If Mort Divine ruled the world

[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.

 

[Dak]

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.

Well I agree that there's a lot of variance or variability possible in assigning political salience to a news entity. However, pretending we can't make assignage intelligently or in terms of a normal distribution is special pleading. I provided a basis for measurement, even if the paper didn't and a prior paper provided a related finding, although I'm having trouble finding the paper again based on the search results I can think of atm.

However they define things, we are still dealing with the entire media outlet option, of which most are "mainstream" by defintion, but we have to ignore "mainstream" as opposed to "neutral", and I've made my argument there.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Tucker is a good entertainer but not a particularly good debater, and hides behind controlling arguments either directly (as the host of his show) or through emotional ploys his opponents are unwilling to call him out on ("But how's the suicide rate?"). I respect him for bringing conservative populism back to the television and for his influence, but right now he's just the best-swaying branch on the right in the wind. The most generous evaluation of Shapiro is an autistic-genius ideologue, but at least there are consistent ideas to be found, and in a live setting he can pull out data to back his arguments reasonably well.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Well I agree that there's a lot of variance or variability possible in assigning political salience to a news entity. However, pretending we can't make assignage intelligently or in terms of a normal distribution is special pleading. I provided a basis for measurement, even if the paper didn't and a prior paper provided a related finding, although I'm having trouble finding the paper again based on the search results I can think of atm.

However they define things, we are still dealing with the entire media outlet option, of which most are "mainstream" by defintion, but we have to ignore "mainstream" as opposed to "neutral", and I've made my argument there.

Never said it can't be done. Simply saying the paper didn't. What was your basis for measurement?

I don't understand your distinction tbh. AP and Reuters almost certainly fall close to the NYT on their chart, and the significance in differentiating between "mainstream" and "neutral" is lost on me when the pressing issue is a far-right outlier, not all the center/mainstream/leftish/whatever outlets that are clearly all about 4-5x the distance from FOX and 10-15x the distance from Breitbart per their x-axis.

 

[CiG]

Tucker is a good entertainer but not a particularly good debater

100% agreed. That he destroyed Cenk in a debate says nothing about Tucker's skills.

 

[Dak]

I'm going to merge HBB posts. Neutral is reporting events vs opinions on events (although there is perspective on this). AP/Reuters does a decent job on this (even if still somewhat liberal, to your point, but not enough to tip the scales, unless we just claim them as lib as well) I don't know what scale you mean by 15xxxxxxxx. Otherwise, everything else is obviously lib. Stop being a cuck yourself. We don't have to pretend TC is presidential candidate material to appreciate his abilities.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I'm going to merge HBB posts. Neutral is reporting events vs opinions on events (although there is perspective on this). AP/Reuters does a decent job on this (even if still somewhat liberal, to your point, but not enough to tip the scales, unless we just claim them as lib as well) I don't know what scale you mean by 15xxxxxxxx. Otherwise, everything else is obviously lib. Stop being a cuck yourself. We don't have to pretend TC is presidential candidate material to appreciate his abilities.

Well, certainly most news outlets have opinion columns, whereas AP doesn't. That would technically make them neutral, though there are still obvious sources of potential bias in how one chooses the stories to report on (e.g. AP is probably going to dodge the kind of stories that get Salon or Breitbart readers fired up). At the same time, simply having opinion pieces doesn't necessarily mean that the reporting itself is biased though. Unless machine learning is strong enough to objectively read the bias of various outlets (something that I believe will be possible eventually but not now), this is all moot because it amounts to inherently biased beings pointing their fingers at where they believe the norm to be. If it's not quantitative, it's not science.



That's the scale I'm referring to and that the paper refers to. I'm making two major points with that. First, there is a clear and massive shoulder on the right of their total distribution, implying two discrete populations that should be accounted for (and aren't meaningfully). As a result, the mode of the primary bell curve is not being taken as the center, which is instead being taken substantially to the right of that, as a result of outlier bias. Secondly, the supposed left-leaning media sources are all relatively close to each other when compared to the right-wing sources. All the named left-wing sources are at the very least within one-half full-width at half-maximum; FOX isn't, and Breitbart sure as fuck isn't. This means that naturally liberals tend to agree with each other because they've been crammed into one small chunk of the left side of the distribution. On the current axis, this gives the illusion that MSNBC and FOX are roughly equidistant from the mode. However, take an arbitrary AP-as-0 measure, and then accordingly add 0.35 to all values. Now MSNBC is at -0.35, NYT is at -0.1, WSJ is at 0.35, and FOX is at a whopping 1.15. Suddenly it becomes a lot less mystifying why more conservatives follow MSNBC on Twitter than liberals following FOX (let alone Breitbart).

 

[Dak]

I don't know where your graph is from, but just taking it at face value, there's a bias built into the data used in that graph in that Breitbart is included, but sites that might be considered comparable to Breitbart on the left are not. No wonder there's so much skew. It's interesting that they used the WSJ as 0, as I've read on more than one occasion it's considered "conservative". I'm wondering if this scale has more to do with coverage of party politics and less to do with values, or something like that. That's about the only way this distribution makes any sense to me.

There is definitely more heterogeneity in viewpoints outside of the narrow set of accepted opinions in/on the NYT, CNN, MSNBC, etc.