LogFAQs > #959924761

Ruvan22 posted...

A) When you say most mainstream news, are you saying immediately disbelieve more than 50% of say NYT headlines?

A) It's a nuanced point that some people don't have the patience/temperament for, but I believe you do:
When we talk about believing/disbelieving and true/false, many people have different working definitions.

I tend to go by programming/elemental logic standards and say something is false if it's not true. This means that and statements that contain one part falseness are "false" (or at the very least "not true" for the purposes of human communication).

Example:
"Trump is an 80 year old narcissist without empathy" is false because he's not 80. Many might say "that's not the point", and sure you can make that argument, but it's still false.

More subtle example:
"Trump is an anti-american narcissist without empathy" Again, I'd say that evaluates to false. His policies and actions certainly have hurt America, but he genuinely seems to identify and even take pride in his sense of being an American. It's hard to be xenophobic without any national pride, and thus he is not "anti-american".

The point I'm making here is about what we mean when we talk about truth. In courtrooms (or at least courtrooms in movies) they say "do you swear to tell the truth, the whole-truth, and nothing but the truth". This level of truth is something yes I don't expect out of mainstream media.

When Pfizer does a press release about their latest drug, do you take that at face value as "the truth, the whole-truth, and nothing but the truth"? I don't. I'm not saying it's for sure false, or that it necessarily contains anything misleading, but I have enough sense to know that their incentives aren't altruism but profit, and so they will be as honest as they need to be but no more honest than that.

So can you see how it's not a big leap from that sensible conclusion to also being skeptical of things said on "Good Morning America, brought to you by Pfizer"?

It's obviously dumb to assume they are saying things that are the opposite of the truth, but it's sensible to assume that they aren't giving you "the truth, the whole-truth, and nothing but the truth", because that's not where their incentives lie.

So when we go to the NYT, do I "disbelieve more than 50% of say NYT headlines"? It goes to a question of incentives. I just went to NYT now, and these are the headlines:

White House Says Its Plans Will Slow Inflation. The Question Is: When?
Not really a claim, reporting a claim by others. So it's fine.

The Bolsonaro-Trump Connection Threatening Brazils Elections
The incentives of the NYT are to dunk on Trump, so I would not be shocked if this is spun in an anti-Trump way that might not be merited by the facts. To be put another way, I would expect somebody with complete and utter indifference to Trump to frame this story differently, so if I want the full truth I'd have to check the sources.

Migrants in Peril, and Raw Emotions, in European Border Standoff
Because the NYT doesn't have a huge incentive about Poland (that I know of), I'd expect this to be close to just regular true journalism.

Germanys Fourth Covid Wave: A Pandemic of the Unvaccinated
I would not trust this to be straight truth. When it comes to the vaccine, many organizations believe that "in the interest of the greater good we cannot report on anything that would be seen as negative, even if in context any reasonable person would understand it's no big deal." There are places like Israel with quite high vaccination rates that have had issues, there are other places with low rates and other approaches that haven't. It is simply a more nuanced discussion than NYT generally seems either willing or able to make. I would trust they aren't fabricating anything, they will provide reasonably accurate details of an event, but they will do so in a way aligned with their incentives. And their incentives are:

1. Don't alienate left leaning customer base or any affiliated institutions with a too far "off-narrative" story.
2. Don't add fuel to any anti-vaxx sentiment by reporting negative things about the vaccine, or reporting positive or empathetic things about the unvaccinated.
3. Don't destroy your credibility.

Having credibility is important to them, so yeah if they regularly fabricated stuff that wouldn't work. But if they tell a story that's "close enough" or even "misleading but not technically lying", their credibility really won't take a hit. And if their incentives push them enough in that direction, I would expect that certainly to be possible.

And like, I don't hate NYT, aside from Reuters, NPR, CSPAN, and a couple others it's relatively good. They seem to care about their reputation and thus by extension kinda care about the actual truth. Like they are willing to run these counter-narrative stories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/politics/igor-danchenko-arrested-steele-dossier.html
(Acknowledging Russiagate was kinda made up BS)

Igor Danchenko, a Russia analyst who worked with Christopher Steele, the author of a dossier of rumors and unproven assertions about Donald J. Trump, was indicted as part of the Durham investigation.

WASHINGTON An analyst who was a key contributor to Democratic-funded opposition research into possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia was arrested on Thursday and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about his sources.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/27/briefing/lab-leak-theory-covid-origins.html
(Defending the argument/evidence for lab leak, while it was still unpopular to do so)

Why all the dismissals?
It appears to be a classic example of groupthink, exacerbated by partisan polarization.
Global health officials seemed unwilling to confront Chinese officials, who insist the virus jumped from an animal to a person.
In the U.S., one of the theorys earliest advocates was Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas who often criticizes China and who has a history of promoting falsehoods (like election fraud that didnt happen). In this case, though, Cotton was making an argument with plausible supporting evidence.
The medias coverage of his argument was flawed, Substacks Matthew Yglesias has written. Some coverage exaggerated Cottons comments to suggest he was claiming that China had deliberately released the virus as a biological weapon. (Cotton called that very unlikely.) And some scientists and others also seem to have decided that if Cotton believed something and Fox News and Donald Trump echoed it the idea had to be wrong.
The result, as Yglesias called it, was a bubble of fake consensus. Scientists who thought a lab leak was plausible, like Chan, received little attention. Scientists who thought the theory was wacky received widespread attention. Its a good reminder: The world is a complicated place, where almost nobody is always right or always wrong.

So I've rambled a bit, but that's a good place to end. Like NYT says, the world is a complicated place where almost nobody is always right or always wrong. I'm skeptical of people and places that don't acknowledge that nuance, and I like to filter my understanding news reporting through an awareness of the incentives driving those giving it to me. And thus, I don't take what they say "at face value".

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