Modern Journalism’s Task: Protecting Us From the Facts

Katie Couric now admits that she censored Ruth Bader Ginsburg's comments regarding kneeling during the national anthem to "protect" RGB. Here is an excerpt from the NY Post:

Couric, being a “big RBG fan” and feeling protective of her and the controversy the comments would likely embroil her in, wrote in the book that she “lost a lot of sleep” and felt extremely “conflicted” over deciding whether she should include Ginsburg’s full thoughts on the matter.

In her new book Couric claims that she withheld the full quote (which would have been highly newsworthy) because RBG “was elderly and probably didn’t understand the question.”

What did RBG actually say in 2016? Here are a few screen shots from the New York Post:

Note that for Couric, RBG was too old to understand Couric's question but not too old to serve as a high-functioning Justice on the Supreme Court.

Here's what is really going on: RBG's statement simply didn't fit the preconceived media narrative Couric was serving up. That was the real problem.  Modern journalism is both what they tell you and what they withhold from you. They are not content to tell you facts so that you can think for yourself. They want to tell you how to think and they do this by misleading you.

BTW, this is not the first left-leaning institution that refused to accurately report the words of their hero, RGB.  Remember what the ACLU recently did? 

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Shedding Light on Left-Wing Authoritarianism

From a recent article in The Atlantic: 'The Experts Somehow Overlooked Authoritarians on the Left Many psychologists wrongly assumed that coercive attitudes exist only among conservatives."

One reason left-wing authoritarianism barely shows up in social-psychology research is that most academic experts in the field are based at institutions where prevailing attitudes are far to the left of society as a whole. Scholars who personally support the left’s social vision—such as redistributing income, countering racism, and more—may simply be slow to identify authoritarianism among people with similar goals.

One doesn’t need to believe that left-wing authoritarians are as numerous or as threatening as their right-wing counterparts to grasp that both phenomena are a problem. While liberals—both inside and outside of academia—may derive some comfort from believing that left-wing authoritarianism doesn’t exist, that fiction ignores a significant source of instability and polarization in our politics and society.

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“News Media” Continues its Role as Unabashed Advocate

From Glenn Greenwald. This is disgraceful behavior by the Washington Post "Fact-Checker."

Much of our legacy news media has proudly decided that its role is no longer to let the fact fall where they may, letting readers decide who they will vote for. Rather, the new role is to tell readers who to vote for, consciously and premeditatedly withholding evidence that puts their favorite candidate into a bad light. What's really amazing is that this disinformation is being shoveled to readers in plain view. It's as if the WP is simply daring people like Greenwald to call them on their journalistic malpractice (which he repeatedly does). But they don't care, because they have a bigger megaphone than he does at the moment.

So much of what I see today reminds me of Brandolini's Law:

Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information:"The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.

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One Suggestion for Hacking a Path out of the Wokeness Thicket

I'm feeling sad today, perhaps because I read too much "news." I struggle when I try to identify any institution that is functioning well. Perhaps the court system is the best example of an (imperfect) functioning institution, although the elephant in the room is that those who don't have the money to hire good lawyers are almost always fucked over by those who have lawyers. Okay . . . but when both sides have good lawyers, the system seems to work fairly well fairly often.

Some of our newly dysfunctional institutions have been captured by Woke ideology, resulting in a thick atmosphere of fear in which smart people intentionally say untrue things so that they don't get yelled at by the mob, which can result in suspension and job loss. It's a terrible situation in many institutions, especially in news media and colleges. I base this on personal stories I've heard from several self-censoring professors who are afraid to engage in a free exchange of ideas in the classroom. I've reported many of these problems at this website over the past two years.

When I feel this sort of melancholy, I actively seek out good news, and I usually find some reason to be hopeful. Today, it comes from one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Jonathan Haidt, who participated in a discussion group at Heterodox Academy (I was one of many HxA members attending). It was a long discussion and there were many speakers. Here's an excerpt from Haidt's presentation:

It's the climate of fear. I'm actually starting a new book on this. It's called Life After Babble: How we lost the Ability to Think Well Together. The core idea is that social media, made reputational destruction democratized, incentivized and freed from accountability. And that's what happened in 2014. And that's why we've had a climate of fear since 2014. So you're right to be afraid.

But here's what I've learned in the last couple years: almost everybody is reasonable. Leaders are the ones who get shot with little darts. Whenever they you know, it's as though they're physically getting shot with darts. And so they all came very quickly. But those who hold out, those who don't cave-- if you just wait a week--it's a hurricane inside of a hall of mirrors, and it blows on to something else a week or two later. So the people who stand up to it and don't bend a knee and don't bow down, they end up looking very, very good. So what I'm trying to develop is the idea that every field needs high professional standards, and a big part of that is depoliticization is not being on a team not fighting for politics, but living up to your standard as a professor doing research. You're a scholar, and what I hope we can develop an HxA is this notion of very high professional standards. If you're a true professional, you live your standards, and then you should be unafraid. We're not there yet, but I think that's that's where I think we can get to very quickly.

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