A common misconception about propaganda is the idea it comes from deliberate lies (on the part of media outlets) or from money changing hands. In my personal experience colluding with the media no money changes hands and no (deliberate) lies are told by the media itself. … Most media bias actually takes the form of selective reporting. … Combine the Chinese Robbers Fallacy with a large pool of uncurated data and you can find facts to support any plausible thesis.
and (2)
Even when a news outlet is broadcasting a lie, their government is unlikely to prosecute them for promoting official government policy. Newspapers abnegate responsibility for truth by quoting official sources. You get away (legally) straight-up lying about medical facts if you are quoting the CDC.
News outlets’ unquestioning reliance on official sources comes from the economics of their situation. It is cheaper to republish official statements without questioning them. The news outlet which produces the cheapest news outcompetes outlets with higher expenditure.
Media bias is not a game of science. It is a game of memetics. Memetics isn’t about truth. It is about attention. Ask yourself “What are you thinking about and why are you thinking about it?”
So, this is a massive and hard-to-summarise question.
You’re right, a lot of what goes wrong in the media isn’t lies. It’s not even deliberate misinformation. The Chinese Robber fallacy is spot on, but it’s also: if you, say, hear that 180 women are murdered in the UK each year, that sounds dreadful (obviously it is dreadful). And if you’re not used to asking questions like “is that a big number” or “what’s the base rate” then you can easily be misled by large-sounding numbers.
A lot of it is just being unfamiliar with numbers (book plug alert! Out today! In the UK at least). Most journalists aren’t very good with numbers, or with thinking about how they reach the news. Sure, there are plenty of grifters and boring contrarians, but there are also a lot of well-intentioned people who want to do good in the world but aren’t brilliant at thinking “wait, that SOUNDS important, but how would I go about checking whether it is or not?”
(Also there are quite a lot of people who are quite unreflective and just think that fighting the culture war is the most important thing you can do, although they wouldn’t necessarily say it that way.)
1. To what extent do some journalists use the Chinese Robber Fallacy deliberately—they know that they have a wide range of even-worse, even-bigger tragedies and scandals to report on, but they choose to report on the ones that let them push their overall ideology or political agenda? (And they choose not to report on the ones that seem to undermine or distract from their ideology/agenda) 2. Do you agree with the “The parity inverse of a meme is the same meme in a different point of its life cycle” idea? In other words, do you agree with the “Toxoplasma of Rage” thesis?
I certainly agree with the Toxoplasma thesis, or I should say it sounds very plausible to me. I don’t think it’s unique to journalism at all—I remember in my MA reading about Israel and Palestine, a book called Through Different Eyes I think, and it fitted a very similar mechanism. Each side would highlight the other side’s “atrocities” as justification for their own retaliation, which would then become “atrocities” which the other side would use as justification for their retaliation, etc. Same thing here: some, I dunno, gender-critical feminist tweets something angry in response to some trans-rights activist; that tweet is then held up to show how awful the gender-critical types are and excuses a bunch of horrible comments; round and round we go.
Re 1), I think that’s rarer than you think. But as rationalist-adjacent types you’ll know that it doesn’t have to be deliberate. We’re extremely good at only noticing the data that is convenient, and fooling ourselves in the service of fooling others. I’m sure there are some cynics and grifters, but they’re nowhere near as common as people honestly saying what they believe. Debate is war, arguments are soldiers, etc, and you have to kill the other soldiers, but it’s not usually a conscious thing to think “I know that is true but I have to pretend it’s not,” it’s more “That is an enemy soldier, therefore it is bad, therefore I must destroy it.”
Thanks for doing this—I’m a big fan of your book!
I’m interested to hear what you think this post about how media works gets right and gets wrong. In particular: (1)
and (2)
and (3)
and (4)
So, this is a massive and hard-to-summarise question.
You’re right, a lot of what goes wrong in the media isn’t lies. It’s not even deliberate misinformation. The Chinese Robber fallacy is spot on, but it’s also: if you, say, hear that 180 women are murdered in the UK each year, that sounds dreadful (obviously it is dreadful). And if you’re not used to asking questions like “is that a big number” or “what’s the base rate” then you can easily be misled by large-sounding numbers.
A lot of it is just being unfamiliar with numbers (book plug alert! Out today! In the UK at least). Most journalists aren’t very good with numbers, or with thinking about how they reach the news. Sure, there are plenty of grifters and boring contrarians, but there are also a lot of well-intentioned people who want to do good in the world but aren’t brilliant at thinking “wait, that SOUNDS important, but how would I go about checking whether it is or not?”
(Also there are quite a lot of people who are quite unreflective and just think that fighting the culture war is the most important thing you can do, although they wouldn’t necessarily say it that way.)
Does that sort of answer your question?
Yes, thanks! Some follow-ups:
1. To what extent do some journalists use the Chinese Robber Fallacy deliberately—they know that they have a wide range of even-worse, even-bigger tragedies and scandals to report on, but they choose to report on the ones that let them push their overall ideology or political agenda? (And they choose not to report on the ones that seem to undermine or distract from their ideology/agenda)
2. Do you agree with the “The parity inverse of a meme is the same meme in a different point of its life cycle” idea? In other words, do you agree with the “Toxoplasma of Rage” thesis?
I certainly agree with the Toxoplasma thesis, or I should say it sounds very plausible to me. I don’t think it’s unique to journalism at all—I remember in my MA reading about Israel and Palestine, a book called Through Different Eyes I think, and it fitted a very similar mechanism. Each side would highlight the other side’s “atrocities” as justification for their own retaliation, which would then become “atrocities” which the other side would use as justification for their retaliation, etc. Same thing here: some, I dunno, gender-critical feminist tweets something angry in response to some trans-rights activist; that tweet is then held up to show how awful the gender-critical types are and excuses a bunch of horrible comments; round and round we go.
Re 1), I think that’s rarer than you think. But as rationalist-adjacent types you’ll know that it doesn’t have to be deliberate. We’re extremely good at only noticing the data that is convenient, and fooling ourselves in the service of fooling others. I’m sure there are some cynics and grifters, but they’re nowhere near as common as people honestly saying what they believe. Debate is war, arguments are soldiers, etc, and you have to kill the other soldiers, but it’s not usually a conscious thing to think “I know that is true but I have to pretend it’s not,” it’s more “That is an enemy soldier, therefore it is bad, therefore I must destroy it.”