
Imagine there is no media bias - lsh123
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/11/imagine-theres-no-media-bias-2.php
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thephyber
Bleh. It's a mention of a book on the subject and little else other than a
less than half-baked counterfactual thought exercise.

I can't stand accusations of liberal-biased media without evidence that it's
not representative of what media consumers want. I would argue that it _is_
where "what people want" intersects with "corporate interests of advertising".
There is a free market available for news outlets. Fox News (the one large
network that's obviously not "liberal biased") hasn't destroyed all of the
other networks in market share, so what gives? Is there a "silent majority"
dog whistle here? Is this just another incident of a huge American demographic
claiming they are being persecuted? Yet more conspiracy theories related to
peoples' distrust of American institutions?

The core of the article is an assertion that "the media" (the term which must
be taken with a grain of salt now that more people than ever in the USA are
cord-cutting and trusting mom-and-pop / astroturfed blogs than trust major
newspapers) is "liberal biased".

I would assert they are "corporate biased". They exist to push commercials,
not to surface unbiased evidence. This is the natural asymptote of free market
media -- to exploit the weaknesses in humans (fear, paralysis, dopamine rush)
in order to market to them. The news media largely doesn't exist to educate
the populace, at least no more than is required to generate ad revenue.

Most people don't consume media because it's hard and boring. They consume
media because it's an escape from life, not unlike alcohol, drugs, gambling,
or sports. News consumers can live vicariously through intrusive invasions
into the privacy of celebrities, or political sex scandals, or the drama of
"new money" housewives. Most media consumers don't care if the media is biased
left or right, only that the media doesn't insult them (as the author seems to
insinuate) and only focuses on their vices (high speed car chases, crime ring
busts, murder/death/kills in their greater metro area, puppy adoptions, feel-
good stories about police buying shoes for the homeless, etc). A non-biased
media would focus just as much, if not more about the more common, more banal
stories -- you know, the ones that most people would turn off immediately.

If we look at those media outlets that are least likely to be left-leaning,
they tend to be conservative talk radio (not exactly non-biased), television
like Fox News (which advertise they are "Fair and Balanced" then completely
fail to deliver), news aggregators like Drudge Report, and partisan
periodicals that focus on the conservative ideology. If you like these news
sources, that doesn't mean that the more common news sources aren't
legitimate, it just means you don't like them.

There are many media outlets that are much less biased (more "neutral" on the
left-right political spectrum), but at its core, it is impossible for any news
outlet to be politically "non biased". In the infamous words of Gov. Mitt
Romney, "corporations are people". They aren't, exactly, but they are made of
people and all people are biased. So long as there is a scarcity of resources
(like salary, time, newspaper room, and consumer attention), there will be
some "bias" in the media.

I fail to see how the counterfactual "what if the media was not liberal-
biased?" is useful. Doesn't that necessarily mean that counterfactual world is
different than ours? The "red states" would be more populated and the "blue
states" would be less, which means the evidence that population density is the
largest predictor of red/blue party affiliation no longer holds. That means
the human behavior and the composition of the free market are different, but
in unknown, arbitrary ways that conveniently fit the narrative of this author.
In short, I think the common retort that "reality is liberal biased" kinda
holds. It seems to be reinforced in party affiliation, in the demographics of
those who enter college, in the demographics of those who become journalists
and editors and movie makers. If it wasn't, what's to prevent Fox News from
growing so large as to chew into more of the "liberal biased media"
marketshare? We are already basically at a steady-state of news composition
and it's not conservative-biased for a reason.

The article posits that the Obama 2008 campaign would have lost if not for the
"liberal media". I argue that the best thing Obama had going for him in 2008
was that he was running against the party of Bush43. Perhaps the "liberal
media" was part of the reason that Bush43 had such low favorables in 2008, but
it probably had more to do with the fact that he was president during the
largest economic collapse in most Americans' lifetimes, and that he plunged us
into 2 extended wars, largely based on his doctrine of preemptive war (but
only after his administration failed to protect the US from 2001-09-11). Also,
Obama didn't force McCain to pick the least experienced governor for a running
mate. Palin was a "hail mary" and managed to sidestep the traditional vetting
process that most national Republican candidates get before being thrust into
the national spotlight.

Additionally, I think that's a dangerous thread to pull on for social
conservatives.

The idea that you can, on your own volition, _will_ your way into a better
life if you only try harder doesn't coalesce with the increasingly observed
concepts of human behavior whereby your environment largely shapes who you are
and how you act. Addicts can't simply decide on a whim to change their life --
it almost always takes a near-death experience for them to "hit rock bottom"
(assuming they survive that near-death experience). Some people simply don't
have the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves (think less socially
functional than Forest Gump). Most of us struggle to make sense of this world.
I personally don't completely trust any single news source or any political
party.

Conservatives love to claim they cherish the idea of freedoms and personal
responsibility, but I do not see the red states as the sole fighters against,
say, prohibition. In fact, I perceive conservatives counties t be _much_ more
likely to be "dry" or "semi-dry" (meaning a prohibition or onerous regulations
on buying alcohol). Red states generally have _much_ higher alcohol fatalities
per capita than blue states.

You can be "nudged" into answering a question on a poll/survey by tricky
wording or "priming" you with a loaded question immediately before the
important one. The young female pollster in the British House of Cards had a
fantastic monologue about this.

Behavioral Economics is a burgeoning field that describes how humans are not
the perfectly rational, self-interested beings that traditional Macro/Micro
Economics posit as the basis for the theoretical economy they describe. The UK
and US governments even recognize that people can be persuaded in subtle ways
by analyzing human behavior and exploiting it (mostly by changing how/when you
are confronted with a choice and what the default answer is). The UK has the
"Behavioural Insights Team" ("Nudge Unit") and the US has the US SBST[2], both
dedicated to optimize features of the government to help achieve the ends the
government wants.

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-
insi...](https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-
team) [2] [https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/09/15/designing-
federal...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/09/15/designing-federal-
programs-american-people-mind)

~~~
thephyber
And my theory is affirmed by the fact that the book referenced in the second
paragraph is an Amazon Affiliate link.

The article is a "conservative biased media" piece rebutting the "liberal
biased media", while actually acting like a "corporate biased media" outlet.

