Liberal, conservative, who has the most credulous media?

[lpetrich]

A New Book Details the Damage Done by the Right-Wing Media in 2016 | The New Yorker

After describing the conventional wisdom that liberals and conservatives inhabit separate and equivalent media bubbles, author Jeffrey Toobin continues with

This view is precisely wrong, according to a provocative new book by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts that will be published next month by Oxford University Press. The book’s title, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,” is a mouthful, but the book’s message is almost simple. The two sides are not, in fact, equal when it comes to evaluating “news” stories, or even in how they view reality. Liberals want facts; conservatives want their biases reinforced. Liberals embrace journalism; conservatives believe propaganda. In the more measured but still emphatic words of the authors, “the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment,” and has been much more susceptible to “disinformation, lies and half-truths.”

According to the authors, false stories on the Right are launched on extreme sites like Alex Jones's Infowars, “none of which claim to follow the norms or processes of professional journalistic objectivity.” They then spread to sites like The Daily Caller and Fox News, sites that “do claim to follow journalistic norms,” but that fail to follow such norms in evaluating such stories. The authors note that “this pattern is not mirrored on the left wing.” That is because there are no big left-wing counterparts of Infowars. When false stories emerge on the Left, the bigger sites try to follow journalistic standards, something that serves “as a consistent check on the dissemination and validation of the most extreme stories when they do emerge on the left, and have no parallels in the levels of visibility or trust that can perform the same function on the right.”

That book's authors do case studies of the tracking of unsupported stories on both the Right and the Left. Consider these two stories that emerged in the 2016 Presidential campaign.

* Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in acts of pedophilia, which included the abuse of Haitian refugee children and visits to an orgy island. Evidence: {}

* In the other, Donald Trump supposedly raped a thirteen-year-old girl back in 1994. He was accused of that in a lawsuit filed that year.

There was a lot of interest from the Left in that Trump story, but both the liberal and the mainstream media were silent on that story, and it did not go very far.

However,

The Clinton orgy-island story met a very different fate in the right-wing media, which pushed versions of it over the course of the campaign. (Fox News initially ran several segments that raised the topic of the “Lolita Express.”) The dynamic on the right, the authors found, “rewards the most popular and widely viewed channels at the very top of the media ecosystem for delivering stories, whether true or false, that protect the team, reinforce its beliefs, attack opponents, and refute any claims that might threaten ‘our’ team from outsiders.” Referring to the orgy-island story, the authors note that “not one right-wing outlet came out to criticize and expose this blatant lie for what it was. In the grip of the propaganda feedback loop, the right-wing media ecosystem had no mechanism for self-correction, and instead exhibited dynamics of self-reinforcement, confirmation, and repetition so that readers, viewers and listeners encountered multiple versions of the same story, over months, to the point that both recall and credibility were enhanced.”

The authors do criticize the liberal side on some issues. They conclude that Russian hacking, fake-news websites, and Cambridge-Analytica Facebook targeting all had only minor impacts on the election and that it was the dynamics of right-wing quasi-journalism that made much of the difference. But since Donald Trump won some states' electoral votes by some very narrow margins, I would not count out the influences that the authors downplay.

 

[Patooka]

Liberal, conservative, who has the most credulous media?

Neither. Just to be clear, I'm not talking about media sources that are accused of either being liberal or conservative. What I'm saying is media outlets that openly pander to a particular ideology as a factor on what news they report is automatically suspect in my eyes.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

While I do agree that the liberal media is far more honest than the conservative both sides have a problem with wanting to confirm their biases.

Consider, which news will go farther with the left: "The situation was caused by racism" or "Racism was not a factor in the situation".