How "Good and Honest" Is the Media?
A Hanania-Caplan Adversarial Collaboration
One of Richard Hanania’s most-read essays is called “Why the Media Is Good and Honest.” One of my most-read essays is a critical reply, “Mainstream Media Is Worse Than Silence.” Since Richard and I normally have a lot of common ground, I proposed an adversarial collaboration. A week or so in advance, we selected a random Thursday, mutually promising not to look at the news until our conversation began. Then we went over the major media stories of the day and argued about their intellectual merits.
I originally let Richard limit our interview to his premium subscribers, but now it’s available for everyone. Here’s his take on our exchange.
Bottom line: We both marginally moved each others’ positions on the media, but I think I moved him more. See for yourself!
I feel like this debate is a bit confused because it isn't clear on some basic definitions and without those definitions it's not a factual dispute but merely a question of attitude. And I think Hanania appropriately pushed on this issue at the start of the conversation but Bryan kinda pushed past it.
1) What is the counterfactual being considered. Obviously the media is more biased than it would be in a perfect world and less biased than it would be in a world where all media was run like it was in the Soviet Union.
2) When you ask if the media is more informative than misleading, that obviously depends on what metric you use.
If you just mean does reading it rather than reading nothing increase or decrease the number of true facts readers believe: of course it does because it means readers encounter a ton of pedestrian uncontroversial facts they otherwise wouldn't: the PM of Israel is named Netanyahu, Trump is campaigning to be US president etc etc.
This only gets interesting if you have in mind some question like whether it makes people vote better. But this risks becoming kinda pointless and just collapsing down to the question of whether it makes people more likely to vote the way you think is better and now it's no longer a question about the media at all but what kind of vote is better.
3) Terms like honest aren't that helpful and are actually doing more to confuse the issue than clarify it. In our normal everyday sense someone is honest when they try to convey facts as they understand them to be so even some of the worst cases of media bias or negligence aren't relevant to dishonesty -- and it's not even clear what it means for a large institution like the NYT to even be honest.
I mean is it enough for each reporter to believe the story they submit is accurate? That's a super low bar that could be cleared even if you had flat earthers writing pieces about how NASA claims to orbit the earth are lies.
Fun tip for dealing with Hanania: use basic philosophy to dispute his claims of fact that are actually subjective beliefs and there's a decent chance he'll lose control of his mind and block you.