Why Debate is Impossible
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.
Thank you, this is an upgrade from my old chart. I just must stop the Occupy pages. I waste too much time fact checking stories I think are too good/bad to be true. I don’t see “The other 98 percent, which I think is also bad. I do like the commentary on The Christian Left. Another thing is too many people confuse fact with opinion. I might have been guilty of that myself.
1El Jefe, what am I doing wrong? Try as I might, have never caused one of our conservative ‘friends’ heads to explode. They may leak radioactive waste from every orifice, but they’re still standing. It’s as if their tiny little brain cell is encapsulated in some unknown variety of unique centrifuge. The fail-safe position allows for a complete melt down missing the classic destructive explosion.
2Story in today’s WashPost about increasing number of torrential flooding episodes, especially in eastern (mostly northeastern) US, quotes NC farmer as saying that half his cow pasture washed away, but he repeatedly said that he’s a Trump supporter and he’s sure that the flooding is because his god is upset with America’s moral decline. Why his god should take that out on his cow pasture was not stated. But how do you have a conversation about climate change with such people? How can you talk about issues when you come from completely different assumptions and ways of evaluating information?
Again I am reminded of the cartoon of the living room of a Bush-supporting couple watching Fox News, with zombies crashing in looking for “Brains…. brains…. bra– oh, damn.”
3It’s well done and really has few surprises, but I was curious as to how CNN landed on the border between fair and unfair interpretation of the news. I mainly stay with MSNBC, which was placed inside the fair representation of the news, but the times when I switched to CNN, I was not aware of unfair interpretations.
4How do we know this chart isn’t more propaganda? Where, for example, are “Democracynow.com” and “therealnews.com” or Jimmy Dore show? https://www.youtube.com/user/TYTComedy
It took a Democrat (Boss Tweed) to say “I don’t care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates”…
Just sayin’
5I await patiently for new versions of a relabeled chart, like those pictures you see occasionally of “A New Yorker’s Map of the US” with a giant NYC on the east coast, almost equally large Hollywood on the west coast, and a pin dot in the middle representing Chicago.
In this case, we might have “A Fox News Viewers Map of the News” with the bottom right unchanged, and the rest of the chart labeled Fake News, Fake News, Fake News…
6…One more thing. Not only is debate impossible because the alternatives on offer aren’t real, but the wall-to-wall 24/7 Trump coverage, either praising or deploring him, distorts his importance and uniqueness.
Any crime you could accuse Trump of committing, Obama led the way. He’s a bigot? He separates kids from families? Obama tripled W’s deportations, separating families. Trump is a criminal? Obama normalized criminality, refusing to prosecute the war crimes of Bush / Cheney, promoting the torturers and prosecuting the whistle blowers.
One could say that Trump’s agenda is to divide the U.S. into squabbling tribes. Reacting with shock and horror to his every move is just following his agenda.
7Adam Eran reminds me: try to imagine what the news would look like if the candidate with the most votes had actually “won” the election. Mind-boggling, isn’t it? We’d be living in a whole different country, a different world, than the one we have now….
I get some stuff from Daily Kos; will have to be careful about their credibility. Didn’t know they were they far out, or that Mother Jones wasn’t.
8One of the headlines right now on Reuters, listed on the chart as Neutral, Original Fact Reporting:
Supreme Court Favors Republicans in Gerrymandering Cases
9I’m curious. Who are the hyper partisan liberals on MSNBC? Certainly not Joe and Mika, they’re center/right; not Rachel Maddow or Lawrence O’Donell, they’re both left but I wouldn’t call either one “hyper-partisan”. Not familiar with the middle of the day folks, must be one or more of them.
10@Rick – Are you saying the story is untrue? SCOTUS DID favor Republicans. In fact, the dissent from Sotomayor was scathing:
“This disregard of both precedent and fact comes at serious costs to our democracy. It means that, after years of litigation and undeniable proof of intentional discrimi- nation, minority voters in Texas—despite constituting a majority of the population within the State—will continue to be underrepresented in the political process. Those voters must return to the polls in 2018 and 2020 with the knowledge that their ability to exercise meaningfully their right to vote has been burdened by the manipulation of district lines specifically designed to target their commu- nities and minimize their political will. The fundamental right to vote is too precious to be disregarded in this manner. I dissent.”
Looks to me that Reuters is straight down the middle. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gerrymandering-wrap/supreme-court-favors-republicans-in-gerrymandering-cases-idUSKBN1JL2KE
11Democracy Now! is on the chart on the left upper. It’s very factual and really first rate.
12Politico is not liberal. I repeat, Politico is NOT liberal.
13Debate? As in high school and college debate clubs? Hey, are they actually around any more? Our high school certainly didn’t have one. It was regarded as something pernicious. Debate actually could call “authority” into question and heaven forbid if that ever happened! Hence “debate” and “democracy” were never even in the same room.
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