
There Really Was a Liberal Media Bubble - protomyth
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/
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tnone
"Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse
along racial or gender lines, ..."

They're just categorically unable to see what's staring them right in the
face, aren't they? Stop. Equating. Race. And. Gender. With. Diversity. Of.
Opinion. It's. A. Non. Starter.

~~~
tdb7893
Diversity of experiences is important when looking for diversity of opinions.
Most of America is either female or not caucasian so if all you are getting is
white men I feel like that would indicate a large systematic bias in your
sampling

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pottersbasilisk
So journalists are still going through the stages of grief after the last
presidential election.

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MR4D
In my opinion (and I disagreed with Nate in late October, and early November),
Nate is great at trees, but horrible at forests.

For instance, he never took into account the high bias of the media. Tons of
people saw it - I'd even argue that most Trump voters saw it.

But he never saw it, nor the effect that it had. I contended that the polls
did not make sense - one candidate was pulling huge crowds and yet was hated
by everyone? Didn't make sense to me.

But that's one opinion. I fault him for not saying, "hey, wait - the media is
really biased in this - could their polls be too?"

That's what I thought. No, I didn't have the statistics horsepower available,
but I saw the forest. So did many others.

One (much smarter than me to be sure), was Nicholas Taleb, who excoriated Nate
on his lack of statistics knowledge. His critique was well above my
understanding, but I'll trust someone who made money off of statistics more
than any pollster.

~~~
ZeroGravitas
I followed the election via Nate Silver's site and remained frightened of a
Trump victory the whole time.

How does that square with all the people like yourself who have a different
recall?

Quite a lot of it seems to come down to people just boiling everything he said
to a binary Hillary will win message. Humans are after all famously terrible
with stats. What does it mean for example to have disagreed with him in
November? My only interpretation of that is that you thought Trump would win.
But he never said Clinton would win, he's making a statistical prediction.
It's like arguing he's wrong because a dice roll came up 2 and he only gave it
1/6th odds.

I can say for definite that he talked repeatedly about the possibility of the
polls being wrong, specifically saying that if the polls were off by the same
amount that they have historically been off and in his favor, then Trump would
win. Again, I don't understand why people want to pretend he never said stuff
like this. Is it part of their own media bias narrative?

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camperman
"Nate, Nate" I said ever so many times, graciously telling my tale. You got it
wrong. Horribly wrong. Let it go and move on. The US mainstream media is not
there to report the news. It's there to shape public opinion in favor of the
small group of elites who own it. It didn't work in 2016 because there's been
an awakening; people want government that represents them and not itself and
they're sick of being lied to. No-one really gives a fuck about what's on
Memoerandom. This analysis reads like an in-depth textual criticism of the
Hitler Diaries that's forgotten the main point about them: they weren't real.

Let me give you an example of how pathetic the reporting has become. This is
an interview from Columbia Journalism Review
([http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/washington_post_bezos_amazon_revo...](http://www.cjr.org/q_and_a/washington_post_bezos_amazon_revolution.php)):

CJR: So you think news consumers in the future will make a decision on which
Hillary Clinton story to click on based on speed? If they see a number of
options and their experience tells them that The Washington Post is faster,
then they’re going to read that one?

SP: Yes. And we see that already. I don’t know if it’s a conscious choice. I
think it’s more about not hesitating to click.

CJR: I can’t imagine that’s a popular view in the newsroom.

JM: Well, it doesn’t really change our editorial strategy in any way.

I'm an old-school journo and I found a number of things in this disturbing.
One: Hillary is assumed to be the winner. Two: The WaPo is admittedly trying
to brainwash their readers through site responsiveness. Three: the article
should mention owner Jeff Bezos's large contracts with the intelligence
community and the ramifications of possible influence there. But it doesn't.

In short, it's propaganda.

~~~
masonic
Also this, from the interview:

"When Jeff bought us, within about six months, he threw (profitability) out.
Now there are three other criteria. It’s basically: How fast do you move? It’s
very subjective. The second one is that there are no sacred cows, to push
experimentation. The third thing is debate, but commit. So you can argue all
you want, but once we agree, then there’s no undermining."

In other words, "we've chosen the narrative; don't you content producers DARE
to go outside it."

~~~
camperman
Of course he threw profitability out. An alphabet, probably the CIA, has
underwritten him for the foreseeable future. Jeff Bezos is what's known as a
NOC, a Non-Official Career officer in the CIA. And they do as they're told.
Other examples: Valerie Plame, Eric Schmidt, billg, Eric Braverman.

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Jack000
I'm not an American but as far as I can tell the Liberal bias is created by
the media staying the same and the country moving to the right.

I don't really buy the idea that diversity of opinion is something to strive
toward. Human opinion doesn't follow some sort of gaussian distribution, and
there are opinions that are objectively objectionable.

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fred_is_fred
I actually think Silver deserves some of the blame because he set the odds at
basically 20-25% that Trump could win.. Many people who would have "held their
noses" and voted for Hillary did not, and Trump won.

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PhantomGremlin
_Silver deserves some of the blame_

That's not fair to Silver. At all.

You're really saying he was a reason that Hillary lost? He should have been
nothing more than a cheerleader? Is there no longer a place for impartiality
or objectivity in polling and reporting?

So hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania
first checked to see what Silver was saying, then decided that the election
was in the bag for Hillary, and then decided to vote for Trump as a protest?

The media groupthink was absurd. Compared to the rest of them, Silver was an
outlier. For example, Huffington Post gave Hillary a 98.2% chance of winning,
and predicted she would get 323 electoral votes.[1]

Blame HuffPost if you want to blame someone. Heaven forbid you actually blame
the person most at fault: Hillary Rodham Clinton. Trump didn't win, Hillary
lost, because she was a worse candidate than Trump, if such a thing was
possible!!!

[1] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-
wi...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/polls-hillary-clinton-
win_us_5821074ce4b0e80b02cc2a94)

