It occurred to me that I made a New Year’s resolution to offer more constructive suggestions in the new year. It’s hard not to complain these days, but at least we can offer some suggestions in the meantime. I talked about concentric circles yesterday without offering any constructive ideas to fix that. That’s on me. I need to do better.

Our mainstream media also needs to do better. They are caught up into a both sides narrative where they feel the need to give exposure to all points of view. In normal circumstances that seems okay. Furthermore, the idea of covering the horse race nature of this thing makes sense. It sells ad space. It sells newspapers. It gets subscriptions to the subscription only services. There is a reason why Steve Kornacki is a thing.

When we were going through journalism school, one of the things they taught us was that it was the journalist’s job to call balls and strikes. Somehow that evolved into making sure there were as many balls as there were strikes. We had an equal number of walks as strikeouts. That has been the case whether it was Greg Maddux on the bump or Nuke Laloosh (from Bull Durham).

Someone came up with another analogy that made more sense. Let’s say that it is pouring rain outside. It makes no sense to run a story where you have one expert saying it’s raining and another ”expert” saying it’s not raining. Look outside. You can see it’s raining, so why in the hell are we quoting some jamoke saying that it isn’t raining? Why do we need to both sides objective reality?

What that does is allow people to believe that objective reality isn’t all that objective. In a free society it is difficult to do anything about right wing media. That toothpaste is out of the tube, but this falls into another false narrative. People just naturally assume that both sides do it. Left wing media may distort the importance of things. They are certainly guilty of overhyping certain stories and ramping up the hysteria, but they generally don’t make shit up.

It’s about pushing back. Both sides don’t operate the same way. One side lies and the other side doesn’t. Period. End of discussion. Then, the mainstream media simply reports what is actually going on. The economy is doing well. Report it. Immigration is not nearly as bad as what it seems. Report it. The so-called crime riddled cities really aren’t all that crime riddled. Report it. Unfortunately, both sidesing this thing just isn’t creating an informed public.

Again, you aren’t reaching everyone. You have a segment of the population watching a steady diet of Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax. They might be reading Breitbart on the interwebs. There is no way you can watch a steady diet of that stuff and come away informed. Still, you can inform everyone else. You can at least allow them to have access to accurate information. If the right isn’t producing truth or building arguments on facts then don’t give them a lifeline. If they aren’t participating in substantive debate then they don’t get coverage. There’s only one serious party right now and they are the only one worthy of coverage.

“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” — Howard Beale

Beale is a fictional character. He was an anchorman in the movie “Network”. In the movie. Beale asks all of the viewers to open their windows and shout out the above refrain at the same time. Referencing a fictional character and a fruitless gesture seems oddly apropos in the moment. Naturally, you are just going to have to take my word for it.

 

What you are looking at above is the media bias chart we teach our students. See, most people naturally just assume that media sources should only be measured by where they are on a left-right scale. The more important axis is percentage of factual content provided on these programs. The lower you are on the chart, the fewer facts that get dispensed on your network.

I’m sure you noticed that the left and right axis is pretty balanced on both sides. There are more right wing sources than left wing sources when you absolutely count them out, but it’s close enough not to make a difference. It is the factual axis that is most revealing. You’ll notice all but two left to center stay above the line that denotes selective or incomplete story information. Quite a few right leaning sources fall below that. In other words, it’s not symmetrical. Both sides do not do the same thing.

We set this in the backdrop of the latest right wing hysteria piece about DirecTV dropping Newsmax from it’s channel list. The right wing noise machine has called this censorship. Sure. If anyone leaning right accidentally stumbles onto this space I want you to listen very carefully. Censorship happens when the government stifles your ability to speak. It is not happening if your boss fires you for saying something offensive. It is not happening if a social media site blocks your commentary or decides to ban you from their site. For the love of God, it is not happening when a cable company decides not to carry your channel.

If you look carefully you can find Newsmax on the site above. It exists on the far right hand wing on the chart and is one of the least accurate. It comes somewhere between OANN and Fox News. That is terrific company. Since most commentators can’t be bothered to explain this nuanced point, I will make an attempt in case you are conservative and stumbled into this space.

All media outlets are biased in some sense. There are two kinds of bias. The first kind of bias reflects the editorial judgment of the outlet. What stories do they pump up? What stories do they bury? On this level, everyone in the mainstream media deserves all of the criticism that gets hurled their way. We amp up conflict. We amp up controversy. We amp up whatever sensationalism we can for eyeballs, clicks, and advertising dollars.

The second level of bias is the kind of bias most people think of. Are you actually telling the truth? You can see the chart above as easily as I can. There simply is no equivalency here. The notion that both sides do it is not only wrong, but it is inherently dangerous. I suppose that when someone exaggerates the importance of an issue then we can consider it a form of lying. That of course depends on how cynical you want to be.

However, take a look at your chart. MSNBC and CNN are reliable sources. They exercise a ton editorial discretion in what they choose to focus on, but they generally report facts. OANN, Newsmax, and Fox News do not. I don’t subscribe to DirecTV. They can allow any channel they want and they can cut any channel they want. It’s called capitalism. Maybe conservatives can give it a try.

We have a focus meeting during the week of teacher orientation every year. A focus meeting is a district wide department meeting where we focus on curriculum and new instructional approaches. They have breakout sessions and this year they had a breakout section on media bias. Of course, the session was led by an instructional specialist that watches Fox News regularly. So, going in I wasn’t expecting much and I probably would have skipped it if I had been warned beforehand.

Yet, it was through this 45 minute session that I was able to cement something I have thought for a long time. We are teaching bias wrong. The materials included an infographic with all of the major media outlets being split into left, right, and center. It registered from far left to far right. Naturally, they put CNN and MSNBC on the far left with NewsMax, Fox, and OAN on the far right.

The implication was already clear based on looking at the infographic, but the instructor hammered home the point anyway. Fox News and CNN (or OAN and MSNBC) are basically the same thing. They are mirror images of each other. Simply seeing that straight off pissed me off. I’m not sure if that was the effect the instructor was going for. Even though I’m sure she was well meaning, the concept of media bias is a complex one. It exists on a number of fronts, and the lesson seemed to focus on one dimension.

Bias seeps into media in a number of different ways. The traditional way regards story choices and charged language. That’s what she showed us. The problem is more pervasive than that. Some networks/media outlets use facts and form opinions around those facts. It is rare to watch CNN or MSNBC and see them report something that wasn’t true. Sure, they focus on storylines that fit a particular narrative. They may pump up an issue as being more important than what someone else would report. However, they print and/or broadcast facts.

The outlets on the far right of the spectrum don’t. In particular, when you leave the news divisions of those particular networks the ratio of fact to fiction levels out significantly. Equating CNN and Fox News is itself a show of extreme bias. Certainly putting NewsMax and OAN in the same category as Fox News is problematic. Heck, they didn’t even mention Breitbart or InfoWars. Accounting for the bias in story selection or perspective is one thing. The lesson never accounted for the bias in whether reporting is actual factual.

Unfortunately, any kind of balanced approach to bias fails to capture what is really going on. This is one of the reasons why the media itself fails so often. They are dedicated to a both sides game where both sides are playing the game in the same way.That might be a balanced approach, but it certainly isn’t a truthful one. Sadly, the answer is not to fight fire with fire. The solution involves damning the torpedoes and telling it like it really is. Fox lies. OAN lies. Newsmax lies. Alex Jones lies. Breitbart lies. It’s one thing to simply disagree on how to interpret a fact. It’s another to make up our own facts. Sadly, as long as this is allowed to continue I’m not sure if we can ever really solve our country’s problems.

This is the latest handy-dandy chart on political media bias put out by allgenearlizationsarefalse.com, home of mediabiaschart.com which rigorously studies media outlets for systematic bias.  Media outlets are charted on two axis, with the x-axis used as a measure of political bias with neutral in the center.  The y-axis scales from factual news at the top to inaccurate and fabricated at the bottom.  The developer of this chart is a patent attorney from Denver who also has a degree in English.  She uses both her legal skills and technical English skills to decode bias and then chart it. If you click on the pic, it will give you a bigger chart to see the detail.  Most interesting is the grouping of media outlets by characteristics of each’s reporting – the green box is News; the yellow box is Fair Interpretation of the News; the orange box is Unfair Interpretation of the News; the red box is Nonsense Damaging to Public Discourse.

Let’s look at who’s in the red box.  On the left are the obvious ones that no one I know reads or reposts since they are so biased.  But look on the lower right corner.  Look at that group.  From Fox News, to the Daily Caller, Newsmax, RedState, Breitbart, and the Blaze, these outlets make up the sources of “news” for the vast majority of conservatives.  This is how you get the arguments that “Bill Clinton passed a law in 1997 to separate kids from families” and “Barack Obama separated kids just like Trump”, or that immigrants are flooding the country when they’re not, or that Trump is the most accomplished president in history, when in fact he’s actively destroying what’s left of our democracy.  Even today, they are raging about “liberals attacking” Melania Trump for her tone-deaf fashion faux pax last week on her trip to south Texas.  Down is up, up is down, and the sun rises in the west.  This is why you can’t get anything accomplished through debating these folks.  They are so far out in right field that you’ll never get anything done trying to talk to them.

I highly recommend the posts on this blog describing the methodology of plotting the media companies in this light.  Oh, and go show it to one of your conservative friends.

Just don’t get splattered when their head explodes.