#633 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Thursday April 13)
Good morning,
NEWS MEDIA BIAS—THERE’S PLENTY TO GO AROUND
I wrote about Fox News’s knowing perpetration of stories about the 2020 election that it knew were false. The testimony under oath of many employees, and Rupert Murdoch himself, as well as emails and texts amongst the “personalities” prove that the lies were real. Fox has ceased being a news organization and is now a propagandist and fabulist focused on feeding a narrative to a hungry, biased viewership that wants confirmation bias served up every evening.
That said, there is plenty of bias within the news media and it deserves being called out. Alan Rosenbach calls out that bias, suggesting that my report could have addressed lesser examples of bias:
“I think a paragraph about the NY Times or Wash Post promoting inflammatory content and intentional errors of omission would have been useful, if only to allow your conservative followers to be more convinced that you understand their views.
How many articles on the front page of these papers dealt with gender or racial issues in the past few years? A lot, often to the exclusion of more "dry" topics, like the suffering of the Rohingya, EU controversies, Sri Lankan debt, etc.
The goal of these papers of record is to generate clicks. While they don't make up stories a la Fox News, they focus on articles designed to generate clicks. This is one reason that explains why they are no longer the papers of record that they were in the past.
Besides avoiding dry news, the titles of the articles are more inflammatory than they were in the 1990s. For example, the front page of the NY Times today has opinion articles with titles such as "Americans are Getting Used to This Sort of Rule" and "Why Americans Love Liars Like George Santos". Even the news articles have inflammatory titles, such as "Biden Will Release Dead-on-Arrival Budget, Picking Fight With G.O.P." Would the words "Dead" or "Picking Fights" have been front left on the NY Times of the 1990s? I don't think so.
I mentioned intentional errors of omission. Here's an example: Did our papers of record allow the theory of lab leak as a possible cause of COVID on the front page? The answer until maybe a year ago was "No."
Intentional errors of omission, or inflammatory titles and tone, do not approach the deceit levels of Fox News-- but they are disappointing to see in our papers of record.”
I’M DONE WITH CABLE NEWS
I’m pretty much through with cable news. All the screaming, “breaking news,” pundits with political agendas, all of it, is not healthy. They are in the business, much like social media, of holding our attention. They do that through a constant barrage of bad news and fear. I restrict my watching to a couple of Sunday news shows, in order to get some different perspectives. Otherwise, I’ll stick to the “print media” (both in print and on line).
FAIR-ITOCRACCY AND MERITOCRACY
From Mark DiMaria, after my Musing about creating greater fairness without diminishing the importance of merit and testing:
“As for merit, you and I are on the same page. We can and should aspire to have both a Meritocracy and a Fair-itocracy. They certainly are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, both are absolutely necessary to give the most deserving a path to success, to the betterment of all society! Give everyone the tools and unobstructed opportunity to make the most of themselves, and then let the cream rise to the top.”
Seems so simple. Like how the majority of us think America should be.
As we confront the biases in our system and systematic disadvantages of some groups. we need to provide access and opportunity. But when it comes time to make choices about doctors, lawyers, pilots, and others on whom we depend, performance still means something.
Have a great day,
Glenn
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