bias – Sheila Kennedy

A Disturbing Analysis

This blog consistently attributes many of America’s problems to the unprecedented contours of the information environment we occupy. That critique has tended to focus on the proliferation of online partisan propaganda, but I’ve gradually become even more concerned about the reduced reliability of some of our most mainstream publications.

I previously shared concerns about an anti-Biden bias at the New York Times. The Times–like several other publications–has engaged in the sort of forced equivalency that has led them to jump on the slightest gaffe by Biden while ignoring–indeed, “cleaning up”–Trump’s ever-more-demented word-salads.

Then there’s the Washington Post, where recent shake-ups in management threaten the publication’s long-term viability–and current reliability. A recent Substack letter from Robert Hubbell analyzed the precarious situation at what was once a storied newspaper. The letter began:

On a quiet weekend, I received several emails from readers outraged over a Washington Post editorial scolding Joe Biden and his campaign for “ignoring the polls.” The editorial is titled, “Opinion: Biden should assume the polls are right, not wrong.” The editorial drips with pique provoked by Biden’s violation of the First Commandment of Serious Journalism: “We are the source of truth, and you shall not question our wisdom.” Or, as the Post editorial board put it, “Mr. Biden has attacked not just individual polls but polling writ large.”

As Hubbell noted, the piece relied heavily on a Times-Sienna poll that has been widely discredited.

What is most disturbing about the Post’s finger-wagging is that it occurs as the Post’s legitimacy as a major media outlet is open to question. A more urgent topic for the Post editorial board would have been, “Will the Post survive for another year?”

The questions about the Post’s continuing legitimacy arise because–as the publication is hemorrhaging money– its management has been taken over by alumni of Rupert Murdoch’s British media operations. Hubbell spends considerable time on the troubling backgrounds of those new managers. Then he gets to the root of the problem:

Because it is hard to be a successful media business these days. They have concluded that the profit-maximizing strategy is to “Root against Biden during the campaign and then rage against Trump if he wins.” (To understand that strategy, it is helpful to know that WaPo’s website had 100 million unique visitors in 2020 when Trump was president and 50 million unique visitors in 2023 when Biden was president.)

Is the Post surrendering journalistic ethics to garner tabloid profits?

We live in a world where one of America’s major political parties has decided to put party above country; if Hubbell is correct–and I believe he is–we are now seeing mainline news organizations put profit above professionalism.

Hubbell provides a telling example: WaPo’s recent article about Trump’s appearance at a “Black church” in Detroit.

The article peddles the popular narrative that Trump has taken his case to the Black community, where Biden is (allegedly) losing support:

Black voters have overwhelmingly favored Democrats since the civil rights movement. But recent polls show Trump has made gains with Black men, alarming some Democrats because even a small change in Black turnout or preferences could tip such pivotal states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Although it sounds like Trump went to a “Black church” to deliver his message to the Black community in Detroit, the event was a PR stunt created for the media—which eagerly participated in the fraud by failing to write the true story, which is this: No one from Detroit’s Black community—or the church’s congregation—showed up to hear Trump!

The reporter clearly understood what was really going on-seventeen paragraphs into the story, he wrote that “No one in line [for the event] identified themselves to a reporter as a member of [the] church.” (He did write In the third paragraph that the audience at the event “was not predominantly Black.”) In fact–as a photo Hubbell helpfully linked to clearly showed, the audience was almost completely White.

The story that the Post’s reporter should have written was this: “Trump holds sham event in Black church with white audience to conceal lack of support among Black voters.” If Biden had pulled the same stunt, that is exactly the type of headline the Post would have run on its front page.

Hubbell concludes that the major media has lined up against Biden and is rooting for him to lose. “The prophets of doom putting profit ahead of democracy include the Washington Post and the New York Times. We just need to accept that fact and focus on getting likely voters and new voters to turn out.”

Following the money explains a very dangerous turn of events…..

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American Exceptionalism?

When we hear the term “exceptional,” we tend to think in terms of merit–someone who is exceptionally good at something. But exceptional has another meaning: unusual. As in “not typical” or “abnormal.” Even before the disaster of the past four years, I’ve come to see American exceptionalism as more of an illustration of that less desirable definition than the former. Our current struggle with COVID-19 has certainly undercut the widespread belief that Americans are exceptionally competent.

My cardiologist cousin recently shared an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that focused on the prevalence of biases that have inhibited our national response to the pandemic–biases that, when added to the utter lack of competent national leadership, certainly help to explain our inability to contain it.

The article began with a discussion of ventilators. One of the first decisions made by the Trump administration in response to the pandemic was to spend $3 billion dollars to build more ventilators. As the article noted, however,

These extra ventilators, even had they been needed, would likely have done little to improve population survival because of the high mortality among patients with COVID-19 who require mechanical ventilation, which acts to divert care-givers away from more health-promoting endeavors. Yet most US residents supported this response because they believed that enough ventilators would lead to better overall survival from this scourge.

So why are so many people supportive of ensuring a sufficient number of ventilators but not similarly supportive of efforts to implement earlier, more aggressive physical distancing, testing, and contact tracing– policies that would have saved far more lives? The article attributes that (illogical) response to the referenced biases, beginning with our human tendency to “prioritize the readily imaginable over the statistical, the present over the future, and the direct over the indirect.”

In other words, to prioritize emotion over science.

This causes humans to respond more aggressively to threats to identifiable lives, ie, those that an individual can easily imagine being their own (or representing of people they care about such as family members) than to the hidden, “statistical” deaths reported in accounts of the population-level tolls of the crisis. Similarly, psychologists have described efforts to rescue visible, endangered individual lives as a highest priority goal, even if more lives would be saved through alternative responses.

Anyone who has ever wrestled with the Trolley Problem has encountered that bias.

This very human trait is why descriptions of the millions of people killed by the Nazis and the Soviets, or reports of the Rwandan and Chinese genocides–or our own near eradication of Native Americans– are less moving, less likely to cause outrage, than the individual stories that emerge from those and other horrific episodes in human history.

The article also cites “Optimism Bias,” our human tendency to predict optimistic outcomes.

Although early pandemic prediction models considered both best and worst-case outcomes, sound policy would have attempted to minimize mortality by doing everything possible to prevent the worst case results, but human optimism bias led many to act as if the best case was in fact the most likely. President Trump provides one of many good examples of this bias.

There were others: A preference for benefits in the “here and now” to larger benefits in the future, leading us to place greater value on saving a life today than a life tomorrow, and something called Omission Bias–a desire to avoid an imminent “harm” (like the pain of a vaccination) even when avoiding it is likely to lead to significantly worse results down the road.

It’s one thing to recognize the prevalence of these very human biases. It’s another thing, however, to indulge them–and it is unforgivable to cater to them through public policies rather than basing those policies on medical and scientific knowledge.

If we really want to achieve that first definition of American “exceptionalism,” we will stop denigrating and dismissing scientific and other expertise, stop scorning people who know what they’re doing as “elitists,” and stop electing people. who pander to our biases rather than those willing to base policy decisions on the best information available.

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Producing A Shared Reality

A major element in the rightwing attack on “Fake News” is the assertion that platforms like Google and Facebook skew to the left, that they privilege liberal results.

Scholars and journalists, for their part, worry about the “filter bubble”–the use of sophisticated algorithms to target individuals with information that is consistent with their pre-existing biases.

A recent study focused on Google provides some reassurance on both counts.

Google News does not deliver different news to users based on their position on the political spectrum, despite accusations from conservative commentators and even President Donald Trump. Rather than contributing to the sort of “echo chamber” problem that critics fear have plagued Facebook and other social media networks, our research has found that Google News algorithms recommended virtually identical news sources to both liberals and conservatives. That’s an important point to keep in mind when evaluating accusations that Google News is biased.

Our findings are part of an ample and growing body of research on this question. Online services – including Google’s regular search function – may provide intensely personalized information. But media scholars like us have found that when it comes to news, search engines and social media tend to lead people not to a more narrow set of sources, but rather to a broader range of information. In fact, we found, Google News is designed to avoid personalized search results, intentionally constructing a shared public conversation based on traditional criteria of journalistic values.

The construction of that public conversation is critically important. As the eminent media historian Paul Starr has observed, “journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it is about assembling a public to read and react to those stories.” In other words, there is a crucial difference between an audience and a public.

Journalism in a democratic system is about more than dissemination of news; it’s about the creation of shared awareness. It’s about enabling citizens to occupy the same reality. It’s about facilitating meaningful communication. As the information environment continues to fracture into smaller and more widely dispersed niches, many of us worry that we are in danger of losing the common ground upon which public communication and discourse depend.

When cities had one or two widely-read newspapers, residents were at least exposed to the same headlines, even if they didn’t read the articles. When large numbers of Americans tuned in to Walter Cronkite or to his competitors on one of the other two networks, they heard reports of the same events. If today’s citizens do not encounter even that minimal amount of shared information, if different constituencies access different media sources and occupy incommensurate realities, the concept of a public becomes meaningless. Informed debate becomes impossible. In that sort of fractured and fragmented environment, how do citizens engage in self-government?

If I say this is a table, and you insist it’s a chair, how do we come to an agreement about its use?

I hope this study, and the others it cites, are right–and that Americans retain enough of a common language and share enough of a common reality to qualify as a “public.”

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