(starting at the most recent in my catchup, because its, er, the easiest way)
(and this is basically a long first draft because I’m getting sleepy, so forgive any weird phrasing and stuff)
Back in this post I made what was basically a note to myself. I’ll expand that note out a bit now I have a chance.
- Our society gets a large majority of its information about the world from large media organisations.
- “Media bias” is something that is frequently raised in discourse about political and social issues. Usually this is raised to discredit a counter-explanation and (implicitly) give credence to the speaker’s explanation
- It is certainly possible that there may be bias slanting the information delivered through a particular media organisation. In fact, it’s inevitable, given the intersection between irreducible human nature, the complexity of the world, and the flexibility of language.
- The two sides of the current American political/social debate, a debate with global implications, each make the claim that the dominant media bias is against them. (“liberal media” vs. “corporate media”)
At the moment, the two sides of the debate in America can each safely discount everything that doesn’t fit their worldview because it comes from a “biased source”. I’m dissatisfied with this. They can’t both be right – either the media is predominantly biased towards liberals, or its primarily biased towards conservatives.
Media bias is a serious claim and it has serious implications for those who believe such claims. Most importantly, it devalues the role of primary information sources and assigns pre-eminent media status to secondary, opinion-structuring information commentators.
Both sides of the debate in the US can produce legitimate grievances with the media. There is truth behind both claims.
So where does this leave us? In a relativistic environment where nothing resembling useful truth can be discerned? Well, in effect it does at the moment, but it need not be so. I believe that an improved vocabulary accounting for the varieties, formulations and effects of media bias will be the crucial step in bringing mediated information back under the control of its audience.
At present, the only vocabulary is the word, ‘bias’. This is much too broad a category. It isn’t going to get us anywhere.
There may already be such a vocabulary. (In fact, I’m sure there is in the world of media studies.) It needs, however, to be popularised. I believe that such a project is very possible because there is a clear and obvious difference between different kinds of bias. Such clear differences make an improved vocabulary very useful, and if something is useful, it can be spread.
Compare, say, 60 Minutes’ failure to properly check the (forged) Bush memos, with the way the coverage of pulling-down-the-statue-day in Iraq was presented. These are very different kinds of bias, creating very different effects on the viewer, and manipulating information in very different ways. At the moment, they are both examples of bias, and they must cancel each other out; the media is liberal, the media is corporate.
Once we have a vocabulary to describe the differences hidden within bias, then we’ll be in a position to discuss how bias works, and how to challenge it and respond to it. We won’t be so dependent on opinion-formers, and we’ll be better able to identify the truth, such as it is. This isn’t just a desirable future – it’s nearly an essential one.
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For what it’s worth, my rule of thumb is that the media is biased in favour of liberal perspectives by the personal biases of the majority of those working within it; they will favour angles in their coverage that push a liberal agenda. However, it is also biased in favour of conservative perspectives by overarching structural features, particularly management and funding structures. In other words, issues are almost always framed in accordance with a conservative agenda, but the pursuit of those issues is undertaken with a liberal mindset.
That’s my hunch. I’d like to have the words to check it out sometime.
—————
So. Brother, can you spare a vocabulary?
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston’s face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
“You haven’t a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,” he said almost sadly. “Even when you write it you’re still thinking in Oldspeak. I’ve read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. They’re good enough, but they’re translations. In your heart you’d prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. You don’t grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?”
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten . . . Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.”
George Orwell
1984
Nice quote Billy. Who is Morgue, Winston or Syme?
Reading your post Morgue I am first struck by the baldness of some of your assumptions. Before even thinking about vocabulary assumptions need to be discussed and addressed.
I know you wrote this late at night, so there is some grace for tiredness but there really are a few things that I think you should at least think about in thye light of day as it were (it at least in the light of a good strong coffee).
You wrote: “At the moment, the two sides of the debate in America can each safely discount everything that doesn’t fit their worldview because it comes from a “biased source”. I’m dissatisfied with this. **They can’t both be right** – either the media is predominantly biased towards liberals, or its primarily biased towards conservatives.” Emphasis added.
I don’t think you really believe this. Of course they can both be right, and they probably are. You intimate as much with comments like:
“Both sides of the debate in the US can produce legitimate grievances with the media. There is truth behind both claims.”
And
“At the moment, they are both examples of bias, and they must cancel each other out; the media is liberal, the media is corporate.”
In the very least you need to clarify the initial assertion that they both can’t be right given that you later claim that they are to some degree.
Personally I think they are both right. I think, with the inital statement, you are commiting a fallacy of generalising across the board, considering “media” as one reasonably unifed entity, then later you implicitly recognise the fallacy and speak against it.
The media is not unified. Different people and agenda’s will drive different companies and even different programs. There is liberal media and there is conservative media .I think the corporate label is fallacious and inflamatory, to equal conservatism with corporate agendas is reactionary and is another generalisation.
In fact the terms liberal and conservative are almost meaningless. There are so many shades of red and blue and some of them look very little like their so called brothers in arms that I think it’s a *huge* mistake to think of them as, and present as, unifed in *any* real sense of that word.
Second, you make another rather gross generalisation that is also seemingly utterly unfounded and simply based on personal bias (there’s that word again).
You wrote: For what it’s worth, my rule of thumb is that the media is biased in favour of liberal perspectives by the personal biases of the majority of those working within it; they will favour angles in their coverage that push a liberal agenda. However, it is also biased in favour of conservative perspectives by overarching structural features, particularly management and funding structures. In other words, issues are almost always framed in accordance with a conservative agenda, but the pursuit of those issues is undertaken with a liberal mindset.”
You say that the media is made up of people with liberal outlooks. Where do you get this idea from? I have to say that the journalists I have met generally tend towards a more conservative view and generally have a hodge podge of views some of which a libveral and some of which are conservative like *most* people. It’s more a matter of degree than extreme.
Certainly the media industry (which I think is more informative that just using the word “media” as that word has many connotations and “media industry” has fewer, but still quite a few) is filled with people from diverse walks of life that probably express pretty much the full range of political outlooks. A claim that most media industry workers are libveral at least needs to be backed up in some way.
Secondly do you think that companies have some power to make decisions without involving their human elements? Because your suggestion that most *people* are liberal but most *companies* are conservative certainly implies something like this. Is it legitemate to pose this kind of dualism. That on one level of analysis x is true and yet on another y is true, especially when they are largely contradictory assertions (at least in their extremes).
I’m not saying it’s not true, I don’t know, but logically that which is true at the lower level should also be true of the higher level. Otherwise it leads to the kind of absurd question I asked above about companies being independent entities of the people who run them.
One way you could make the dichotomy work is toi lok at established patterns in people. For example, people generally get more conservative politically as they age. Also, the people who make the big decisions in companies tend to be older (there are not many 20 years old board chairpeople). So there is a correlation (perhaps) between political outlook and age and relative power. Thus, companies may appear conservative because they are run by older people who are likely to be more conservative. Whilst the younger people in the organisation will have a borader range of views and are thus likely to be more liberal. Whether they is any truth in that hypothesis is beyond me, but it’s an intuitive argument for the sort of dichotomy you suggest.
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On a related note I am confronted with the weakness of the liberal/conservative distinction. Generally people tend to think of liberal as more socialist/left wing and conservative as more capitalist/right wing. But conservative is totally the wrong word for some of the extreme right wing views. And it would be hard to call the proscriptive communists and anarchists who make up the extreme left wing liveral as they seek to impose their views on everyone (hardly being liberal that is, at least in my opinion).
I guess my conception of conservative is more leaning towards the centre (on the right side perhaps) and leaning away form any kind of extremism.
So perhaps we need a new vocabulary here too…
Symes is, unfortunately, wrong, though it’s a common mistake; but contemplation of the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon will show the problem with his problem. Newspeak wouldn’t stop thoughtcrime; however, it might well make *sharing* thoughtcrime much more difficult, which is the more pernicious problem anyway.
Large media wants to make money. (Small media sometimes wants to make a point, sometimes wants to make money.) However, any discussion that lumps Fox News and the BBC World Service is likely to be problematic.
Agreed.
I suppose a part of Morgues new vocab could be a way of referring to news media without referring to each individual company or without referring to them all as media as whole. The first is too fine grained and the second not granular enough.
Of course then there’d be dispute over which companies the terms are applied too as some might thing Fox is blergle companiy and others might think it’s a grominge company.
If you get my drift.
There you go morgue, two new as yet undefined words for your vocab. Blergle and Grominge.
Matt, you challenged an assumption implicit in my opening salvo: “At the moment, the two sides of the debate in America can each safely discount everything that doesn’t fit their worldview because it comes from a “biased source”. I’m dissatisfied with this. They can’t both be right.”
All I was really getting at here was, ‘this is something people are arguing about, and the argument has serious consequences that go beyond the frame of the argument.
(As you says, and I should have been clearer on this, I giving an oversimplistic summary of the core of the debate. What I am alluding to is that there are two self-serving worldviews in place here that are incompatible. Each side thinks the media is biased against it and towards the other group. The truth is certainly more complex; in a sense both are right, while in a sense neither is. The important thing is that as long as “Red America” and “Blue America” (themselves shaky concepts) tell themselves the media is biased, members of those groups are going to be discouraged from seeing anything but self-perpetuating political spin.)
You also ask, Matt: “do you think that companies have some power to make decisions without involving their human elements?”
And the answer here is, yes, I do, absolutely. I am convinced that systems have a power of their own. Any system by its very nature exerts power to extend its key logic beyond itself. A simple, but relevant, example: tabloid journalism in the UK is driven by celebrity and scandal. This does not mean that either the producers or consumers of tabloids believe that celebrity and scandal are the proper content of ‘news’ – but the system in place here, of competing newspapers vying for customers in a cultural environment valuing individual celebrity and traditional morality [a.k.a. the UK working classes], exerts its own logic. When tabloid editors have attempted to move away from this template, as Piers Morgan at the Daily Mirror did over the last few years, the market punishes that tabloid. (Morgan also oversaw a giant fuckup that saw him dumped in disgrace, but that’s by the by.)
I can’t back up the assertion that journalists are mostly liberal in their politics, but somewhere I picked that idea up; I thought, and think, it is as uncontroversial as the notions that teachers are mostly liberal and bankers are mostly conservative. I’d be interested if anyone knew of any statistics either way; am I deluded on this point entirely?
In regard to companies running themselves morgue wrote: “And the answer here is, yes, I do, absolutely.”
It’s still people that make the decisions. My concern here is that people could use your arguement from market forces to justify immoral acts (like employing children in third world countries). If you take the human responsibility for making decisions out of the loop then you can’t attack the people for making inhumane decisions or exploiting people.
In the end the people make the decisions. If they choose to be controlled by the nebulous ‘market forces’ that is still their decision. They could have chosen otherwise.
People are still responsible.
As for the assertion of liberal journalist and teachers and conservative bankers I think that is simply too great a generalisation.
Many of the teachers I know are very conservative. The only banker I know isn’t very conservative.
Until I see hard evidence I don’t think it’s worth even entertaining such generalisations as it adds nothing but stereotypes (prejudice?) to the discussion).
Matt sez “In the end the people make the decisions. If they choose to be controlled by the nebulous ‘market forces’ that is still their decision. They could have chosen otherwise.”
I think you’re assigning too much agency to these decision-makers. Systems exert their influence covertly, hiding in the kinds of decisions that are made and the frame of consequences surrounding those decisions.
If someone resists using exploitation labour, the system will begin exerting pressure for that person to resist, or for that person to be replaced. The system doesn’t care about morality unless morality is directly built into it somewhere.
This is where morality enters the discussion. I believe that it is unacceptable for participants in a system to blame the system for any wrong that results. Participants in a system must strive to act morally even when the system pressures against this. I believe there is a further responsibility, however, and that is for system-controllers to seek out ways to modify the system so it does not pressure against morality.
This, in a sense, is the political division between left and right that interests me; introducing a moral element at a systemic level, instead of relying on ‘personal responsibility’.
Re: journalism and left-wing politics – of course it isn’t an absolute thing. the only evidence I can point at is the long history of journalism unions being on the left/liberal side of political debate, although (if I’ve got it right) not so far left as the teachers’ unions. It’s all a bit hazier now, the unions having lost much of their power throughout the west in the 70s and 80s, but I see no reason why such a historical trend should change. Anyway, this is hardly the main point.
Regarding responsibility in companies
Morgue writes: “I think you’re assigning too much agency to these decision-makers.”
and then later says: “Participants in a system must strive to act morally even when the system pressures against this. I believe there is a further responsibility, however, and that is for system-controllers to seek out ways to modify the system so it does not pressure against morality.”
I don’t know Morgue but you seem to contradict yourself here. On one hand you argue that decision makers are exposed to pressures that force their hands, on the other hand you say they must act morally and that the ‘system controllers’ (by this I assume you mena people) must make the system not punish moral behaviour.
I never argued that people could come under pressure from making moral decisions, I have seen it happen many times, that’s what I mean by ‘nebulous market forces’.
In the end the responsibility still lies with the individual. Natalya trained as a broadcast journalist but decided not to enter it as a career in part because of the compromises that she’d have had to make morally.
Sure, you might lose your job for refusing to do something you consider immoral, or mss out on a promotion, that’s life, that’s the way the system works. But it’s still your choice.
In some sense morgue you are putting forward the old Nazi argument of “I was just following orders.” It’s changed slightly thse days “I didn’t want to lose my job/promotion.” but it’s essentially the same argument and it didn’t washj then and it doesn’t wash now.
People can choose to act morally even in the face of considerable pressure. People *d0* choose to act morally in the face of considerable pressure, and in my experience people will oftne respect that, but sometimes they punish people for it.
But in the end it is the people who decide what to do, there is not some nebulous decision making entity that lies behind the actions of companies. People choose.
I don’t see a contradiction. What I’m getting at is that structures can set context for decisions and decision-makers in such a way that they don’t realise the extent to which they are part of a system. Any system, by its nature, creates an effect that discourages awareness of the limits of the system and the possibility of choices that do not serve the needs of the system.
We are, of course, in agreement about the way in which people need to be responsible for their actions, and that saying ‘the system made me do it’ doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.
But I believe very strongly that there is a fundamental lack of awareness of how heavily our behaviour is structured. It’s PSYC 101 stuff about how easy it is to influence behaviour without the subjects realising it, only amped up to eleven because pervasive systems create an echo chamber for this effect.
The problem isn’t people facing moral decisions – it’s people not even being aware there is a decision before them, and just taking the action the system mandates.
I’ve decided to finally throw my hat in here, but I’m going to be a bit tangental…
Have other people read the 2004 New Zealand Listener Christmas edition? It was entitled “2004: The Year of the Arguement.”
The editorial direction of that issue was that the media (both NZ and internationally) has taken the principle of “fair and reasoned” debate too far. Now, the editor argues, every issue (even the most obvious) requires both sides to be presented and a debate be had.
And, the editorial goes on to say, this had led the political and social debate throughout the Western world to be stymied in unresolved and often futile arguements for the sake of arguing.
The editor used what I thought was a very good example to illustrate this – Global Warming.
The truth is that human-caused climate change is an accepted fact amongst almost all scientists, ecologist and other “experts.” There are a few disenters, but they are in a clear majority, and their arguements are usually easily rebuted.
However, if one was to just pay attention to commercial media, you’d think that there was two equal parties of scientists, each with important and well reasoned views that we need to pay attention to. One side says there is a problem, the other doesn’t. And, as a result, it becomes very difficult for your average person to work their way through the arguements presented by both sides because, of course, the viewer doesn’t have the facts to decide which side is right. So the viewer ends up deciding that the issue of climate change is undecided and open to debate.
Well, actually, it’s not really. But the media will not allow themselves to say “Global Warming is a fact.” Instead, in the interests of being fair and balanced, the media will ask “Global Warming: Fact or Fiction? After the break we speak to two scientists about this issue…”