According to an article written in 2012, 6 corporations then controlled 90% of the media in the USA. That is consolidated from 50 companies in 1983. Motley Fool says things haven't changed in that regard.
This whole business of 'controlling the narrative' is only possible when there are only a limited number of 'trusted news sources'. People who question the government's story won't get access to government sources in the future. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has given over 300 million dollars to media organisations over the years. (source, their own website) according to https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/21/bill-gates-million-media-outlets-global-agenda/. This isn't anything that the Right hasn't been doing all along -- see, for instance Charles Koch's plan to weaponise philanthropy from the 1970s: see the link to Structure and Social change here: https://www.prwatch.org/news/2020/01/13531/right-wing-megadonors-are-financing-media-operations-promote-their-ideologies and they dumped more than 100 millions dollars into such efforts recently.
It's no wonder we live in a media landscape where news organisations are printing what they are paid to print. There is just too much money at stake, and there is no way that the classified ad revenue of a few thousand local businesses was ever going to be able to compete with this.
So, we need to do a few things. The first is to break up the media conglomerates under anti-trust. And the second is to seriously reform the philanthropy/NGO sector. Perhaps the Effective Atruism people have some suggestions for how to do this? I would start by serverly limiting what counts as a 'charity' for the purpose of a 'charitable deduction' in the USA (since I do not think you can go directly to what we have here in Sweden, where there aren't any), but limiting the money that governments are allowed to send to NGOs for 'consultation' seems another good bet to me.
I agree! I'm not sure how much skepticism we can expect from journalists - even in the heyday of newspapers, most reporters couldn't learn enough about the subjects they were covering to do more than ask the right questions - they generally couldn't tell whether the answers were good. Today, with cuts in newsroom staffs, and most media seemingly more committed to advancing the narrative than presenting the truth, I have little hope.
Fortunately, the internet, with multiple sources and lots of blogs and comments, offers far more voices from any conceivable point of view. Unfortunately, this compounds the error of figuring out who to believe. "Show your work", and finding people who can respond intelligently with their own work, will help. It can at least expose the people who aren't even doing the work. Which seems to be most of them.
Perhaps the biggest 'lie' of all is the one that woke liberals tell themselves is the psychological motivation that underlies their woke opinionising. They 'really care' about race/gender/economic inequality, 'the environment' etc etc. Not really true in the vast majority of cases it seems to me. What they 'really care' about is feeling personally pious in a cost-free way. What they 'really care' about is feeling morally superior and more sophisticated than thou. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Arnold wrote "I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks." I doubt whether the Presidents and Trustees of elite institutions, all of them Left "Liberals," personally felt any guilt at all. Rather, what is euphemistically called "affirmative action," i.e., racial preference in admissions, was for the purpose of maintaining the moral authority of white elites by protecting them from spurious charges of racism based on the low presence of blacks admitted under objective standards. This was overcome by turning a blind eye to the cognitive limitations on average of this population. At first there was a hope, or pretense, that a little extra tutoring could bring these admittees up to standards, but that hope proved evanescent.
I find that people who like to explain why and how they know something – essentially, people who teach me what they know – are people I can trust. I suppose that this is your “show your work” point. Conversely, people who provide conclusions without showing their thinking deserve to be met with some skepticism. I find that people in the latter case usually haven’t thought through their positions very well and are instead relying on a position or posture of authoritative knowledge.
And it really is, I think, a personality trait – some people think that having position equals having authority, while others think that being able to explain your position correctly equals having authority. (Or rather, in the latter case, that the position itself has the “authority” standing on its own, having been demonstrated through fact, logic, argument.) I find a lot of former Ivy League students fall into the “position equals authority” camp, perhaps not coincidentally.
Silver has a more-recent article about bias in the media that somehow relates to the point you’re making in this article about Team Blue and Team Red, making a similar case that Team Blue has more of a problem with these sorts of assertions of fact based on position of authority because of its cultural dominance (very rough summary). It’s really interesting.
But, again, I think it comes back to this idea of, as you put it, “show your work”. For someone like Silver, the point isn’t “the point” itself. Rather, the point is “how do you know something is, in fact, true?”. I don’t agree with him politically, I suspect, but I do love his approach to thinking through things, to try to get out of his own head and show why he believes the things he claims in a way that stands outside of “I trust Nate Silver and therefore believe what he says is true”.
Garrett Jones says the solution is 10% less democracy.
I would add a strong presumption for the principle of subsidiarity: decentralization of policy unless there are, in particular cases, (a) great economies of scale and scope or (b) major negative externalities of small jurisdictions.
And maybe 50% less democracy, i.e., a much stronger presumption in favor of markets and other forms of voluntary cooperation, rather than big government. (Caveat: Private orgs have their own governance issues, HR, etc.)
Wise deference might be somewhat more feasible under subsidiarity and decentralization. Decentralization of policy and a shift to markets and to voluntary cooperation might somewhat reduce the need for wise deference, if they make 'exit' options more accessible and thereby lessen the importance of 'voice'.
It seems you are defining a real problem for which there is of yet no realistic solution. It’s completely unrealistic to expect the average person (and even intellectuals) to “check the work”. There are just too many issues which require expertise to even understand what’s actually involved in evaluation. At the end of the day society and civilization are built on a certain degree of trust in institutions ( elites/experts). Asking everyone to “check the work” of these elites/scientists isn’t a real solution and could even exacerbate the problem. I have no realistic answer. When trust in everything and everyone is lost there is little that can be realistically proposed as a solution.
Part of this problem is caused by the lies from upon high and the other by the “democratization of access to information “ aka misinformation and disinformation.
This is now way beyond an issue of red and blue. Societal conflict and collapse is now a flourishing media and intellectual marketplace. It’s a huge conundrum when the very forces that could ameliorate the problem are more invested in creating doubt and distrust. All under the cover of the First Amendment. Distrust and conspiracy cults have become a new form of identity which paradoxically give confidence to those who prefer to disbelieve in everything but their own conspiracies. It is indeed an epistemic crisis which if left to fester will be a civilizational crisis.
It is important not to conflate falsehoods and lies. In the Vietnam era lots of members of the elite sincerely believed we had to prevent the takeover of South Vietnam to "halt the relentless march of communism." That was a wrong opinion, but it was not a lie. They actually believed it. We need a word to describe knowingly false statements, and "lie" used to be that word, but now the meaning of the word "lie" is changing to simply mean false, just as the meaning of words like "incredible," "unbelievable" "crisis," etc. has changed. This is unfortunate because our common language is becoming poorer - what word do you use now if something is really not credible? - and important distinctions are being lost.
The only thing you can do is to try and pay attention to those who have a demonstrated track record of not being partisan hacks. Slightly off topic-- anyone know of any legal analysts who suffer neither from Trump Derangment Syndrome nor excessive Trump enthusiasm? I would like to read some dispassionate analysis of the most recent round of indictments...
It is commonplace for geneticists, for example, to (routinely) utter things they must know to be untrue in their popular treatments. So sometimes the motivation is obvious: they say certain things because they believe it aids the cause of being antiracist, or being seen as having done so.
But why lie about one's knowledge of the origins of Covid? Obviously it must have had something to do with Trump, but it's really not very clear.
Sometimes the answer is easy: the elite pretends to love soccer, as a body - it does not - because it knows Americans hate soccer.
The interest to me lies in the things they lie about for which there is no obvious motivation. When they lie about crime, for instance - I mutter something about their wanting to turn the world upside down. But really, what that means is - we're in some deep and very murky waters.
I'm surprised one of the most recent, and most salient, examples of elite lies goes unmentioned in this piece: the terrorist sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. If there was ever an example of elite opinion closing ranks around a flagrant falsehood, the Nord Stream sabotage is it.
2) Reduce the ability of elites to force their POV on others.
During COVID when you didn't force people they mostly made decent decisions, or at least better decisions then the average politician/institution.
Private schools made better decisions than public schools.
Most people got vaccinated, and it followed a pattern that mirrored actual disease risk (unlike elites that were giving vaccines to 20 year olds before 70 year olds).
People tend to work things out, sometimes it takes trial and error, but they work it out.
---
I think there are two "real" reasons for AA at Harvard, both self interested:
1) You need a critical mass of minority elites aligned with Harvard in order to Harvard to have control over that group.
I would also note that many of the minorities are foreign elites, you can understand how that would be important for expanding Harvard's influence.
2) I think they genuinely are afraid of having too many Asians. As in keeping Asians below X% isn't a byproduct of wanting blacks to be Y%, but the main point.
Both of those goals are very self serving and bad PR, so of course they lie.
---
On foreign policy I'm thoroughly convinced that it's hopeless. I lived through The War on Terror and thought we learned something from it, but it doesn't seem so. I can read something in the news about Ukraine, find out its a lie on Twitter within a day, and then months later the news will admit it was a lie (or just ignore it).
"I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks. Let’s stipulate that such guilt is legitimate, and then we can argue over whether race-based admissions are an effective means to deal with it."
This might be true, but the reasoning from the Court in Brown which later informed Bakke and Grutter (the big AA cases) is that, quoting directly from Brown, "[education is the] principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment." While racial balancing plans for the purpose of remediation for past discrimination is considered a *requirement* for lower schools, the existence of past discrimination by the institution in question has not heretofore been necessary to justify affirmative action in higher education. You can see the Court discuss this in Community Schools v. Seattle https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-908. There are two carve-outs that the Court has recognized as "compelling state interests": remedying past identifiable discrimination by the institution, or achieving racial diversity in higher education. This the Court considers separate and identifies it as a different motive.
Before SFAA, university AA had a carve-out in Constitutional law as serving a "unique and compelling state interest" so long as it is "narrowly tailored." Typically, the Court takes the "narrow tailoring" test seriously, but pre-SFAA it put on whiskey goggles for what the universities were doing and deferred to how the universities represented their policies to the Court. The pre-SFAA reasoning is that basically the US contains many races, universities are crucial for forming the leadership classes of the country, and we cannot effectively maintain the loyalty of all these races without peppering our leadership formation institutions with people from them, irrespective of past discrimination or lack thereof. Versions of this reasoning also applied to the many cases that broke down single sex higher education as well.
This is the best part of the "rationalist" community in my opinion- the lack of requirement to believe in a particular set of beliefs, or to play according to a different set of rules depending on who you are. The rules of logic and proof are equally applicable to everyone.
According to an article written in 2012, 6 corporations then controlled 90% of the media in the USA. That is consolidated from 50 companies in 1983. Motley Fool says things haven't changed in that regard.
https://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6?op=1&r=US&IR=T
https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/communication/media-stocks/big-6/
This whole business of 'controlling the narrative' is only possible when there are only a limited number of 'trusted news sources'. People who question the government's story won't get access to government sources in the future. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has given over 300 million dollars to media organisations over the years. (source, their own website) according to https://thegrayzone.com/2021/11/21/bill-gates-million-media-outlets-global-agenda/. This isn't anything that the Right hasn't been doing all along -- see, for instance Charles Koch's plan to weaponise philanthropy from the 1970s: see the link to Structure and Social change here: https://www.prwatch.org/news/2020/01/13531/right-wing-megadonors-are-financing-media-operations-promote-their-ideologies and they dumped more than 100 millions dollars into such efforts recently.
It's no wonder we live in a media landscape where news organisations are printing what they are paid to print. There is just too much money at stake, and there is no way that the classified ad revenue of a few thousand local businesses was ever going to be able to compete with this.
So, we need to do a few things. The first is to break up the media conglomerates under anti-trust. And the second is to seriously reform the philanthropy/NGO sector. Perhaps the Effective Atruism people have some suggestions for how to do this? I would start by serverly limiting what counts as a 'charity' for the purpose of a 'charitable deduction' in the USA (since I do not think you can go directly to what we have here in Sweden, where there aren't any), but limiting the money that governments are allowed to send to NGOs for 'consultation' seems another good bet to me.
"Show your work."
I agree! I'm not sure how much skepticism we can expect from journalists - even in the heyday of newspapers, most reporters couldn't learn enough about the subjects they were covering to do more than ask the right questions - they generally couldn't tell whether the answers were good. Today, with cuts in newsroom staffs, and most media seemingly more committed to advancing the narrative than presenting the truth, I have little hope.
Fortunately, the internet, with multiple sources and lots of blogs and comments, offers far more voices from any conceivable point of view. Unfortunately, this compounds the error of figuring out who to believe. "Show your work", and finding people who can respond intelligently with their own work, will help. It can at least expose the people who aren't even doing the work. Which seems to be most of them.
But maybe I'm too cynical.
Perhaps the biggest 'lie' of all is the one that woke liberals tell themselves is the psychological motivation that underlies their woke opinionising. They 'really care' about race/gender/economic inequality, 'the environment' etc etc. Not really true in the vast majority of cases it seems to me. What they 'really care' about is feeling personally pious in a cost-free way. What they 'really care' about is feeling morally superior and more sophisticated than thou. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
Arnold wrote "I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks." I doubt whether the Presidents and Trustees of elite institutions, all of them Left "Liberals," personally felt any guilt at all. Rather, what is euphemistically called "affirmative action," i.e., racial preference in admissions, was for the purpose of maintaining the moral authority of white elites by protecting them from spurious charges of racism based on the low presence of blacks admitted under objective standards. This was overcome by turning a blind eye to the cognitive limitations on average of this population. At first there was a hope, or pretense, that a little extra tutoring could bring these admittees up to standards, but that hope proved evanescent.
I find that people who like to explain why and how they know something – essentially, people who teach me what they know – are people I can trust. I suppose that this is your “show your work” point. Conversely, people who provide conclusions without showing their thinking deserve to be met with some skepticism. I find that people in the latter case usually haven’t thought through their positions very well and are instead relying on a position or posture of authoritative knowledge.
And it really is, I think, a personality trait – some people think that having position equals having authority, while others think that being able to explain your position correctly equals having authority. (Or rather, in the latter case, that the position itself has the “authority” standing on its own, having been demonstrated through fact, logic, argument.) I find a lot of former Ivy League students fall into the “position equals authority” camp, perhaps not coincidentally.
Silver has a more-recent article about bias in the media that somehow relates to the point you’re making in this article about Team Blue and Team Red, making a similar case that Team Blue has more of a problem with these sorts of assertions of fact based on position of authority because of its cultural dominance (very rough summary). It’s really interesting.
But, again, I think it comes back to this idea of, as you put it, “show your work”. For someone like Silver, the point isn’t “the point” itself. Rather, the point is “how do you know something is, in fact, true?”. I don’t agree with him politically, I suspect, but I do love his approach to thinking through things, to try to get out of his own head and show why he believes the things he claims in a way that stands outside of “I trust Nate Silver and therefore believe what he says is true”.
Garrett Jones says the solution is 10% less democracy.
I would add a strong presumption for the principle of subsidiarity: decentralization of policy unless there are, in particular cases, (a) great economies of scale and scope or (b) major negative externalities of small jurisdictions.
And maybe 50% less democracy, i.e., a much stronger presumption in favor of markets and other forms of voluntary cooperation, rather than big government. (Caveat: Private orgs have their own governance issues, HR, etc.)
Wise deference might be somewhat more feasible under subsidiarity and decentralization. Decentralization of policy and a shift to markets and to voluntary cooperation might somewhat reduce the need for wise deference, if they make 'exit' options more accessible and thereby lessen the importance of 'voice'.
It seems you are defining a real problem for which there is of yet no realistic solution. It’s completely unrealistic to expect the average person (and even intellectuals) to “check the work”. There are just too many issues which require expertise to even understand what’s actually involved in evaluation. At the end of the day society and civilization are built on a certain degree of trust in institutions ( elites/experts). Asking everyone to “check the work” of these elites/scientists isn’t a real solution and could even exacerbate the problem. I have no realistic answer. When trust in everything and everyone is lost there is little that can be realistically proposed as a solution.
Part of this problem is caused by the lies from upon high and the other by the “democratization of access to information “ aka misinformation and disinformation.
This is now way beyond an issue of red and blue. Societal conflict and collapse is now a flourishing media and intellectual marketplace. It’s a huge conundrum when the very forces that could ameliorate the problem are more invested in creating doubt and distrust. All under the cover of the First Amendment. Distrust and conspiracy cults have become a new form of identity which paradoxically give confidence to those who prefer to disbelieve in everything but their own conspiracies. It is indeed an epistemic crisis which if left to fester will be a civilizational crisis.
It is important not to conflate falsehoods and lies. In the Vietnam era lots of members of the elite sincerely believed we had to prevent the takeover of South Vietnam to "halt the relentless march of communism." That was a wrong opinion, but it was not a lie. They actually believed it. We need a word to describe knowingly false statements, and "lie" used to be that word, but now the meaning of the word "lie" is changing to simply mean false, just as the meaning of words like "incredible," "unbelievable" "crisis," etc. has changed. This is unfortunate because our common language is becoming poorer - what word do you use now if something is really not credible? - and important distinctions are being lost.
The only thing you can do is to try and pay attention to those who have a demonstrated track record of not being partisan hacks. Slightly off topic-- anyone know of any legal analysts who suffer neither from Trump Derangment Syndrome nor excessive Trump enthusiasm? I would like to read some dispassionate analysis of the most recent round of indictments...
It is commonplace for geneticists, for example, to (routinely) utter things they must know to be untrue in their popular treatments. So sometimes the motivation is obvious: they say certain things because they believe it aids the cause of being antiracist, or being seen as having done so.
But why lie about one's knowledge of the origins of Covid? Obviously it must have had something to do with Trump, but it's really not very clear.
Sometimes the answer is easy: the elite pretends to love soccer, as a body - it does not - because it knows Americans hate soccer.
The interest to me lies in the things they lie about for which there is no obvious motivation. When they lie about crime, for instance - I mutter something about their wanting to turn the world upside down. But really, what that means is - we're in some deep and very murky waters.
I'm surprised one of the most recent, and most salient, examples of elite lies goes unmentioned in this piece: the terrorist sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline. If there was ever an example of elite opinion closing ranks around a flagrant falsehood, the Nord Stream sabotage is it.
Excellent piece, thanks for writing.
The only solution is more Public’s, Racket News, and others who are willing to do the work to expose the BS. This means more conflict not less
+1
As a practical matter I think its best to:
1) Encourage people not to consume "news".
2) Reduce the ability of elites to force their POV on others.
During COVID when you didn't force people they mostly made decent decisions, or at least better decisions then the average politician/institution.
Private schools made better decisions than public schools.
Most people got vaccinated, and it followed a pattern that mirrored actual disease risk (unlike elites that were giving vaccines to 20 year olds before 70 year olds).
People tend to work things out, sometimes it takes trial and error, but they work it out.
---
I think there are two "real" reasons for AA at Harvard, both self interested:
1) You need a critical mass of minority elites aligned with Harvard in order to Harvard to have control over that group.
I would also note that many of the minorities are foreign elites, you can understand how that would be important for expanding Harvard's influence.
2) I think they genuinely are afraid of having too many Asians. As in keeping Asians below X% isn't a byproduct of wanting blacks to be Y%, but the main point.
Both of those goals are very self serving and bad PR, so of course they lie.
---
On foreign policy I'm thoroughly convinced that it's hopeless. I lived through The War on Terror and thought we learned something from it, but it doesn't seem so. I can read something in the news about Ukraine, find out its a lie on Twitter within a day, and then months later the news will admit it was a lie (or just ignore it).
"I believe that the true motive for affirmative action in admissions was to assuage white guilt over past treatment of blacks. Let’s stipulate that such guilt is legitimate, and then we can argue over whether race-based admissions are an effective means to deal with it."
This might be true, but the reasoning from the Court in Brown which later informed Bakke and Grutter (the big AA cases) is that, quoting directly from Brown, "[education is the] principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment." While racial balancing plans for the purpose of remediation for past discrimination is considered a *requirement* for lower schools, the existence of past discrimination by the institution in question has not heretofore been necessary to justify affirmative action in higher education. You can see the Court discuss this in Community Schools v. Seattle https://www.oyez.org/cases/2006/05-908. There are two carve-outs that the Court has recognized as "compelling state interests": remedying past identifiable discrimination by the institution, or achieving racial diversity in higher education. This the Court considers separate and identifies it as a different motive.
Before SFAA, university AA had a carve-out in Constitutional law as serving a "unique and compelling state interest" so long as it is "narrowly tailored." Typically, the Court takes the "narrow tailoring" test seriously, but pre-SFAA it put on whiskey goggles for what the universities were doing and deferred to how the universities represented their policies to the Court. The pre-SFAA reasoning is that basically the US contains many races, universities are crucial for forming the leadership classes of the country, and we cannot effectively maintain the loyalty of all these races without peppering our leadership formation institutions with people from them, irrespective of past discrimination or lack thereof. Versions of this reasoning also applied to the many cases that broke down single sex higher education as well.
This is the best part of the "rationalist" community in my opinion- the lack of requirement to believe in a particular set of beliefs, or to play according to a different set of rules depending on who you are. The rules of logic and proof are equally applicable to everyone.