You Are What You Read…
So you should definitely read this.
Personality and politics
Most reasonable people agree that we need change and that healthy societies evolve. Most reasonable people also agree that certain traditions and a framework of rules to ensure fairness and stability are equally important. We know that certain personality traits predict political attitudes. For example, openness correlates with liberalism and conscientiousness predicts conservativism. Note that I’m not saying only liberals are open-minded and only conservatives are reliable, but that certain personality traits can predict political preferences.
Both openness and conscientiousness are essential and both are fundamentally rooted in compassion. We want to be inclusive and we want people to be able to rely on us. Without change or tradition you either stagnate or live in perpetual anarchy. The trick is knowing when to tilt one way or another, not unlike the balance we have to find in our own lives. Very few people are exclusively extroverted. In some situations we’re more risk-averse than others. We can’t always live in the moment at the cost of preparing for our future. The art of this balance parallels society.
So let’s assume we all agree that we need both liberals and conservatives and balance is an optimal solution. Why am I so worried then?
We know that a free and fair media is one of the pillars of democracy. I worry because representation of conservative stances in mainstream media has become almost exclusively negative, distorting our perceptions. Disclaimer: I’m not trying to provoke or be contrarian. I observe these biases and I’m worried. We trust the media to be our window to the world and we rely on them for full information to make important decisions. Their influence in shaping our worldviews cannot be understated. They are not elected officials, yet they have the power to control the story, the conversation at the dinner table and thereby the conversation in government.
In liberal circles there is a tendency to view conservatives as backwards, racist, misogynist people unable to confront changing their oppressive patriarchal society. We say they’re stuck in the past because of their religion. This perception contradicts evidence, for example, of Christian conservatives promoting abolition worldwide. (That point, by the way, is commonly labelled as far-right propaganda even though there are written accounts from that era confirming this stance.)
Conservatives are not opposed to change. They tend to be more cautious about decision making and consider unintended consequences. I struggle to see that as intolerance in and of itself. But we are repeatedly fed the intolerant right-wing narrative and in this case, the bias tilting left is substantially more prevalent than the other way around:
The challenge of staying informed
I desperately try to stay informed but I can’t help but notice how time consuming it has become. I’m at a stage in my life where I can allow myself the time for research. I have the time to fact check the fact checkers and then fact check the fact checking fact checkers. (Welcome to dystopia, we’re already here!) But what about when I won’t have the time?
Media trust levels are at an all time low. Why is that?
The media was not kind to Trump, and we can agree it was deservedly so. A common sentiment I hear is that Trump lied so much, it eroded people’s trust so that even when he says something reasonable you’re automatically primed to disagree. I understand that argument completely because I have the same relationship with the news. Biased news predates Trump. I think it’s fair to say, that however ineloquently, the Trump presidency shined a light on a problem in the media that objectively exists and we should confront. This ties in with the view that Trump is a symptom, not the cause of the problem. So we need to look at the problem.
Studies confirm observable effects in gatekeeping and negativity bias, creating a gap between reality and the world painted by the media. Even research that argues there’s no gatekeeping bias shows that journalists overwhelmingly identify as liberals. (Maybe liberals are more likely to choose journalism as a career.) There are statistics suggesting that the public are even aware of this but I guess we just don’t care? Put simply, if the people responsible for informing us of the world don’t have a check on their own preconceptions, we get a distorted view of the world, affecting our stances on policies that have real-life consequences.
Here are some of many claims in the news that are simply not true, are designed to fear-monger or otherwise push a one-sided narrative:
- “We are more divided than ever.” Are we? Presidential elections by popular vote suggest that we’ve been around the 50/50 margin for most of American history. I’ve watched the Ken Burns documentaries on Prohibition and the Vietnam War, when the country was also “more divided than ever.” We’ve had a Civil War before. For me, our division being worse than ever before is not a definitive conclusion. We’ve always been divided because democracy encourages people to have different opinions. Let’s stop being shocked that people have different opinions based on their experiences. The perpetuation of this narrative is what might incidentally lead us to conflict.
- The ABC News Tweet. This now deleted tweet falsely claiming that the fireworks on Bonfire Night in the UK were to celebrate Biden’s election is a harmless mistake that can happen to anyone. But these are journalists, where informational accuracy is kind of the bread and butter of their jobs. The media is fallible, because people are fallible. However, these kinds of mistakes reveal a lot about the assumptions and political attitudes of news outlets.
- “Republicans’ wild deregulation and Bush’s push for homeownership caused the 2008 Financial Crisis.” The Bush administration actually tried to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2003, but failed to do so facing opposition from Democrats. Bush encouraged homeownership among people that could afford it and regulation of subpar loans. House Republicans then proposed another regulatory GSE Reform Bill in 2005. I’ll admit what I don’t know. And I don’t know much about this bill but for some reason Bush opposed it and it died in the Republican Senate. So my point is not to dive even deeper into identity politics. My aim is only to encourage a more objective lens and question whether some of the shortcuts ingrained in our collective consciousness may be false. Maybe Republicans don’t systematically hate regulation. Maybe they’re not evil caricatures getting richer off the backs of the poor.
Here are some other examples in real-time. This is a screenshot of my Medium Newsfeed from this past week:
I tried to find examples the other way around but I really struggled. (Maybe my Google algorithms have swapped over.) In my research, I stumbled across this opinion piece, which highlighted many more instances of liberal bias, including false reporting of children in deportation centers that turned out to be from the Obama era, omitting crucial information regarding the rise of hate crimes, etc. The author includes the links and references. I mean it when I say I’m trying to have an objective view. Please, if you have examples the other way around, send them and I will publish them.
One turning point that especially highlighted this dynamic in the media for me was Jordan Peterson’s now infamous Channel 4 interview. With an interest in psychology, politics and social issues, coupled with his controversial reputation, I was curious to hear his views and expected to be outraged. This interview is a classic example of journalism with a not-so-hidden agenda. The reporter’s bias and indignation is immediately obvious and the strategy of “So you’re saying: [insert sensationalist headline here]” is a weak yet deliberate attempt to misrepresent his comments. Peterson patiently pushes back and carefully explains his observations and views. His critics label him a misogynist, sexist, a dangerous pseudoscientist, but I have yet to find criticisms that offer counter-evidence to his research. All I’ve found are just labels, warning us to stay away. They say because he distinguishes between equal opportunity and equal outcome, that he’s a fascist protector of the patriarchy. (Again, a convenient label implying that anyone who dares agree with him must be a white supremacist male.) For the record, he’s repeatedly denounced white supremacy, any ideas of racial superiority and speaks out against discrimination. He explicitly discusses the importance in setting boundaries along the political spectrums to protect against extremism and polarization. I will address the vast criticisms against him in another piece, but for now, my point is to show how quickly we’re discouraged to even entertain academic viewpoints with unsubstantiated labels. If you really listen to what he’s saying, I challenge you to find him controversial:
How can we navigate media bias?
Emotion is easier to appeal to than reason. Emotional stories and slogans create visceral reactions and activate people. It’s the basis of the advertising industry and the media knows it too. Progressives will argue that so long as the media acts as a tool for spreading a message of inclusivity, it’s fine. (I’d argue it’s certainly not fine when the message means we chase the wrong policies.) Regardless, the mechanisms are also important. The same leniencies we grant tools that promote our causes can just as easily turn against us. Executive Orders are a perfect example of this, and why I’ve never understood the outrage on either side that sitting presidents take advantage of them. Censorship is another tool we justify to keep extremists in check, a tool to ensure safety. It’s another tool where in the “wrong hands” we’re in dangerous territory. But even in the “right hands”, censorship doesn’t erase hateful or bigoted attitudes. If anything, when people feel silenced they become more resentful. I’d personally rather have them out in the open, be aware of their actual presence, and scrutinize their views with debate and evidence.
I’m worried about the trend that anything that’s based in facts is automatically not compassionate. When did the two become mutually exclusive? Analyzing and debating statistics is not sexy, I get it. But if we misuse our tools and let emotion dominate over facts in mainstream media, we leave ourselves incredibly vulnerable to manipulation. For the record, I’m not suggesting that media bias is some malicious, coordinated, deep-state operation. There’s a common sentiment against conspiracy theories that if two people couldn’t “get it on” in the Oval Office without the whole world finding out, conspiracies that would require hundreds if not thousands of people to stay quiet are very unlikely. I definitely subscribe to this mindset, but will concede that many conspiracies also turned out to be true. It’s unlikely that we suddenly live in a world where nothing shady is happening.
What I am suggesting is that since people have implicit bias, it’s possible that ideas within the mainstream consensus are not rooted in reality. I’m suggesting that framing bias is widespread and it’s known to impact our decision making. Statistics can be frightening, especially when you omit key information that gives them context, something we need to be very careful about when we examine the total impact of COVID-19 for example. Framing and selection biases have consequences. Fear changes people. Decisions are often revealed to have been made for political reasons when scarce resources could’ve been better allocated for more effective measures. When you see an alarming statistic, ask yourself:
- What else is happening in this context?
- What are the statistics under “normal” conditions?
- Am I being primed to focus on one aspect deliberately, and who benefits from me being scared or angry?
I’m suggesting we should be very careful. Experts and academics disagree all the time and we should welcome open debate, especially when there’s a lot on the line. In the end, who are we granting authority to decide what expert opinions we even hear? We should be aware of who’s curating what constitutes fake news, by what standard, and how our decisions are thereby affected.
Democracy means having checks and balances; it means allowing us to be divided without cause for alarm. I’m not sure why we feel entitled to a life without offense or intellectual conflict. The aggressive push for a consensus on some universal ideological truth is a futile and slippery slope. In this futile quest though, moderates and conservatives have a right to be worried. The people on the progressive left, who embrace their radicalism are on the cover of Time magazine, their ideas getting significantly more air time and exposure to the public. They are designing the platform of the Democratic party. They have equally divisive rhetoric about list making that, at the risk of sounding alarmist myself, echoes the McCarthy era (another time in history, by the way, when we were “more divided than ever”). Universities, once institutions for critical thinking, block speakers that offend students. The reality is, even center-right opinions, let alone conservatives like Candace Owens or Ben Shapiro do not get the same access to the public through the mainstream, which is why they are on YouTube and Talk Radio. Their calls for open and public debate go unanswered. Because the mainstream labels them extreme, far-right, alt-right, we’re signaled to ignore them completely and dismiss them as lunatics. It means that in any discussion, even moderate conservatives are at a disadvantage because they have to level the playing field to be considered sane. And perhaps in some cases, rightfully so. I think if your idea sounds controversial, you do have an obligation to explain, clarify, back up your claims and be scrutinized. My observation is that the media and the public have a significantly higher threshold in relaxing this obligation for the radical left. While conservatives have repeatedly drawn distinct lines between their views and right-wing radicals, that boundary on the left is remains dangerously undefined.
We claim there is a crisis of misinformation. But what we don’t really talk about is that misinformation often comes from experts, accredited organizations and ‘reliable’ sources that people want to trust. Varied modelling of COVID-19 scenarios from the WHO or governments spring to mind. In defense of the experts, we’re always obtaining new and evolving information. This happens even with something mundane, like how we’re continuously told we’re brushing our teeth wrong even though it’s always dentists telling us so. Within my lifetime the reputation of eggs, cholesterol and fats has fluctuated more times than I can count. No wonder people are turning to their own friends and family for advice. If we are to regain trust in experts and the people responsible for informing us of the world, they need to earn it. And if we agree that new information comes to light the more we discover and learn, then maybe a cautious approach to change in an otherwise fast paced world populated by sensational headlines, isn’t such a bad idea.
I’m not sure what the solution is. I can’t imagine a strongly worded letter to mainstream media outlets will result in more objective reporting. I recognize the irony of my own sensationalist claims that we’re in a dystopian world and my outrage at enemy lists. So what can we do? Go online, check out the stances yourself, google the opposite of your opinion, check statistics in their full context, Wikipedia, whatever you can get your hands on. We have to do this ourselves.
In the meantime, if you want to learn about more fallacies that shape our worldviews, stay tuned.
