Distrusted News
Living in a free, open society with public participation in government requires access to reliable information about events. Accurate information is a necessity for popularly elected government. As participants in self-government, we rely on news reporting to furnish such information.
As Martin Gurri pointed out in his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority, the information age has drastically increased the volume of information that is available to everyone all the time. This flood of information has not been of reliable quality itself, but it has often served to shine a light on inaccuracies in news. The new sources of information have undermined trust in traditional news sources, causing the public to lose trust in the gatekeepers who previously chose what information was worth reporting and what should be ignored. To be sure, the trust that the public previously had in the news was not necessarily earned so much as it was maintained by force of habit and lack of any organized challenge. The advent of the internet and citizen journalism changed all that.
Unfortunately, traditional sources of news and authority did not learn from the experience that they should make their news as reliable and trustworthy as possible, but instead that they should find the audiences to serve who had existing beliefs the information would support. And the audience for traditional news was just as eager to have its views confirmed as ever, just as prone to confirmation bias as any other audience with political preferences and beliefs.
This new model of news and information has no obvious advantage over the prior model where the news was mainly furnished with a steady left-wing bias. News consumers with right-wing tastes suspected dishonesty in the reporting, and the internet provided the detailed evidence to back up those suspicions. The traditional news providers still didn’t care, though, since their audiences were still there, still as hungry to have their biases confirmed as ever—just like anyone else.
There is no political consensus, and there never was. The pre-internet consensus of a public trusting the information provided by the gatekeepers was an illusion. But the traditional media knew what fabulists, public relations experts, and fiction writers know: To keep a lie going requires keeping your story straight and repeating it relentlessly. Admitting it has all been a lie gets you nothing in return for the trust you lose with your audience. The new sources of news and information that cater to an audience with right-wing preferences have understood this, too, with regard to their own consumers.
This is where we are now, approaching 30 years with the internet having begun to change things, and we still don’t know what it will all mean for the open society and public participation in government. In the early years, the hopes were strong that new information would improve the veracity of news across the board, that a new consensus would emerge. Instead, we have come to live in parallel realities, probably more than just two of them. For the time being, at least, that makes us look either incapable of self-government or altogether ungovernable.
The inspiration for today’s posting was slightly tangential to where it took me. It was a journalist’s confessional as to why traditional—presumably responsible—news outlets like the Associated Press not only disproportionately cover Israel, but also knowingly report on the country from an extremely distorted negative perspective.
The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives [the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.
The article excerpted was written in 2014 (!) during another flare-up in the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The obsessive reporting and scrutiny at that time was on what Israel was doing against terrorism from Hamas. Even though journalists on the scene were aware of it, Hamas’s brutality against its own population, its corruption, violence, and criminal activity were knowingly kept out of the reporting. Why? The author speculates on several reasons from liberal bias among journalists, journalistic groupthink, mindless hostility toward Israel due to the perceived oppressor-oppressed and anti-colonial storylines. In today’s context of the October 7 terrorist assault on Israeli civilians by Hamas as Iran’s proxy, none of those explanations is in the least bit satisfying.
Whatever the reasons, the end result of the slanted reporting is an extreme level of misinformation that distorts the public’s view of the international scene. We can’t make sensible, rational, or even vaguely sane choices about what to do as a country based on such ridiculously distorted information. The question the article left me with was whether the news coverage of Israel was the most extreme example, or merely one among many others about which we lack similar peeks behind the curtain. Sadly, it appears the advent of the internet has done little or nothing to make news reporting any more trustworthy.
Good afternoon. I am recovering from my long Black Friday weekend at the store. It was tiring but went well. Yesterday I fresh-cut a whole bunch of trees (maybe a couple dozen? lost count) in the space of 2 to 3 hours. Boss was impressed because it freed up the guys to unpack a whole new shipment of trees. And customers were impressed because I am good with that chainsaw and always offer the "hockey puck" (sometimes it's more like a log) to the kids and the trimmed branches to the parents and tie off the netting with a flourish, and then thank them for their business before handing them over to the dudes who will properly secure the tree to their car. Now get that tree into water ASAP!
https://www.thesun.ie/news/11752092/top-russian-banker-dead-heart-attack-mystery/?
Sudden Russian Death Syndrome