The mainstream press is failing America (UK edition)
Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science 2024-09-09
This is Bob.
I’m in London (about to head to StanCon!), so I saw today’s opinion piece in The Guardian (a UK newspaper not immune to the following criticisms), which I think is a nice summary of the sorry state of the media (and courts) in the United States.
It has a classic strong open,
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power.
If you haven’t been following Mark Palko’s blog, West Coast Stats Views, or this whole storyline elsewhere, this article does a good job of framing the issue.
In the article, Jeff Jarvis, a former editor and columnist, is quoted as saying (er, tweeting [or do they call it X-ing now?]),
What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?
The article reprises what Mitzi Morris has been saying ever since she worked at the New York Times in the 1990s when it was first going digital. She was appalled by the entire organization’s highly misleading approach to their readership statistics and focus on click-bait. Her take agrees with the article’s,
In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
As Palko has been pointing out on his blog, the mainstream media, in part led by the New York Times, no longer seems concerned with candidates’ mental health and age now that they can’t criticize Joe Biden. Instead, you get what is described by the article this way,
They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over.
This whole trend goes back to at least the Clinton/Trump election. Their relentless focus on Clinton’s email while ignoring all of Trump’s malfeasance led me to stop reading the Times after that. Also, whenever I read anything I know about in the press, like epidemiology or computer science, the coverage is appallingly misleading.
There’s a lot more detail in the article. And a whole lot more on Palko’s blog if you want to do a deeper dive. On a related topic, I’d also recommend Palko’s coverage of Elon Musk’s shenanigans.