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.
You can find out who the PM of Israel is or who's running for President from Wikipedia or even just casual absorption of knowledge.
My mom watches the news. CNN, etc. She's a pretty ordinary boomer with I guess center-left-ish opinions (to the extent they are coherent), so I feel like I get a pretty good feel for what consuming CNN about the amount a typical grandma does to you.
What it does is insane. This was really bad during COVID (if you ever wondered why everyone seemed insane during COVID, just go watch what CNN was telling them). But it's bad pretty much all the time. Bryan is right that the sum net of what the media does is try to get you really scared of whatever the 24 hour news cycle of the week is. Nothing would definitely be an improvement. Even if nothing meant ignorance (as opposed to getting news from some other source or just tapping into your knowledge from your personal life) it would be an improvement.
For people that really want to know stuff, there are a lot better options out there. And for most people not caring would be an improvement.
Hanania's issue seems to be that the NYTimes is better then Alex Jones or whatever straw man comparison he'd like, which OK whatever bro.
I did watch CNN during business travel in 1996-1997. Then I switched to BBC and BBC world as I did not go in the US.
In 2017, I was told by an American colleague that CNN was a biased media. In 2021, some twitter nutcase told me that Kyle Rittenhouse was innocent despite mainstream media headlines. So I cross-checked various sources and came to the conclusion that CNN was deceitful in framing their narrative of woke activism as a force for good.
It seems like politics has polarized and the mainstream try to exclude the conservatives. It normally takes a long time for society to accept women vote or gay marriage, but they invent a new drag queen in kindergarten or puberty blockers for 10-year-old kids every other month not because they care about people, but to help exclude the conservatives.
When did it happen to CNN between 1997 and 2021? Why?
Most people would say that it picked up in The Great Awakening in Obama's second term and you can certainly see it go exponential just looking at the math, but you can see it creeping in before that. Romney got treated like trash despite being an objectively nice guy. There were massive race riots in my city before the 2016 campaign even got going.
Some people think it was a reaction to Trump but the math seems pretty clear that it got going before he came on the scene (one could say he was a reaction to woke). The two certainly play off one another.
My point is that it's not really a factual claim unless you define the alternative (and in my comment I said reading the news vs doing nothing). If the alternative is learning about foreign affairs by reading Wikipedia that might give you a very different answer than if it's watching porn or going on a walk.
And even then you need to define how you weigh the facts. I mean, at a trivial level, reading the NYT means you learn all sorts of facts of the form "the NYT wrote X"
Ultimately, I worry thar the claim is more about whether we should disapprove of the news than the factual claim it appears to be.
Lets say that in the absence of "news", people would concern themselves with the things happening in their real lives and the information available to them from personal experience.
Would the introduction of "news" lead to a better world than that? I can imagine a form of "news" that would, but I would say that the actual news I see is probably worse than nothing.
This is the advice I give people in my life. When my Mom watches more news, it has a negative impact with no positives as far as I can see. When she watches less news she is happier.
I don't know if I disagree, but note that you are now debating a very different question than Bryan claims to be addressing. After all, even perfectly accurate unbiased news is plausibly just going to make most people unhappy and, since they can't affect world events, not reading it doesn't really harm them.
So if this is the claim there isn't much point going through the stories in the newspaper as Bryan does to evaluate them for bias and accuracy since what we need to know is if it makes your life better and even unbiased accurate news probably makes most people less happy. And even if you consider how it affects voting no reason to think that even accurate unbiased news gets people to vote for the best policy.
Heck, it's totally plausible that accurate, honest and unbiased news makes reader's worse off but being fed biased inaccurate news might improve lives (uplifting, fun and maybe tricks them into voting the right way).
I think the claim that most people would be better off if they didn't read the news is totally plausible but we shouldn't confuse that with a claim about the quality, honesty or lack of bias of the news.
"even perfectly accurate unbiased news is plausibly just going to make most people unhappy"
I don't know. If you were trying to present unbiased news, you wouldn't trend towards sensationalism and negativity.
Bryan has a thought example. Imagine someone that presented nothing but stories about horrible things Jews had done, but all of the stories were technically true. That would give people a certain image of the world without technically lying. That's what the news does (even in the best of circumstances).
The point isn't that the news is unbiased but the truth of the claim "people are better off not reading to news" isn't something that is demonstrated by whether the news is unbiased and accurate.
The point isn't that Bryan's example is wrong but that it's misleadingly creating the impression that it's because the news is misleading that it's not beneficial to consume. The fact that it doesn't improve your life to consume it seems to be true regardless (or at least plausibly regardless) of if it's misleading.
The main factual issue for whether it's beneficial to consume is largely one of whether reading the news makes your life more pleasant not whether it's accurate.
It's like if I said, "owning an electric car doesn't make sense because the mechanics are thieves.". It might be true that the mechanics are thieves but if the cost of mechanics is small relative to the other costs so it's a bad economic deal even if mechanics weren't thieves the claim is misleading.
There is no such thing as "perfectly accurate unbiased news". "The News" is (and always has been) an intrinsically bogus concept .....because of the huge editorial selectivity involved. Vast amounts of potentially interesting and impactful things are constantly unfolding around the world and 'the news' is just a some inherently tendentious take on which of them is most important. Hence - to take just one example - some murders get months of agonising whilst other barely a mention.
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.
Its funny seeing CCNs lower third on screen, before it said "the war in Iraq" and now it says "the war on Ukraine" Or the Daily Mail headline that read "Putin and his cronies are...." but I've never seen a "Bush and his cronies are...."
Easy test of how good the media is: talk to someone who absorbs a lot of product from the MSM and does not access alternative perspectives.
They'll likely think some or all of the following; Trump was colluding with Putin, masks were proven effective in stopping the spread of COVID, FL had a high death rate from COVID compared to other states, Zelensky is a champion of anti-corruption in Ukraine, the Hunter Biden laptop has not been established as genuine and may be Russian disinformation, there is no evidence of Joe being involved in Hunter's foreign money adventures, recent FL hurricane activity shows that FL weather has become more violent due to global warming.... On an on.
A whole lot of things that are demonstrably untrue, all slanted in one direction. A whole worldview is being constructed for them daily.
Hanania occasionally has interesting things to say but too often writes like a clickbait clown. This is an example. No serious person could defend the media after the last five or six years of performance.
I do think they've fallen off a cliff in recent years and used to be much better, although they always had a liberal slant. They were probably defensible in the way Hanania tries to do 10 years ago.
Prigozhin wasn't picking up any support from broader society and his column was being bombed. If he got to Moscow he probably would have been slaughtered.
The best case scenario would be that Russia collapsed into civil war and he got killed. Can anyone imagine him taking over Russia? Would anyone want that?
It's hard to see Prigozhin being better for the interests of Hanania or Bryan. He's a mercenary strong man who started his coup because he wanted to go back to Africa and kill people for money. His claim to fame in Ukraine was that he scraped Russia's prisons dry, loaded them up with meth, charged them at Ukranian positions, then called in artillery when they were exposed from firing on his suicide soldiers.
He was afraid because Wagner had been ordered to join MoD, and that was the end of his gravy train. He was willing to plunge his own country into civil war to keep his killing machine going.
There is no such thing as "perfectly accurate unbiased news". "The News" is (and always has been) an intrinsically bogus concept .....because of the huge editorial selectivity involved. Vast amounts of potentially interesting and impactful things are constantly unfolding around the world and 'the news' is just a some inherently tendentious take on which of them is most important. Hence - to take just one example - some murders get months of agonising whilst other barely a mention.
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.
You can find out who the PM of Israel is or who's running for President from Wikipedia or even just casual absorption of knowledge.
My mom watches the news. CNN, etc. She's a pretty ordinary boomer with I guess center-left-ish opinions (to the extent they are coherent), so I feel like I get a pretty good feel for what consuming CNN about the amount a typical grandma does to you.
What it does is insane. This was really bad during COVID (if you ever wondered why everyone seemed insane during COVID, just go watch what CNN was telling them). But it's bad pretty much all the time. Bryan is right that the sum net of what the media does is try to get you really scared of whatever the 24 hour news cycle of the week is. Nothing would definitely be an improvement. Even if nothing meant ignorance (as opposed to getting news from some other source or just tapping into your knowledge from your personal life) it would be an improvement.
For people that really want to know stuff, there are a lot better options out there. And for most people not caring would be an improvement.
Hanania's issue seems to be that the NYTimes is better then Alex Jones or whatever straw man comparison he'd like, which OK whatever bro.
I am not a US person. I have a question on CNN.
I did watch CNN during business travel in 1996-1997. Then I switched to BBC and BBC world as I did not go in the US.
In 2017, I was told by an American colleague that CNN was a biased media. In 2021, some twitter nutcase told me that Kyle Rittenhouse was innocent despite mainstream media headlines. So I cross-checked various sources and came to the conclusion that CNN was deceitful in framing their narrative of woke activism as a force for good.
It seems like politics has polarized and the mainstream try to exclude the conservatives. It normally takes a long time for society to accept women vote or gay marriage, but they invent a new drag queen in kindergarten or puberty blockers for 10-year-old kids every other month not because they care about people, but to help exclude the conservatives.
When did it happen to CNN between 1997 and 2021? Why?
It's been a slow burn for a long time.
Most people would say that it picked up in The Great Awakening in Obama's second term and you can certainly see it go exponential just looking at the math, but you can see it creeping in before that. Romney got treated like trash despite being an objectively nice guy. There were massive race riots in my city before the 2016 campaign even got going.
Some people think it was a reaction to Trump but the math seems pretty clear that it got going before he came on the scene (one could say he was a reaction to woke). The two certainly play off one another.
My point is that it's not really a factual claim unless you define the alternative (and in my comment I said reading the news vs doing nothing). If the alternative is learning about foreign affairs by reading Wikipedia that might give you a very different answer than if it's watching porn or going on a walk.
And even then you need to define how you weigh the facts. I mean, at a trivial level, reading the NYT means you learn all sorts of facts of the form "the NYT wrote X"
Ultimately, I worry thar the claim is more about whether we should disapprove of the news than the factual claim it appears to be.
Lets say that in the absence of "news", people would concern themselves with the things happening in their real lives and the information available to them from personal experience.
Would the introduction of "news" lead to a better world than that? I can imagine a form of "news" that would, but I would say that the actual news I see is probably worse than nothing.
This is the advice I give people in my life. When my Mom watches more news, it has a negative impact with no positives as far as I can see. When she watches less news she is happier.
I don't know if I disagree, but note that you are now debating a very different question than Bryan claims to be addressing. After all, even perfectly accurate unbiased news is plausibly just going to make most people unhappy and, since they can't affect world events, not reading it doesn't really harm them.
So if this is the claim there isn't much point going through the stories in the newspaper as Bryan does to evaluate them for bias and accuracy since what we need to know is if it makes your life better and even unbiased accurate news probably makes most people less happy. And even if you consider how it affects voting no reason to think that even accurate unbiased news gets people to vote for the best policy.
Heck, it's totally plausible that accurate, honest and unbiased news makes reader's worse off but being fed biased inaccurate news might improve lives (uplifting, fun and maybe tricks them into voting the right way).
I think the claim that most people would be better off if they didn't read the news is totally plausible but we shouldn't confuse that with a claim about the quality, honesty or lack of bias of the news.
I think Bryan did tackle it fine.
"even perfectly accurate unbiased news is plausibly just going to make most people unhappy"
I don't know. If you were trying to present unbiased news, you wouldn't trend towards sensationalism and negativity.
Bryan has a thought example. Imagine someone that presented nothing but stories about horrible things Jews had done, but all of the stories were technically true. That would give people a certain image of the world without technically lying. That's what the news does (even in the best of circumstances).
The point isn't that the news is unbiased but the truth of the claim "people are better off not reading to news" isn't something that is demonstrated by whether the news is unbiased and accurate.
The point isn't that Bryan's example is wrong but that it's misleadingly creating the impression that it's because the news is misleading that it's not beneficial to consume. The fact that it doesn't improve your life to consume it seems to be true regardless (or at least plausibly regardless) of if it's misleading.
The main factual issue for whether it's beneficial to consume is largely one of whether reading the news makes your life more pleasant not whether it's accurate.
It's like if I said, "owning an electric car doesn't make sense because the mechanics are thieves.". It might be true that the mechanics are thieves but if the cost of mechanics is small relative to the other costs so it's a bad economic deal even if mechanics weren't thieves the claim is misleading.
There is no such thing as "perfectly accurate unbiased news". "The News" is (and always has been) an intrinsically bogus concept .....because of the huge editorial selectivity involved. Vast amounts of potentially interesting and impactful things are constantly unfolding around the world and 'the news' is just a some inherently tendentious take on which of them is most important. Hence - to take just one example - some murders get months of agonising whilst other barely a mention.
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.
Or give his theory that 'Shakespeare is Fake' the derision it deserves.
Do you have some examples of him doing that?
You're in luck!
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/israel-must-crush-palestinian-hopes/comment/44329612
An interesting take on it.
Its funny seeing CCNs lower third on screen, before it said "the war in Iraq" and now it says "the war on Ukraine" Or the Daily Mail headline that read "Putin and his cronies are...." but I've never seen a "Bush and his cronies are...."
Maya (from Hinduism) and culture are often travelling companions.
How “good and honest” is the media? Seriously?
The question cannot be contemplated without psychological aversion (forcing cognitive error), due to our cultural conditioning.
Easy test of how good the media is: talk to someone who absorbs a lot of product from the MSM and does not access alternative perspectives.
They'll likely think some or all of the following; Trump was colluding with Putin, masks were proven effective in stopping the spread of COVID, FL had a high death rate from COVID compared to other states, Zelensky is a champion of anti-corruption in Ukraine, the Hunter Biden laptop has not been established as genuine and may be Russian disinformation, there is no evidence of Joe being involved in Hunter's foreign money adventures, recent FL hurricane activity shows that FL weather has become more violent due to global warming.... On an on.
A whole lot of things that are demonstrably untrue, all slanted in one direction. A whole worldview is being constructed for them daily.
Hanania occasionally has interesting things to say but too often writes like a clickbait clown. This is an example. No serious person could defend the media after the last five or six years of performance.
I do think they've fallen off a cliff in recent years and used to be much better, although they always had a liberal slant. They were probably defensible in the way Hanania tries to do 10 years ago.
Prigozhin wasn't picking up any support from broader society and his column was being bombed. If he got to Moscow he probably would have been slaughtered.
The best case scenario would be that Russia collapsed into civil war and he got killed. Can anyone imagine him taking over Russia? Would anyone want that?
It's hard to see Prigozhin being better for the interests of Hanania or Bryan. He's a mercenary strong man who started his coup because he wanted to go back to Africa and kill people for money. His claim to fame in Ukraine was that he scraped Russia's prisons dry, loaded them up with meth, charged them at Ukranian positions, then called in artillery when they were exposed from firing on his suicide soldiers.
He was afraid because Wagner had been ordered to join MoD, and that was the end of his gravy train. He was willing to plunge his own country into civil war to keep his killing machine going.
The constant laughing with every comment from Bryan made it really easy for Richard to keep dismissing him. This was a confidence mismatch.
There is no such thing as "perfectly accurate unbiased news". "The News" is (and always has been) an intrinsically bogus concept .....because of the huge editorial selectivity involved. Vast amounts of potentially interesting and impactful things are constantly unfolding around the world and 'the news' is just a some inherently tendentious take on which of them is most important. Hence - to take just one example - some murders get months of agonising whilst other barely a mention.
With articles from Caplan on UBI and WWF from Hanania, it's panem et circenses. Klingon and Romulan in Bat'leth
Media reflects what people want to read ;-)
https://polsci.substack.com/p/public-opinion
So you both moved towards the middle, and became (more nearly) *moderates*. Boring!
Why pay for Hanania when his pay-walled content is available for free a few weeks later? It’s for a good cause I know.