For years now, liberal activists have called for the media to abandon the notion of journalistic objectivity as typically defined, which is to say, the idea that good reporting makes people equally mad and strives to be “balanced” between opposing political viewpoints. This “
You kinda have to read those pieces with the understanding of their audience capture and the catering to confirmation biases. Then just note the facts (and as you say, whatever NYT has become, it’s still decent at gathering facts) and dissociate it from the op-Ed aspects (even in the purportedly “news-y” pieces).
This reality is what requires folks to have a diverse media appetite….so that you not only recognize what the NYT is doing, but also to actually get a look beyond its curated garden. It’s basically a glorified insta feed at this point.
I get the feeling a lot of liberals also don't like DEI either. A PMC NYC-dwelling liberal who's ever had to attend a DEI workshop at their white-collar job can't honestly think that that stuff isn't a grift. But they're all afraid to speak out because elite liberals keep enforcing this idea that all good liberals are lockstep in favour of DEI and if you have doubts, you must be a closet Nazi. The NYT needs to make it seem as if it's a foregone conclusion that DEI is good because once even their own readers feel the free to question it, it will collapse (even faster).
That's right Freddie, pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.
Karl Popper stated, that any scientific theory which cannot be falsified, is not a valid scientific theory.
Thus, if we have a single piece of contradictory data, we must re-examine our theory.
Here's the conundrum:
We all know that sea level rise is the result of anthropogenic global warming, and that this began in earnest around 1950. However sea level rise, as reported by NOAA, in long term tide gauges, places the beginning of sea level rise, hence global warming at 1863, fully 87 years before the rapid rise of anthropogenic global warming cause. Here's the analysis https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28564-6
Conclusion: Sea level rise began in 1863, CO2 rise began 87 years later in 1950. Since the cause is 87 years after the effect, there must be something wrong with the theory.
By the way, didn't New York have to be abandoned in 2019 due to sea level rise? Because that was the best scientific prediction from 2004.
I once railed against the idea of "objective" reporting. I railed against it for the exact reasons Freddie outlines: not all ideas are equal, and reporting that stops at "these guys say this, and those guys say that" is unhelpful because a reiteration of each side's talking points does not bring ideas into contact with one another. Evaluate the arguments! Not in terms of values; in terms of soundness.
But you must do so fairly. Find both the most common and the best arguments and evaluate those; don't merely find a convenient strawman to destroy. And you must be respectful even to arguments you find detestable, if those arguments are either good or extremely common.
Now that I see what happens when reporters abandon "objective" reporting, I am horrified, and I should have known better: should have understood that the inevitable vector of the move away from objectivity would be, rather than fair evaluation, total recapitulation of one's own values. Please. Give us back objective reporting.
“that come largely from a particular kind of person - urban, extravagantly educated, upwardly-mobile if not already affluent, the type of person who mocks meritocracy on Twitter while enjoying the fruits of their own desperate clawing up the meritocratic ladder.”
“Whatever affirmative case is to be made for questioning the diversity, equity, and inclusion business - and it is indeed business, big business, one that makes some of its priests quite wealthy.”
“such as those of Ibram Kendi, who sees any racial disparity as ipso facto proof of racism”
“But this is the very worst kind of media bias, which is the bias that stems from pretending that you aren’t making a political point when you very much are.”
“The fact that DEI efforts are run from within institutional power itself should make us skeptical of their ability to actually achieve meaningful reform”
Taken together this all covers my explanation for the left-based woke phenomenon. I also covers the theory of anthropogenic global warming which I put in the same woke basket.
First consider that almost everyone wants more… more status, more money, more likes, more followers, more love, more,,, just fill in the blanks. Wanting more is baked-in human psychology that is both our blessing and curse. Without it and the corresponding outcome of human advancement and progress we would become extinct. However, it also results in bloody conflicts that also threaten extinction.
Al Gore is a multi-millionaire never having produced much of anything of value except global warming fear porn.
Ibram Kendi, although his reputation has been justifiably shattered by evidence of fake scholarship and plagiarism, also has made millions doing the same in the race ideology space.
The professional activism space is an industry where people can get more. It primarily serves the over-educated, upper class, coastal liberal elite… the type that would never think about a career as a welder or auto mechanic… or even an engineer… careers where tangible things are invented, made, built, grown and fixed. They also flock to government and media roles. Many of them are lawyers.
These woke topics have been woven into sub-ideologies: gender ideology, race ideology, climate ideology, America-hating ideology, etc., and their purpose is to create a money and power making sandbox for these otherwise unemployed upper-class elites.
They are aided and abetted by the Wall Street controlled corporatists, the managerial class if you will, because they also skim from money and power making capability of these ideological trends.
Wall Street bets on trends. If it can have a hand at controlling the trends, then it increases the odds that their bets pay off. Today they have a lot of control over trends.
The pandemic trend was to demand everyone get the “vaccines” from Big Pharma that later required the CDC to redefine the term “vaccine” because those mRNA novel drugs failed to prevent repeated infection.
The global warming ideology is also pushing market trends that Wall Street is betting on.
Democrat party power, the same as political establishment power, is the key to protection of the money and power-making sand box.
This is the full answer I think. Trump threatened this money and power-making sandbox in a number of ways. One is that the black underclass was waking up to the reality of decades of failed liberal and establishment policies that decimated their paths to post civil rights middle-class economic opportunity. With blacks jumping ship from the Democrat party the power game would be over. Thankfully for this Democrat looting cabal, race ideology pushed through their corporatist media control including the sensationalist George Floyd movement, got the black voters back on the voting plantation. And then the fortuitist Dodd decision to rev up female voter rage.
The woke platform is both a market and political strategy that supports a power and money-making enterprise. The Times reporting is in that pocket. Four mega Wall Street asset management companies together own a controlling interest in 80% of the media and big tech. The writing pools are infested with the children of over-educated, upper-class coastal elites. They are all in it together for the same reasons.
Part of this mess is attributable to the consequences of losing our industrial and manufacturing base, and importing so much immigrant labor to do the work “that Americans won’t do”. So then, what do all these high-educated more sophisticated people do to satiate their need for appropriate positions on the human status hierarchy? They leverage the new information economy to create their own paths to power and money. They create ideologies and then push them in the education system and media as popular trends… then they farm money and power-making opportunities from those trends.
They are the new capitalists.
Woke is a capitalist game… a virtual one… and a destructive one... or at least one that does not produce anything of real value.
Discussions of liberal media bias misses the larger point. These people don’t care about really any political orientation other than what provides them the easiest path to more... more power and money.
You are far too kind to the NYT. They have never been averse to outright lying when it serves their interests, whether by omission or commission. The truth has not always made it past the barriers to rest in the land of the “fit to print.”
The DEI business now so entrenched in our institutions and big business won't do squat to solve very real problems affecting vulnerable constituencies...folks who live with concentrated poverty, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and lack of good employment prospects.
Saw a great interview of Dr. Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King's speech writer, who confirmed that Dr. King if alive today would be completely mortified by and in opposition to DEI.
DEI is a tool of the neoracists. It is a more sophisticated tool to identify people by race and treat them differently... the same behavior we noted in Democrats before Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act.
It serves two purposes for the over-educated, upper-class coastal and big city leftist elites. One - it is a luxury belief that allows them to signal virtue and to farm power and money-making opportunity. Two - it continues to keep minorities like blacks on the plantation of underclass so there is less competition for money and status pursuits of the coastal and big city elites.
One thing I find interesting is that NYT coverage of DEI has not always been positive. Take "‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?", which describes at least one racist "anti-racism" training, where a "hallmark of whiteness" is "scientific, linear thinking." See here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html
Your final point is the one I don’t understand - why isn’t anything emerging to tackle the “just the facts” space? The truth, wherever it leads? I’d subscribe. Without question.
It appears that it’s guys like me that kind of wrecked the media. I used to subscribe to way more papers and magazines than I could realistically read - at any time I’d be getting some subset of the NYT, the WSJ, one or two local papers, the Atlantic, the Economist, plus at least one or two more exciting and weird political magazines, plus Spin or something. I’ve still got my WSJ subscription, but other than that I only pay for subscriptions on Substack. And it’s because of what you’re talking about. It’s clear that I can’t trust these publications, even if some of the writers are still straight - how do I know who, and when? - so why bother. But if something new and principled emerged I’d be on it in a heartbeat.
Freddie, I hope you noticed that on the same day, the Times editorial board bashed the left as well as right for restricting free speech on campus. At a ratio of about 3:1, but still.
Thank you for making clear the difference between liberal bias and left-wing bias. And also for affirming the value of the NYT's fact-finding mission. Even Noam Chomsky says that the NYT prints a lot of useful, important facts. It's what they leave out that is important. I would also say it's less "liberal" bias and more institutional, mainstream bias that is the issue. I made this same critique of NPR's news coverage for Current Affairs: https://weirdcatastrophe.substack.com/p/npr-is-not-your-friend-redux
And some NPR fans just couldn't get past their idea of NPR's supposed "balance" as being a sign of true fairness and objectivity instead of what it really is, a cover for mainstream apologetics.
My problem with the critique of the "View From Nowhere" is that it is guilty of an either/or fallacy: either you're perfectly objective or you're biased, and since you can't be perfectly objective, you might as well embrace being biased.
But this doesn't make any sense. Bias is not an either/or thing; it has many gradations. And unless you think there is some virtue in lying, I don't see why you wouldn't aspire to be less biased. Why make the perfect be the enemy of the good?
The Times was on board with the effort to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop. Any reporting worth spit would have included the obvious, basic, journo 101 next step of calling the individuals who received or were copied on the emails it contained to ask whether they'd gotten them and what they thought. That was a newsroom terrified of what their actual reporting might reveal about the Biden family so they spiked the story and amplified the White House denial. That denial was the foundation for like 65% of poll respondents who now believe Biden, et al, are grifters.
In any event it was a dishonest, outcome directive news reporting strategy. Bias anyone?
FIRST!
You kinda have to read those pieces with the understanding of their audience capture and the catering to confirmation biases. Then just note the facts (and as you say, whatever NYT has become, it’s still decent at gathering facts) and dissociate it from the op-Ed aspects (even in the purportedly “news-y” pieces).
This reality is what requires folks to have a diverse media appetite….so that you not only recognize what the NYT is doing, but also to actually get a look beyond its curated garden. It’s basically a glorified insta feed at this point.
I get the feeling a lot of liberals also don't like DEI either. A PMC NYC-dwelling liberal who's ever had to attend a DEI workshop at their white-collar job can't honestly think that that stuff isn't a grift. But they're all afraid to speak out because elite liberals keep enforcing this idea that all good liberals are lockstep in favour of DEI and if you have doubts, you must be a closet Nazi. The NYT needs to make it seem as if it's a foregone conclusion that DEI is good because once even their own readers feel the free to question it, it will collapse (even faster).
That's right Freddie, pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.
Karl Popper stated, that any scientific theory which cannot be falsified, is not a valid scientific theory.
Thus, if we have a single piece of contradictory data, we must re-examine our theory.
Here's the conundrum:
We all know that sea level rise is the result of anthropogenic global warming, and that this began in earnest around 1950. However sea level rise, as reported by NOAA, in long term tide gauges, places the beginning of sea level rise, hence global warming at 1863, fully 87 years before the rapid rise of anthropogenic global warming cause. Here's the analysis https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28564-6
Here is the NOAA data: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=9414290
Conclusion: Sea level rise began in 1863, CO2 rise began 87 years later in 1950. Since the cause is 87 years after the effect, there must be something wrong with the theory.
By the way, didn't New York have to be abandoned in 2019 due to sea level rise? Because that was the best scientific prediction from 2004.
I once railed against the idea of "objective" reporting. I railed against it for the exact reasons Freddie outlines: not all ideas are equal, and reporting that stops at "these guys say this, and those guys say that" is unhelpful because a reiteration of each side's talking points does not bring ideas into contact with one another. Evaluate the arguments! Not in terms of values; in terms of soundness.
But you must do so fairly. Find both the most common and the best arguments and evaluate those; don't merely find a convenient strawman to destroy. And you must be respectful even to arguments you find detestable, if those arguments are either good or extremely common.
Now that I see what happens when reporters abandon "objective" reporting, I am horrified, and I should have known better: should have understood that the inevitable vector of the move away from objectivity would be, rather than fair evaluation, total recapitulation of one's own values. Please. Give us back objective reporting.
Great piece Freddie!
“that come largely from a particular kind of person - urban, extravagantly educated, upwardly-mobile if not already affluent, the type of person who mocks meritocracy on Twitter while enjoying the fruits of their own desperate clawing up the meritocratic ladder.”
“Whatever affirmative case is to be made for questioning the diversity, equity, and inclusion business - and it is indeed business, big business, one that makes some of its priests quite wealthy.”
“such as those of Ibram Kendi, who sees any racial disparity as ipso facto proof of racism”
“But this is the very worst kind of media bias, which is the bias that stems from pretending that you aren’t making a political point when you very much are.”
“The fact that DEI efforts are run from within institutional power itself should make us skeptical of their ability to actually achieve meaningful reform”
Taken together this all covers my explanation for the left-based woke phenomenon. I also covers the theory of anthropogenic global warming which I put in the same woke basket.
First consider that almost everyone wants more… more status, more money, more likes, more followers, more love, more,,, just fill in the blanks. Wanting more is baked-in human psychology that is both our blessing and curse. Without it and the corresponding outcome of human advancement and progress we would become extinct. However, it also results in bloody conflicts that also threaten extinction.
Al Gore is a multi-millionaire never having produced much of anything of value except global warming fear porn.
Ibram Kendi, although his reputation has been justifiably shattered by evidence of fake scholarship and plagiarism, also has made millions doing the same in the race ideology space.
The professional activism space is an industry where people can get more. It primarily serves the over-educated, upper class, coastal liberal elite… the type that would never think about a career as a welder or auto mechanic… or even an engineer… careers where tangible things are invented, made, built, grown and fixed. They also flock to government and media roles. Many of them are lawyers.
These woke topics have been woven into sub-ideologies: gender ideology, race ideology, climate ideology, America-hating ideology, etc., and their purpose is to create a money and power making sandbox for these otherwise unemployed upper-class elites.
They are aided and abetted by the Wall Street controlled corporatists, the managerial class if you will, because they also skim from money and power making capability of these ideological trends.
Wall Street bets on trends. If it can have a hand at controlling the trends, then it increases the odds that their bets pay off. Today they have a lot of control over trends.
The pandemic trend was to demand everyone get the “vaccines” from Big Pharma that later required the CDC to redefine the term “vaccine” because those mRNA novel drugs failed to prevent repeated infection.
The global warming ideology is also pushing market trends that Wall Street is betting on.
Democrat party power, the same as political establishment power, is the key to protection of the money and power-making sand box.
This is the full answer I think. Trump threatened this money and power-making sandbox in a number of ways. One is that the black underclass was waking up to the reality of decades of failed liberal and establishment policies that decimated their paths to post civil rights middle-class economic opportunity. With blacks jumping ship from the Democrat party the power game would be over. Thankfully for this Democrat looting cabal, race ideology pushed through their corporatist media control including the sensationalist George Floyd movement, got the black voters back on the voting plantation. And then the fortuitist Dodd decision to rev up female voter rage.
The woke platform is both a market and political strategy that supports a power and money-making enterprise. The Times reporting is in that pocket. Four mega Wall Street asset management companies together own a controlling interest in 80% of the media and big tech. The writing pools are infested with the children of over-educated, upper-class coastal elites. They are all in it together for the same reasons.
Part of this mess is attributable to the consequences of losing our industrial and manufacturing base, and importing so much immigrant labor to do the work “that Americans won’t do”. So then, what do all these high-educated more sophisticated people do to satiate their need for appropriate positions on the human status hierarchy? They leverage the new information economy to create their own paths to power and money. They create ideologies and then push them in the education system and media as popular trends… then they farm money and power-making opportunities from those trends.
They are the new capitalists.
Woke is a capitalist game… a virtual one… and a destructive one... or at least one that does not produce anything of real value.
Discussions of liberal media bias misses the larger point. These people don’t care about really any political orientation other than what provides them the easiest path to more... more power and money.
You are far too kind to the NYT. They have never been averse to outright lying when it serves their interests, whether by omission or commission. The truth has not always made it past the barriers to rest in the land of the “fit to print.”
The DEI business now so entrenched in our institutions and big business won't do squat to solve very real problems affecting vulnerable constituencies...folks who live with concentrated poverty, failing schools, crumbling infrastructure, and lack of good employment prospects.
Saw a great interview of Dr. Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King's speech writer, who confirmed that Dr. King if alive today would be completely mortified by and in opposition to DEI.
DEI is a tool of the neoracists. It is a more sophisticated tool to identify people by race and treat them differently... the same behavior we noted in Democrats before Republicans passed the Civil Rights Act.
It serves two purposes for the over-educated, upper-class coastal and big city leftist elites. One - it is a luxury belief that allows them to signal virtue and to farm power and money-making opportunity. Two - it continues to keep minorities like blacks on the plantation of underclass so there is less competition for money and status pursuits of the coastal and big city elites.
One thing I find interesting is that NYT coverage of DEI has not always been positive. Take "‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?", which describes at least one racist "anti-racism" training, where a "hallmark of whiteness" is "scientific, linear thinking." See here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html
Make of that what you will.
DEI is clearly being used to further divide and conquer and further the oligarchy.
And Freddie, why do you assume that right wing attacks on DEI are in bad faith?
Your final point is the one I don’t understand - why isn’t anything emerging to tackle the “just the facts” space? The truth, wherever it leads? I’d subscribe. Without question.
It appears that it’s guys like me that kind of wrecked the media. I used to subscribe to way more papers and magazines than I could realistically read - at any time I’d be getting some subset of the NYT, the WSJ, one or two local papers, the Atlantic, the Economist, plus at least one or two more exciting and weird political magazines, plus Spin or something. I’ve still got my WSJ subscription, but other than that I only pay for subscriptions on Substack. And it’s because of what you’re talking about. It’s clear that I can’t trust these publications, even if some of the writers are still straight - how do I know who, and when? - so why bother. But if something new and principled emerged I’d be on it in a heartbeat.
Freddie, I hope you noticed that on the same day, the Times editorial board bashed the left as well as right for restricting free speech on campus. At a ratio of about 3:1, but still.
Thank you for making clear the difference between liberal bias and left-wing bias. And also for affirming the value of the NYT's fact-finding mission. Even Noam Chomsky says that the NYT prints a lot of useful, important facts. It's what they leave out that is important. I would also say it's less "liberal" bias and more institutional, mainstream bias that is the issue. I made this same critique of NPR's news coverage for Current Affairs: https://weirdcatastrophe.substack.com/p/npr-is-not-your-friend-redux
And some NPR fans just couldn't get past their idea of NPR's supposed "balance" as being a sign of true fairness and objectivity instead of what it really is, a cover for mainstream apologetics.
My problem with the critique of the "View From Nowhere" is that it is guilty of an either/or fallacy: either you're perfectly objective or you're biased, and since you can't be perfectly objective, you might as well embrace being biased.
But this doesn't make any sense. Bias is not an either/or thing; it has many gradations. And unless you think there is some virtue in lying, I don't see why you wouldn't aspire to be less biased. Why make the perfect be the enemy of the good?
The Times was on board with the effort to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop. Any reporting worth spit would have included the obvious, basic, journo 101 next step of calling the individuals who received or were copied on the emails it contained to ask whether they'd gotten them and what they thought. That was a newsroom terrified of what their actual reporting might reveal about the Biden family so they spiked the story and amplified the White House denial. That denial was the foundation for like 65% of poll respondents who now believe Biden, et al, are grifters.
In any event it was a dishonest, outcome directive news reporting strategy. Bias anyone?