I think this article makes a good point: the point in the title.
I find the intro almost made me not want to read the article though, as it has this long segue dunking (in a way unrelated to the main point) on some arbitary person who made the mistake of the title.
E.g., '''"it’s more than a little presumptuous to then claim that people on Gessen’s (pro-Palestine) side of the argument are “just much better informed”'''
I don't know who Gessen is, and not knowing who they are, the authors take is, to me, odd and mean spirited. Gessen, at least as quoted in the article, isn't making the point that their side is "much better informed." They actually say that their friends (who support their side) are more informed than their wife's friends (who support the other side) on this particular topic. This is a judgement on two friendship groups that they (Gessen) have first-hand experience of.
Gessen also makes some later points about how people aren't appearing to think during the congressional hearing. But none of the quoted text reaches the arrogance of characterizing all of their side as enlightened and all opposition as ignorant.
What’s missing in the Gessen and Silver’s article here is that our ideological backdrop is largely realpolitik. If we’re talking about saying certain things to get re-elected, then yes, the notion of what public opinion is and how that affects potential votes is purely an academic matter. If it’s the case that Palestine alone will torpedo Biden’s re-election, then for sure he will change his tone.
But as Silver points out, it’s not obvious that Palestine is big enough of an issue to affect him. For the most part, Democrats run on being a big tent that represents teachers, unionists, college grads, progressives, globalists, democratic socialists, neoliberals, etc. It’s going to be watered-down, that’s a feature, not a bug. Trumpism is much more straightforward.
The irony in Gessen’s complaint is that the more “fringe” views you see on college campuses are largely correct in a narrow sense: what’s happening in Gaza is a product of The West. We are the Bad Guys. If you look at the world with no nuance whatsoever, then yes, binary logic would say Hamas are the Good Guys. Obviously, that’s insane.
But the colonial West analysis is fundamentally true. It’s true if we set our scope of history to the last century (British Mandatory Palestine) or the last 500 years. It’s true in an obvious sense, in how the US supports Israel today. Historians a thousand years from now will see The West as one long, colonial Empire, and Israel is its beachhead in the Middle East.
The “woke” kids on the campuses see this in a maximally socially constructivist sense, i.e, of course things like cops, oppression, capitalism, etc are all related to Gaza. So much of our way of life is built on violence… but if you’re a liberal (not a leftist!) you still believe you need these things to maintain society… Which is how you end up with Biden’s realpolitik neutrality, which means supporting Israel to win an election.
What Gessen ought to hope for is that public opinion does reach critical mass such that it is guaranteed that Biden would be re-elected if he was pro-Palestine. That is more or less their implicit desire: a free Palestine, but no Trump.
That is not impossible. But it will require a sustained political strategy from the ground up, not from the DNC. And the only viable political strategy is not one of utilitarian vote counting, because that’s what begets this kind of violence to begin with, but appealing to people’s pathos towards the suffering of others.
Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are better informed about a faraway country then ordinary people? I'm sure teachers know more about education and cops know more about crime then journalists but I don't see what profession would know more about the middle east.
>Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are better informed about a faraway country then ordinary people?
From the average person yes. From ordinary people in general (even not including academics and such), not necessarily, and not as an aggregate group.
Journalists follow rote narratives about faraway countries - either those of the establishment, or of their peer circle.
Or they are too superficial. Or their understanding of the foreign country is the pals they spoke too that tell them what they wanted to hear (or belong to their political persuassion/peer group/class in the first place, and are hardly representative of the country, as in "I spoke to my fellow Ivy League school educated Nigerians about the situation in the country, and they confirmed what I believed was the case").
Most of them are also notoriously ignorant about foreign relations, the history of different countries, and so on, even at the basic level (but still write nonetheless).
The journalists that specialize on a country, and have deep knowledge of it beyond the surface level and beyond their local same-ideology opinions, are few and far between.
The layman Indian immigrant for example would more often than not know more about India and what's going on, than the average journalist writing about some latest development there (or merely rewriting a Reuters or AP report).
The first is about the statistical notion of average. If knowledge about X country's affairs goes from 1 to 10, the average score of journalists covering it will be quite higher than the average score of the general population (who usually can't even pinpoint the country on a map).
So that journalists writing about X country will have better knowledge on those matters than the average person's knowledge is true.
The second is about whether a journalist writing about country X is expected to know better than any ordinary person (who isn't a journalist). This is not necessary true.
There are laymen that have vast more/better knowledge of country X (history/global affairs enthusiasts, expats that lived and worked there, and especially immigrants from X) than many such journalists.
In other worlds, journalists are not like scholarly experts on a subject, where their knowledge by definition trumps both the average person's knowledge (an aggregate figure), and aany layman.
They're more like knowledgable in those matters, but whose knowledge can easily be trumped by many better informed laymen, especially laymen with ties to the country that understand the situation on the ground and the background much better.
For any given faraway country, most journalists do not do in-depth reporting on that country themselves and instead get their news from other journalists, same as everyone else. So they can be expected to be informed about as well as ordinary people.
In any case, the comparison in the article is between journalists Gessen is friends with and unspecified other people who disagree with them. It's basically an attempt to reframe a political conflict as not political in nature at all, but instead rooted in ignorance, so that everyone who knew enough would obviously join the only correct side.
No, they don't just get their news from other journalists the same as everyone else, they also get it in person.
The article makes a broader point, but if you insist on focusing on Gessen: she is mentioned in the article because she was interviewed by the leading Israeli newspaper. Is it that hard to believe that she and her friends know more about Israel then ordinary people?
Most journalists have never visited Israel (though I believe Gessen has).
As far as who knows more, the base level facts are well-known: two ethnic groups both want a piece of land with lots of religious and cultural attachments; the weaker one engages in terrorism, while the stronger one engages in strict restrictions on the weaker population and kills more people than them. And if people know anything, they know that, and the difference in opinion is more about moral rules than a factual dispute.
If anything, the people who know more than that tend to be less thoughtful about the conflict, able to recite lists the atrocities one side has committed against the other and obscure historical incidents to justify one side or another, without even making the smallest effort to comprehend why the other side does what it does. I can't say I've ever walked away better informed by reading one of the "well-informed" partisan screeds.
Back when I was studying IR in Uni, it used to be all about terrorism.
In general states will always put a moral spin on terrorists. But terrorism is always the tool of the weaker party.
In fact all forms of rebellion can be spun as terrorism. As the state gets to frame the debate. Even now people refer to state violence as state terrorism.
I remember some authors arguing that terrorism label is more of a construct for emotional propaganda than anything useful for distinction.
Violence is violence. Who we expect or accept to receive that violence is a matter of opinion and perspective.
> In fact all forms of rebellion can be spun as terrorism.
Sure. But not all forms of rebellion (or state violence) are terrorism. If rebels (or the state in question) are focused on attacking and killing enemy combatants, it's not really terrorism, while if they are focusing on indiscriminately targeting civilians, it is.
Words have meaning. Not all violence is the same.
EDIT: Even in the most violent of contexts (war), humans have collectively agreed that some forms of violence ("war crimes") are less acceptable than others; saying things like "violence is violence" could be seen as support to the "anything goes" approach to war (which I'm sure you don't support).
>No, they don't just get their news from other journalists the same as everyone else, they also get it in person
You'd be surprised.
Most never get it in person, having never even visited the countries they write about. A journalist covering global affairs might have visited a few of them, have a working knowledge of a couple or so, and the rest only know about superficially (if they're not merely Googling or checking 1-2 books, that could just be biased summaries about those countries and their issues).
And for those that do get it in person, like going there to report, many never get beyond the superficial, or beyond talking to people telling them what they want to hear (or even just people in their ideology/class).
I love that you mentioned those 3 professions. You've accurately pointed out 3 professions whose workers are often misinformed about their profession. Not the observations, but the resulting conclusions and solutions are often misinformed.
Journalists are the worst of the lot. For the rare honest ones, it's hard enough to be the carrier pigeon for truth as is. Buy, take their willing alignment to underlying agendas, and things are already looking bad for the profession.
It's exacerbated by journalists never stepping foot in these foreign nations, and when they do, they're guided by one clearly biased party who shows who shows them around. So now their observations are misinformed as well.
Yes, it is absolutely hard to believe the average journalist knows more about anything than the average person does.
I view the average journalist as a person who is educated in writing blog posts accessible for wide audiences. Therefore I believe a journalist will be better than the average person at writing blogs.
There used to be prestige to this, not everyone could write a blog before the internet, there was a whole production involved and the costs demanded a certain degree of talent and effort for economic reasons. This is no longer the case.
Certain specific journalists, with an earned reputation, still have that prestige. But that's all them and their individual efforts.
Masha Gessen is a paranoid fool. As evidence, go back and read her writings about the end of democracy in the US which draw strong and outlandish parallels between the US and Russian.
I don't think that's Nate Silver's point? He said that some specific journalists are generalizing their social circle's opinion to the wider public leading them to make unfounded claims about the election. It seems clear that for all the attention pro-Palestine groups are given, the issue is basically a rounding error for the election, yet many left wing journalists are adamant that Biden is throwing the election on this issue. Are they bad journalists, or cynical propagandists? Dunno.
You’re assuming that the relevant debates rest on different views of facts, when in reality they rest on different values. Specifically, journalists tend to have a very different view of fairness and justice when it comes to people who they perceive as non-white and whose religion is seen as adverse to Christianity than ordinary people do. Indeed, I think that if your average person knew as much about the Middle East as your typical journalist, the magnitude of the difference in opinion between journalists and average people would only increase.
I find the intro almost made me not want to read the article though, as it has this long segue dunking (in a way unrelated to the main point) on some arbitary person who made the mistake of the title.
E.g., '''"it’s more than a little presumptuous to then claim that people on Gessen’s (pro-Palestine) side of the argument are “just much better informed”'''
I don't know who Gessen is, and not knowing who they are, the authors take is, to me, odd and mean spirited. Gessen, at least as quoted in the article, isn't making the point that their side is "much better informed." They actually say that their friends (who support their side) are more informed than their wife's friends (who support the other side) on this particular topic. This is a judgement on two friendship groups that they (Gessen) have first-hand experience of.
Gessen also makes some later points about how people aren't appearing to think during the congressional hearing. But none of the quoted text reaches the arrogance of characterizing all of their side as enlightened and all opposition as ignorant.