Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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Actually, I would. It's a priming effect; by focusing on the notion that the rest of the media hates you, you're priming your audience to look at that media specifically to find examples of where it hates you, and indeed to specifically interpret it in a way that finds that the media hates you. The actual truth of that statement is rather less self-evident, and I suspect that far fewer people would agree that it is true without that priming effect.

To give a salient example: I read an article this morning about the ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election in Michigan, clearly something that has no respect for those people. Except... it actually has a lot of respect for them, far more than I think they deserve. It treats the request for an audit as nothing more than a request for the audit; there's no questioning on what purpose it could serve other than overturning the election results. There's also this quote: "Last week, a few hundred demonstrators carrying boxes of affidavits signed by thousands of people demanding a state ballot audit showed up at the Capitol." What it doesn't go on to explain is that the "affidavits" are actually foisted contracts that say in effect "if you don't agree to my demands in X days, you are in violation of the law," which has 0 legal effect whatsoever. Does it really "have no respect for [them]"?

Not every article -- not even most articles, really -- need go out of its way reflect the author's and editor's ideology for it to be quite clear that most national news media organizations lean heavily in the same direction and aren't afraid to let that determine what they report on and how they frame it.

Just curious, can I see the article?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michigan-2020-electi... is the article in question.

But note also that there is a distinction to be drawn towards a media source being biased versus "on the spectrum of 'has no respect for you' and 'likes to sincerely fantasize in public about the elimination of your culture'."

I claimed that almost everyone working for these organizations (or to be more pedantic but more accurate, almost everyone involved in content for these organizations) is well-described by the latter, not that almost every article will reflect that perspective in an obvious way or even at all. For someone who tends to see the world differently from the average journalist or editor, the question then becomes: why take even the articles that aren't obviously biased at face value when you have a good idea of how the individuals involved feel about your culture and your priorities?

Really, if someone suggests that such a push would not be effective at convincing a lot of people, regardless of the truth of what's being promoted, then I'm not sure why they care whether media is biased.

Yes, media's biased. Yes, media lie a lot, often about serious things. Yes, some outlets on some topics tend to slant "left" pretty consistently. It's also true that, in the early days of post-fairness-doctrine right-wing broadcast media, there was a concerted and deliberate effort to promote the notion of the "left wing media" to a much greater degree than it was actually true, at least at the time that effort began, and that it was highly effective.

... but, if it's not possible that suddenly emphasizing the notion of a "left-wing media" may have significantly affected public perception of same, including possibly even if it wasn't true or was being grossly exaggerated, then I suppose we don't need to care about any of that. Right?

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