Well-said. Please allow me to add to the above a bit:
The fundamental reason to “not recognizing this almost universal tilt to traditional news sources is as wrong as relying on third hand reports…” is that the result is effectively the same - a misinformed citizenry. I do not think the motives of either group is any different, if the goal is to misinform by making up or leaving out or mis-representing information that provides an objective picture of a story.
This is why I am always surprised when people disparage known mainstream sources (not MSM) without even reading the information. This may explain why I and no one I know have been surprised by anything this year. We read everything, even the newspapers and sources we 100% disagree with and which we know have a universal tilt in another direction than we believe.
I also think it is a disservice to students to teach them to ignore valid sources because they do not hold your worldview; that is pretty much guaranteeing self-induced ignorance.
Overall, by reading everything, as you suggest, my colleagues and I knew something was happening that no one on the two coasts seem to know. It was real, and we could feel it in the air when speaking to people. If we stuck only to the MSM, we would not know half of what we knew was happening on the ground.
I do not “believe” media sources because I know they are all biased and are trying to sway me, the reader.
What I do is read all major sources, even the ones I disagree with ideologically. Then, I critically analyze and reach my own conclusions. Sometimes I reach the same conclusions as the sources, but many times I do not.
However…one’s analysis is only as good as your raw numbers. If raw numbers are off, then your analysis will be off.
538 is not really a news site; it is a statistical site. But, it fell into the same trap as the MSM media without really wanting to. 538 took polls that were demographically-structured specifically to give a certain result, i,e, the raw numbers were off intentionally, and gave those polls the same statistical weight as demographically correct polls.
The result was even 538 final numbers was too high a chance for Clinton and too low a chance for Trump because the vast majority of polls were just plain demographically set-up to provide a better picture for Clinton. Therefore, its analysis of the numbers was correct, but it never analyzed to see to if it was using bad numbers.
That is the glaring weakness of 538 - it does not produce its own raw data; it only analyzes other’s raw data without regard to checking the statistical accuracy of that raw data and adjusting for errors that data set. It takes the data producers word for it. I stopped following it early on when I realized this weakness.
Some of the close states also did not have very many (or any) polls in the last week before the election. Since states could shift by more or less than national polling shifts, the lack of state polling meant that estimates for the states in question had to come from national polling shifts since the last (stale) state polls, resulting in greater potential polling error.
Their pre-election writeups also did specifically call out that they believed that the potential polling error was large enough to have a significant chance of changing the election result from what would be expected if the polls were accurate. Their last pre-election poll model had Clinton +3.6, while the actual election result was Clinton +1.7. This 1.9% polling error was somewhat greater than in 2012, where their polling model suggested Obama +2.5 but the actual election result was Obama +3.9, a polling error of 1.4%. They also had pre-election writeups specifically on the possibility of a popular versus electoral vote split, specifically indicating that Clinton would be more at risk of that than Trump would be.
Buildings are built to stand the test of time. On the other hand, MSM is built upon narratives and headlines of the day or season.
MSM has long ceased to be news reported facts and really is a place where people justify what they already think, and they follow the journalists and stations that think like them - and people do this at their own intellectual peril. The MSM set up a fake/false narrative and ran with it. And the problem was, that narrative was never true.
In practice, after MSM openly laughed at the fact of a person winning a specific nomination, and then when that happened, openly mocked that person’s ability to win it all. How silly would it look if its own commissioned polls said something different? Before the first poll was taken, the MSM was statistically wedded to make sure the polls matched their mocking narrative; hence they look really stupid.
I am not too sure if you are into numbers, but I am, being a scientist by training. In that vein, I study the methodology and the demographics of polls (the ultra fine print), not the publicly reported results that the pollsters want the masses to see.
It was clear from early on that the MSM and establishment polls were intentionally set up to paint a particular picture. And how this is known because the local state polls were always at odds with the MSM polls, but those polls were not highlighted because they are not considered credible. However, those state polls were statistically and demographically, by leaps and beyonds, more accurate and showed that the winner had a much better chance of winning than reported and the loser was in worst shape than reported.
@hunt nailed it perfectly, as to why these “other” polls were not reported - the reporters and serious people who saw this were laughed at and ridiculed if they mentioned this on the air or in major print media. Therefore, the narrative of the MSM silenced those voices from being heard above the din of the narrative it was pushing. People wanted to keep their jobs and their friends, so they kept their mouths shut as to what was actually happening.
The general public knew something did not add up and what the MSM was saying and pushing did not match their lives and what they were seeing in their states. This disconnect was coupled with the fact the MSM also openly mocked the part of general public who liked Trump by calling them names etc.
Mark Cuban could not have said it any better:
Bingo to Cuban for being on the up and up here, even though I think he talks a lot of ideological nonsense. (I cannot print link here, as the article itself is a rather political one. Use the quote above and you can find the article on google I bet)
Up to the eve of the election, Mark Halperin questioned the swag confidence of the people around him who said it would be a short night and race would be called by 8 pm, and the entire table of MSM journalists laughed at him. That MSM station even discussed this yesterday how stupid they looked on that tape. In contrast, Mark Halperin placed his credibility above the narrative and friendships and good for him for doing that.
All this angst we are seeing now could have been avoided if the MSM did set up the initial fake narrative. In my book, this is case example #1 of fake news.
Even 538 got the chances of each winning wrong on the eve of the election. Not sure how “overall 538 was quite accurate” turns into a completely wrong prediction. In the end, it was off as much as everyone else.
So what if they hedged their bets by saying, we could be wrong because all statisticians say that when dealing with very low confidence levels. However, when the rubber hit the road, 538 missed it completely just like everyone else.
I hope you realize the fundamental issue with this statement about “post fact” - does it not depend on people are analyzing the same things?
One really has to know the underlying basis of a fact in order to declare it factual to someone else, as your fact may not apply to them because they analyze different things. This is particularly true when people claim facts about social and economic issues.
I believe too many things presented today are not facts, but interpretations of actual facts written in such way to present a pre-ordained worldview of the author and his known audience.
I think it is not so much that there are places that are always accurate, or not susceptible to their own institutional biases or blinders. I think the trick is to try and remain aware of how the particular news source has approached certain issues over time, and to remain critical of a particular report or analysis if it happens to fit the narrative of that particular source.
That said, my own personal list of sources that are generally down the middle or just a little off keel would include the Christian Science Monitor, the International Business Times, the Skimm, Reason, Politico, Real Clear Politics (and its associated sites), the WSJ news pages, and the Hill (although it seem to be drifting right lately). In addition, there are certain sources, particularly on line sources, where the reporting on particular topics is generally insightful, even if the source is pretty openly ideological. Slate used to be at or near the top of this list although it is sliding more and more into the fever swamp lately. Instapundit is still a great aggregator of news. On foreign affairs, I really like a guy writing at the Belgravia Dispatch.
This thread is about fake news. People purposefully create stories that are fake, and lets be clear not based on facts.
Many “readers” find no issue with this. Therefore a cottage industry has been created to profit from this post fact phenomenon.
It’s like the modern day version of the National Enquirer. Perhaps social media and the search engines can flag these fake sites with their fake stories for what they are. Then I would imagine their ad revenue would dry up and these entrepreneurs will be off to their next scam.
You mean like “fake but accurate” national guard memos, John McCain affair stories, Mitt Romney is a bully stories, or that Sarah Palin said she could see Russia from her house? Is that what you mean by fake news? Let’s at least be honest. If there is a market for “fake” news, it was created by traditional news sources becoming less and less about straight up news reporting (if they ever were) and more about pushing a narrative.
I’m not good at numbers, not as good as I’d like to be. But it amazes me that pollsters can reach a conclusion by polling only a thousand or so people.
Not sure what science you were trained in. Believing pollsters intentionally poll raw numbers to match their preconceived narratives is like believing scientists collect data to support their desired results. Not true in the US. The advances in sciences and technologies prove it.
I am almost exclusively a consumer of mainstream media. I don’t have time (or interest) to read that widely in disparate sources. I don’t have a cable television subscription. I read my local paper, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, the New Yorker, and sometimes The Atlantic. I appreciate fivethirtyeight.com and read it occasionally. BBC.co.uk, too. I listen to NPR and BBC radio news programs. I watch local news TV broadcasts, but almost never national ones. I don’t particularly value the commentary, editorials or op-eds of any of the foregoing.
I have no idea what @awcntdb is talking about. I highly value the sources I cited because, except for the Economist, the news they report is invariably based on knowledgeable reporters going someplace and reporting confirmable facts, and also indicating the nature of their sources. I don’t mind when reporters have a point of view that they have developed by actually knowing what they are talking about and being where it is happening. I do mind when they fail to report contrary positions and the reasons for them, but that doesn’t usually happen in the mainstream media, at least the print version, and when it does it gets corrected fast.
Anyway, based on my experience, absolutely none of what @awcntdb says passes the smell test. There’s no question the mainstream media was anti-Trump. But it was anti-Trump for the understandable reason that Trump appears to have contempt for everything it stands for, starting with the very notion of accuracy, facts, and expertise, not to mention respect for opposing views and not letting what you wish were true affect what you report as true. No reader of the mainstream media could have failed to miss Trump’s narrative and that of his supporters about how his victory was possible, and why all of the polls were wrong.
Fivethirtyeight contains extensive, sometimes exhausting discussions of poll methodology, if you look past the pretty graphs. It did about as good a job as I can imagine explaining in advance why polls might not be doing an accurate job figuring out who was actually likely to vote, while also explaining that on the whole traditional assumptions were more likely to be accurate.
before you discuss reporters in main stream publications being knowledgeable, or reporting based on verifiable facts.
The real issue is that the main stream press, not unlike academia, is almost monolithic in its political outlook and this has a tendency to cause people to miss things outright, to misinterpret the significance of others, or to simply misjudge the temperature of the larger body politic. This is neither a new phenomenon nor is it particularly open to serious debate. But what is different in the last fifteen or so years is that people on the other side of the political spectrum now have the ability to point out actual errors (the Rather memos, John Kerry christmasing in Cambodia while listening to Nixon, etc) Obvious collusion (jurno-list, Donna Brazille feeding HRC debate questions, etc) or simple narrative cocconing (no one cares about the Clinton foundation or e mails, being against open barders is racist, etc). All of this is terrible for liberals by the way, because it contributes to decisions like HRC not putting resources into Michigan, Pa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota et al.
All that said, it is undoubtedly true that this whole “pajama media” movement has not only changed our consumption of news over the last several years but it has opened the door to some bad actors who have used the general public’s distrust of the main stream media and the relatively easy megaphone that is the internet to intentionally spread disinformation. I have no idea how to combat that phenomenon, particularly among those with neither the time nor inclincation to read broadly. But I am very convinced that the appropriate response is not to stick one’s fingers in one’s ears and say NBC/ABC/CBS/CNN/NYT/WaPo et al will pull you through.
Leaving aside the whole issue of whether a monolithically liberal press is a good or bad thing, five minutes with my kids would be enough to convince me that print and network media is dying. Everything comes to them on their phones. They have likely never read an entire paper. No one under the age of fifty or so watches the network news. When Jon Stewart left the Daily Show, about half as many millenials who used CNN as their main source for news used the Daily Show. In that kind of enviornment, the Sunday Times has no shot.
It also seems to be the expected norm now that news comes with editorial opinions (particularly when things are shared on social media, since the most opinionated people tend to share the most and tend to favor the most opinionated news). That newspapers like the Wall Street Journal actually distinguish between news articles and editorial and opinion pieces seems like something that some people have forgotten or never realized.
Well, of course not, if all your sources are of the same ideological bent from the same journalism schools with the same pedigree who all socialize with each other. Exactly how much difference in viewpoint and reporting do you expect if one wants to keep one’s social circle intact. The answer is - not much.
I do not expect you understand the above because you do not even see the fundamental issue that before they begin reporting they are all the same already. You are expecting whiskey from a bottle of wine - no changing these people because to get out of journalism school, you must think and present news a certain way.
Dutifully, you prove my point with your next paragraph below.
Re the bolded section above - exactly who appointed the media the arbiter of accuracy, facts, expertise and the definers of tolerance? So, they get to choose what people learn from the angle they decide? Seriously, who anointed the media to this position, except themselves and the people who look up to them? A bit self-serving, is it not?
I do not expect you to understand this either because you think the media are uniquely smart and qualified people, and you seem not to have the ability to accept they are human just like everyone else and will not present views that are contrary to their own if they do not have to. And, more importantly, they are encouraged to push their own views, if they self-servingly think they are the arbiters of accuracy, facts, expertise, and the definers of tolerance.
And it is from this self-serving, self-annoited position from which, to a man, the media got it all wrong. For me, that is the biggest news story of the year - how the media led it followers down a rabbit hole.
If the media is the arbiter of “accuracy, facts, and expertise,” why were they not astute enough to figure out the polls were that wrong?
Occam’s Razor answer - the polls confirmed their narrative and worldview of what they wanted to be true. They got suckered just like everyone else; hence, they are not as smart as they think. Follow them at your own risk.
The sinister answer - the media knew, but ignored the evidence and presented a fake narrative to its readers in an attempt to push their world view.
Neutral answer - Plain ignorance. For example, if you do not visit Wisconsin an rural PA, then you will not have a clue what the people are thinking there. (Well, that would, in hindsight, prove not to be too bright)
People are free to pick which reason they think it is.