Media, reporters, truth, bias - and transparency ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Friday, December 20, 2024

Media, reporters, truth, bias - and transparency

Axios has an article that seems almost panicky, titled "Media vs. Reporting," about how Elon Musk helped stop the government spending bill.

This week's epic fight over funding the government captures the power — and flaws — of the new information ecosystem.

Why it matters: Elon Musk and his followers on X proved they dominate the Republican media industrial complex — using a digital revolt to kill a spending bill, and open the door to a government shutdown. That revolt was powered by some false information, tweeted with total self-certainty.

"We aren't just the media here now. We are also the government," Donald Trump Jr. tweeted yesterday to his 13 million followers....

So when Musk tells X followers "You are the media," it's true they're part of his media. But that's different than declaring they're all reporters, trying to validate information before sharing it.

I've been doing what I do for a long enough time to know that reporters are not necessarily any better at reporting the truth than anyone else.

There are several advantages of listening to reporters over non-reporters:

1. They at least go through the motions of validating information before publishing. We do not know what exactly they do and how they do it, though.

2. They have at least one layer of oversight, namely, editors and maybe fact-checkers.

3. At least in theory, they don't want to pub publicly shamed for getting their facts wrong.

But the overriding problem with "reporting" is that it is still as subject to bias as anything else. That bias, when entrenched, means that the editing sand fact-checking themselves are also biased. If the entire ecosystem is bad, then you cannot trust anything that comes out of it.

The news media aren't the ecosystem, however. it is much bigger than that.

This week, Tablet published a long piece by David Samuels about how the Obama administration subverted the media to push its worldview and quash any other viewpoints. In this story, reporters are not the righteous, objective upholders of truth and democracy - they are part of the problem, and only cogs in the machine.

When I wrote about Rhodes’ ambitious program to sell the Iran deal, I advanced the term “echo chambers” to describe the process by which the White House and its wider penumbra of think tanks and NGOs generated an entirely new class of experts who credentialed each other on social media in order to advance assertions that would formerly have been seen as marginal or not credible, thereby overwhelming the efforts of traditional subject-area gatekeepers and reporters to keep government spokespeople honest. In constructing these echo chambers, the White House created feedback loops that could be gamed out in advance by clever White House aides, thereby influencing and controlling the perceptions of reporters, editors and congressional staffers, and the elusive currents of “public opinion” they attempted to follow. If you saw how the game worked from the inside, you understood that the new common wisdom was not a true “reflection” of what anyone in particular necessarily believed, but rather the deliberate creation of a small class of operatives who used new technologies to create and control larger narratives that they messaged to target audiences on digital platforms, and which often presented themselves to their targets as their own naturally occurring thoughts and feelings, which they would then share with people like themselves.

This description reflects reality much more than Axios' simplistic "trustworthy reporters vs. untethered right-wing social media activists" dichotomy. Before Musk bought X, reporters and the companies that ran social media were on the same side, and opinions that disagreed with the prevailing conventional wisdom were actively silenced, like questioning COVID lockdowns or bringing up Hunter Biden's laptop.

Even the most careful, professional, ethical reporting cannot eliminate bias. Newspapers are beholden to advertisers, they must ensure they have access to newsmakers, they don't want to risk losing readership, they want to please their corporate owners as well as the activist members of their own newsrooms. The choice of stories to cover and what not to cover, and how prominent those stories are, reflect bias.

Why don't we see more stories about starvation or sexual abuse by aid workers in parts of Africa? Do black lives not matter? Not as much as ratings and circulation.

And it is not only journalism. Even science, which should be the field with the least amount of bias because the scientific method is meant to eliminate it, is still subject to bias. The choices of what topics to research, what kinds of research get funding, concerns over publishing papers that go against conventional wisdom and might lead to "cancellation" or other professional harm, have all been shown to affect the quality and objectivity of scientific research.

Of course, this is personal to me. I am my own reporter, editor, editorialist, designer, headline writer, publisher, illustrator, legal advisor, social media expert, and marketing department. To complicate things, I am anonymous. How can I get people to trust me? What is the best model for someone with no known experience, no resume, no history, to become a news media professional?

The answer is transparency.

I will show my sources. I will describe how I got from point A to point B. I try to give enough information in every article I write to allow anyone to check my work.

Moreover, I am upfront about my own biases. This is a pro-Israel blog, and I choose to cover stories from that direction. My choice of what to write comes from my biases and my mood at the moment. If I feel like I am burning out on one topic, I will switch to something else or to another medium like cartoons or memes or videos.

So EoZ is not a place for comprehensive news. But neither is any newspaper or TV show or website on Earth. At least I can tell you why I choose to cover a story and (for those who ask me) why I don't cover others - often the reason is simply that I don't have the time to do it properly, or that I'm not so interested at that moment, or that I feel others are covering it adequately and I have nothing to add.

Unlike other media, I don't have to please my boss, my advertisers, my peers (although there is some peer pressure as with anywhere else.) I am very appreciative of donations but I do not cover or avoid covering any topics because of them or the threat to withhold them.

So even though most of you don't know my name, I believe I am more transparent about these things than any major media outlet is, where they pretend that they have no biases and no external pressure to cover or not to cover a story.

Transparency is the key to being able to trust any source, whether it is a newspaper or a Facebook post or a scientific paper or a Wikipedia entry or AI.

The Axios story does get this right:

That puts even more pressure on you as a news consumer to discern what and who you can trust for reliable, actionable information. It demands skepticism and patience when hot news hits fast.
You need to be skeptical of people or sources unless you feel confident they routinely get it right. You need to be patient in not overreacting to — or oversharing — stories that hit your dopamine button.

We should be teaching students how to check their own facts, how to put things in context, how to understand the motivations of the source - and there are always motivations - how to relate the story with history, and how to be skeptical especially when the story fits in with your own biases. In short, how to think.

When a story like the drones over New Jersey comes out, it helps to compare them to UFO sightings in the past - and how most of those have more mundane explanations. Occam's razor is very useful for taking a first pass at understanding an event.

So is life experience. If you are too young to know about the waves of UFO sightings in the past, then you don't have the proper context to examine another story of unknown lights mysteriously appearing in the sky.

And, perhaps most of all, is humility. Everyone has a field they are experts in, and have seen how others misjudge it based on their own ignorance. But those same people believe the are experts on military matters or psychology or history based on little more than TikTok videos.

Misinformation is not something to be trivialized. It is a major problem. But it is a potential problem with every news source, present company included. Only educated consumers of news can pressure the news sources to do the right thing.