
The Surprising Reason the Right Doesn’t Trust the News - Varcht
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/09/26/conservatives-media-trust-shafer-220708
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bachbach
I think that is wrong - it's more like The Frame Problem.

It's not really that right wingers think the news is lying to them in a direct
sense. It's more like they believe the entire frame of discussion is wrong.
I'm not an American but I'd concur with that sentiment in general when I
listen to NPR. You could listen to NPR for years without realizing the
experience of many Americans directly contradicts the story themes on offer,
yet many other Americans do have an experience which is sympathetic to the
same themes.

This is because of social class. Different people have different experiences -
but because of social stratification what has happening is that some people
_consistently_ have a difference experience of the world.

In Hidden Brain - an NPR podcast - a social science researcher and mother
relates how she had the impression most mothers breastfed their kids, bought
organic food, went to yoga. It's only through her analytic research that she
came to the understanding this is a minority, a sort of elite.

A zip code away - you'll have some people who have had their car broken into
17 times, burglarized 5 times - every time by people with the same skin
colour.

I leave the results to your imagination.

NPR and Russia Today will make one of those scenarios sound normal, the other
abnormal but they're the result of the same sorting affect.

Scott Alexander makes the point that this clustering affect can happen even
when you go out of your way to prevent it. He says he doesn't have any
Christian Republican friends on his Facebook account - but they're half the
country. He didn't try to do this - it just happened that way.

The probability of this happening by accident is astronomical - yet each one
of us is in a similar peculiar bubble. Worth reflecting that this makes it
harder to understand each other.

~~~
throwaway5250
There's a lot to this. But in addition, the basic quality of journalism in
papers like NYT and WaPo have fallen dramatically in the last few years. On
any given day, I encounter a headline that simply does not match the story
it's attached to. Usually it's a click-baity or ideological exaggeration.

Or a piece not marked as "opinion" is obviously not factual reporting. A not-
uncommon example is "fact" pieces that assume the mental state or thought
processes of various public officials with no quotes or really anything to
back them up.

Perhaps journalists were always often dishonest. But these days they often
seem not to even be trying to make those deceptions convincing.

~~~
bachbach
I've similar impressions.

I think - and this risks sounding self absorbed - that we've become more
sophisticated because of the Internet - at least in some ways.

Closer feedback loop because flow of information is higher. You might have
thought "this is bullshit" before but this feeling was more widely spaced
before when journalism was in print form.

Some subgroups in society like the extremes were easier to dismiss as
irrelevant because we couldn't really point to anything concrete representing
their existence. This will probably be a downvote attractor but I wouldn't
have believed SJWs were real people before the web existed. I'd heard of them
before but presumed them the ravings of hyperbolic conservatives.

The number of people in these subgroups isn't large but large changes in
society usually happen when the subgroup mainstreams an idea - so appreciating
that extremist minority groups are important - is important - that idea
development is an ecology and even that policy _cannot_ come from the center.
I think this is why when politics stalls support flows into fat tails -
normally thought of as a bad thing but it's a survival instinct - this idea is
slippery because from the evolutionary view conflict isn't a pure bad - lack
of reproduction is.

> A not-uncommon example is "fact" pieces that assume the mental state or
> thought processes of various public officials with no quotes or really
> anything to back them up.

I really hate this, I'd call it an allergy! The worse version of this is that
most dishonest form of journalism where the piece attempts - inception-like -
to insert the thought process into yours. It's not compare and think or think
within this framework - it's think like me. For this reason I dislike Fox but
I really, really hate NPR.

