that the story was blocked because of an affinity for one side or the other. The story is just incredibly problematic. The reality is, the NY Post story is a prime example of what most people think of when they hear about anonymous sources. They simply didn’t dig deep enough to tie up the loose ends before publishing. There are still too many questions and too many unverified parts of the story.
Giuliani basically said as much when he said that he went with the NY Post because he thought that other organizations would try to discredit it first. Discredit is a word choice, and we can argue the positive or negative in presenting it — but it should have been picked apart and verified. Call that validating or discrediting, but it’s a semantics argument around checking the veracity. He knew the NY Post wouldn’t and other organizations would. As they should.
(The person I was initially responding to sent me a Ben Shapiro show episode to give some of that perspective to the NY Post thing…) Beyond all of that, the Ben Shapiro thing you sent essentially says the same thing. He just seems to take the stance that it’s okay because he thinks there’s a massive liberal bias in the mainstream media.
Ben Shapiro
I tried very hard a couple of years ago to like Ben Shapiro. I think he’s smart and occasionally makes good points. But I also think he talks really fast so that he can bounce from one point to a series of unrelated or tangentially related points that offer little more than confirmation bias. It’s like listening to a right-wing Rachel Maddow. I like her, but I only take a small fraction of her political commentary seriously because it does the same thing. I like her and a lot of what she says and does, but her on-air political analysis is typically just confirmation bias.
While not applicable to this situation, what I ended up really disliking about him is that he only sounds especially smart when he builds a straw man and tears it down and refuses to consider that his premise could be flawed in any way. I think he’s smart, but intellectually dishonest — which is much worse than being stupid and saying dumb stuff.
So anyway, I listened to about the first 15 minutes of the episode until he got to the end of the Biden segment. What I got from it was — the stuff was unsubstantiated. We’re still a ways off from knowing if it’s real and then if it is we’re a ways off from knowing whether the assumptions about Joe Biden are true — but they did it before (with the Steele Dossier) so it’s okay now.
I’m of the opinion that if it’s wrong — it’s wrong. If you look up the Steele Dossier on Wikipedia it’ll link near the top to some articles from the time by major news organizations that said it shouldn’t have been published. Now, in that they did go into details of what it said — but they did the same thing with the NY Post article. Basically with the Steele Dossier and the Biden emails organizations like The NY Times and WaPo said — this shouldn’t have been published, but now that it’s out there we are going to offer analysis to our readers. And as far as the Steele Dossier getting more ink spilled, there’s also the fact that it was about the actual person running for president and this is about the candidate’s son. Not the candidate.
Overall, I didn’t hear anything particularly compelling in the Shapiro thing and I think he spent a lot of time to say “we don’t know any of it for sure, but it should be out there anyway because they’d have done the same thing.”
Anonymous sources
The person to whom I was initially responding said that he thinks the MSM relies too much on anonymous sources without digging deeper and referenced the alleged Trump comments about soldiers, so here’s a little about anonymous sources…
To say they used anonymous sources without digging deeper is problematic. You don’t get big stories from the mainstream media (NYT, NPR, WaPo, etc…) unless they’ve already dug as deep as they can and can’t find any other way to publish the story.
I feel like when people hear that something is from an anonymous source they think that means it’s just idle rumors and gossip or maybe even that the reporter doesn’t know the source. Like, if I called The Washington Post and said, “I heard Trump eats live babies every night” they’d just roll with it. That’s hardly true. Journalists have relied on these kinds of sources for a very long time and they’re really an integral part of the journalism ecosystem. Without these types of sourcing we wouldn’t know a lot of what happens in government.
Reporters, and especially editors, really don’t like using this kind of sourcing, though, and will typically only use it as a last resort. Often they’ll try to use the information to track it back to something in the public or to find someone who will talk on the record about it. If they can’t and it’s the only way to get the information out and it’s important information, the reporter typically has to let their editor know who the source is so that at least two people know their identity and they generally require the information to be corroborated by at least one other independent source. They also look at who is making the claims and asking why they might be doing so and if they have anything to gain personally.
For example, the dead soldier comments may have come from anonymous sources, but they had multiple independent sources who are known to multiple people within the organization. Furthermore, how people within Trump’s orbit responded, Kelly’s non-response in particular, but other vague responses, to the story would seem to imply a level of veracity.
Here are the AP’s guidelines for using unnamed sources
Here’s some information on how The NY Times uses anonymous sources
Here’s a piece with a reporter explaining how anonymous sourcing works
Overall, I understand the concern when we hear that something is from an anonymous source, but in reality it’s not easy to get something published with anonymous sources and it’s the only way we know about a lot of stuff. Based on all of that, what do you think is a good alternative to media outlets using anonymous sources with stringent guidelines?
Final Thoughts
In the end, I understand the desire for digestible, right-leaning media. Unfortunately, I think that too many people are consuming right-wing media as an alternative to left-leaning media, which makes it feel like we’re living in totally different worlds.
Consuming right-wing media as an alternative to NPR and the AP is like taking a handful of pot gummies because you don’t like the flavor of your gummy vitamins. In both cases, you’ll definitely get a more interesting experience, but you’ll also end up with a more tenuous grasp on reality. And once you’re in that right-wing commentary-as-news ecosystem, it’s that much harder to discern real news from fake news and conspiracy theory from funny-thing-to-consider-but-totally-not-real idea.
So if you think NPR, the Times and the Post are too liberal, by all means, find different sources of news… but find comparable ones.
