If Mort Divine ruled the world

[Einherjar86]

I'm with HBB on that one. I also find this comment in their conclusion suggestive:

Partisan outlets in the conservative media ecosystem are simply not a mirror image of the mainstream news outlets that they often position themselves against. Opinion plays an outsize role in this ecosystem, while it is only a part of what mainstream news organizations produce. By the same token, professional journalistic norms are not as widely established in partisan conservative media, so that conservatives with a taste for both traditionally reported news and congenial opinion may need to sample more widely than liberals with analogous tastes.

 

[Dak]

@HamburgerBoy and @Einherjar86 I absolutely understand your counterpoint. I disagree however with the degree to which you assign "mainstream" to "leftist" outlets because leftists are the ones assigning "mainstream" status in a non-pejorative sense! If, instead of "mainstream", we use "neutral", this clearly shifts CNN, MSNBC, NYT, NPR, WaPo etc into the leftist category. Neutral consists of AP and Reuters for the most part, and maybe a couple more you could argue, but not those "mainstream" options. If we use simple popularity, this makes FOX outlets, at a minimum, "mainstream".

 

[Einherjar86]

@HamburgerBoy and @Einherjar86 I absolutely understand your counterpoint. I disagree however with the degree to which you assign "mainstream" to "leftist" outlets because leftists are the ones assigning "mainstream" status in a non-pejorative sense! If, instead of "mainstream", we use "neutral", this clearly shifts CNN, MSNBC, NYT, NPR, WaPo etc into the leftist category. Neutral consists of AP and Reuters for the most part, and maybe a couple more you could argue, but not those "mainstream" options. If we use simple popularity, this makes FOX outlets, at a minimum, "mainstream".

I'm not sure if HBB would agree with this, but I think there's a marked difference between CNN and NYT, and FOX News. CNN interviews John McWhorter. FOX interviews Ted Nugent.

Part of the distinction here has to do, again, with journalistic standards.

 

[Dak]

I'm not sure if HBB would agree with this, but I think there's a marked difference between CNN and NYT, and FOX News. CNN interviews John McWhorter. FOX interviews Ted Nugent.

Part of the distinction here has to do, again, with journalistic standards.

Couple of issues with this. One, you're picking extremes, and if I want to find a Nugent-level celebrity on one of those liberal outlets, it won't be hard to do. Two, "journalistic standards" don't reduce the viewpoint bias. How many Covington, Michael Brown, and Trump examples do I need to pull as problematic for those liberal outlets (with support from McWhorter, not counting the Trump issues, which can easily be mocked with the "turning point/bombshell/etc clips")?

 

[Einherjar86]

Couple of issues with this. One, you're picking extremes, and if I want to find a Nugent-level celebrity on one of those liberal outlets, it won't be hard to do. Two, "journalistic standards" don't reduce the viewpoint bias. How many Covington, Michael Brown, and Trump examples do I need to pull as problematic for those liberal outlets (with support from McWhorter, not counting the Trump issues, which can easily be mocked with the "turning point/bombshell/etc clips")?

1. Fair enough.

2. You're picking extremes.

 

[CiG]

CNN interviews John McWhorter. FOX interviews Ted Nugent.

CNN interviewed Ted Nugent too.

 

[Einherjar86]

Haha, isn't he a regular contributor on FOX, though? Like an "expert" they call on...?

 

[CiG]

Not sure about that. A quick Google search says he's a regular guest on the Glenn Beck Show, Larry King Live and Politically Incorrect.

 

[TechnicalBarbarity]

Like an "expert" they call on...?

Lol are you trolling? Hes nothign more than just a guest.

 

[CiG]

CNN considered him enough of an expert on the 2nd amendment to have him on to have a discussion with Piers Morgan, so... kinda blows out this idea that CNN have higher journalistic standards if Ted Nugent is a mark against FOX.

 

[Einherjar86]

Well, CNN's not the epitome of journalistic standards either. But overall they have more substantive interviews than FOX does (and no, I have no data on that).

 

[Dak]

1. Fair enough.

2. You're picking extremes.

Extremes that dominated all the op-eds for months (totaled).

 

[Einherjar86]

Key word is "op-ed."

NYT also published op-eds from conservatives.

 

[CiG]

Well, CNN's not the epitome of journalistic standards either. But overall they have more substantive interviews than FOX does (and no, I have no data on that).

I think they're both trash and in the cases that they manage to have a substantive interview they're anomalous and probably about equal. I don't think CNN has any hosts as interesting as Tucker Carlson either.

 

[Dak]

Key word is "op-ed."

NYT also published op-eds from conservatives.

Douthat? He's mostly considered a cuck and gets bashed by other NYT and etc "mainstream" outlets.

Edit: that's just Op-eds. Everything else is pure liberal.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think they're both trash and in the cases that they manage to have a substantive interview they're anomalous and probably about equal. I don't think CNN has any hosts as interesting as Tucker Carlson either.

Well, this is getting away from the article. We can disagree about Carlson all day. He's a phony who's mastered a tactic of guest-smashing. It was hilarious hearing him have a meltdown over Rutger Bregman.

I think the most generous explanation is one the original article states: that most right-wing media conservatives consume fails to rise above opinion, and so conservative listeners consume left-wing media as a source of journalism. I will say, this implies that conservatives can tell the difference.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

@HamburgerBoy and @Einherjar86 I absolutely understand your counterpoint. I disagree however with the degree to which you assign "mainstream" to "leftist" outlets because leftists are the ones assigning "mainstream" status in a non-pejorative sense! If, instead of "mainstream", we use "neutral", this clearly shifts CNN, MSNBC, NYT, NPR, WaPo etc into the leftist category. Neutral consists of AP and Reuters for the most part, and maybe a couple more you could argue, but not those "mainstream" options. If we use simple popularity, this makes FOX outlets, at a minimum, "mainstream".

How people of political category X describe themselves or insult others is irrelevant to what should be an objective scientific inquiry. It's not clear how they plot media groups along a left-right axis, nor is it clear how they chose the particular representatives of each. They mention an "ideology parameter, ϕ" but don't appear to define it at least in the bulk of the paper, and I don't see any supplement either. There's actually very little in the way of rigorous analysis in the paper, and the more I look at it, the more it looks like the most one can conclude is that there are two groups of conservatives (WSJ/light-FOX conservatives and Breitbart conservatives), and that if one treats the two populations as belonging together, you can come up with an average that shows greater diversity than a mono-culture mainstream-liberal population (aka, nothing surprising). Take Figure 7 where you can clearly see that their liberal group is homogeneous and their conservative group made up of two discrete types. Or the simple fact that their "center" is clearly off-center from the median of the total population. Give someone a free half-standard deviation bias in their direction of choice and it'll make telling any story a lot easier.

 

[Dak]

How people of political category X describe themselves or insult others is irrelevant to what should be an objective scientific inquiry. It's not clear how they plot media groups along a left-right axis, nor is it clear how they chose the particular representatives of each. They mention an "ideology parameter, ϕ" but don't appear to define it at least in the bulk of the paper, and I don't see any supplement either. There's actually very little in the way of rigorous analysis in the paper, and the more I look at it, the more it looks like the most one can conclude is that there are two groups of conservatives (WSJ/light-FOX conservatives and Breitbart conservatives), and that if one treats the two populations as belonging together, you can come up with an average that shows greater diversity than a mono-culture mainstream-liberal population (aka, nothing surprising). Take Figure 7 where you can clearly see that their liberal group is homogeneous and their conservative group made up of two discrete types. Or the simple fact that their "center" is clearly off-center from the median of the total population. Give someone a free half-standard deviation bias in their direction of choice and it'll make telling any story a lot easier.

I get that. So, based on this, provide some sort of distribution. All of that aside though, I think my critique still stands.

 

[CiG]

Well, this is getting away from the article. We can disagree about Carlson all day. He's a phony who's mastered a tactic of guest-smashing. It was hilarious hearing him have a meltdown over Rutger Bregman.

He's terrible at guest-smashing, unless you consider smirking and laughing at something someone says a slamdunk. I don't.

I think he's interesting because when put beside pundits like Ben Shapiro he exposes just how corporatist and status quo they really are. Even if, as Rutger Bregman pointed out, he's a Johnnie-come-lately to these more populist socialist anti-corporatist anti-free market views it still makes him a thorn in the side of his political allies' official narrative on most things.

There is nobody to my knowledge that can even come close to doing that in the left-wing media elite community.

I think the most generous explanation is one the original article states: that most right-wing media conservatives consume fails to rise above opinion, and so conservative listeners consume left-wing media as a source of journalism. I will say, this implies that conservatives can tell the difference.

I actually think it's a third explanation; that there is much less right-wing media to consume on the level of CNN, MSNBC etc. Most right-wing media is on the alt-media level and I think you'll find it's mostly younger right-wingers consuming that stuff and the more middle aged and older on the right stick with the big platforms, in which the right is outnumbered.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I get that. So, based on this, provide some sort of distribution. All of that aside though, I think my critique still stands.

Provide a distribution for what?

I'm not making any argument about popularity so I'm not sure what you're critiquing with that. I've already made my case for why assigning ANY political label (left, right, neutral, mainstream) is arbitrary and non-scientific unless clearly defined and validated in some way. If I have a set of data and want to find a correlation between two variables, allowing me to freely define just one of the variables without explaining it is as analytically useless as it would be for me to simply forge data. Political science frequently fails at the first step for this reason, e.g. the "racial resentment" test which is used as a shitty proxy for racism, but at least there it's clear that they're using a shitty proxy because you can find the test for yourself. For this paper I don't even understand where or how they define their variables.