So, I stumbled across this chart recently. Apparently a librarian was using it to teach students about bias.
Where to start?
Well, first, who reading this thinks that the Economist is left wing?
Who here thinks that the New York Times opinion pages are far-left? Or for that matter, CNN opinion?
Those who read or watch the BBC will know of its unrelenting hostility to Corbyn and Labour, and that it isn’t even centrist any more.
MSNBC is as left-wing as Jacobin and the Intercept? Mother Jones is radical left when their house blogger said Bernie was to blame for Clinton losing? (And does anyone think Kevin Drum isn’t a centrist?)
The second thing is this weird equivalency. People who want universal healthcare are the same as people who are racists who want to cut taxes and impoverish people? People who want to do something about climate change are the same as climate change deniers?
The “far”-left in the US or Britain aren’t communists, they are social democrats who would have been considered weak tea in the 60s.
These bias charts and organizations are all folks with money and and an ideological agenda to push: They want to control the Overton window and say what is “reasonable.” And they’re indoctrinating children by pretending to be “scientific.”
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Herman
You are right, but how many people even know that left-wing publications like Monthly Review even exist? The real far left has zero influence so if we are going by what passes for the mainstream left then social democrats are the far left, as crazy as that sounds.
Second, as much as we might dislike the right, there are a lot of right-wing people out there so yes, people who support anti-worker economics and climate change deniers are mainstream as crazy as that sounds.
I agree that the Overton window is kept narrow but a librarian is not going to risk their job by mentioning actual communist or fascist sources (what would be the real far left and far right) and in any event most people, to the extent that they even have any coherent ideology at all, probably fall somewhere within this chart.
Those of us who discuss politics a lot likely fail to realize how unusual we are. I know that my own views on a number of issues like technology are way outside the mainstream. Most people don’t put any serious thought into politics because it is personally useless to them and is likely to make them depressed or maybe get them branded as a weirdo so to the extent that they even have views they usually fall within whatever the society deems to be the mainstream.
Ian Welsh
Even by their own standards it is ludicrous to put MSNBC in the same bag as Jacobin.
Hugh
So like we used to do in the old days, I went to the Allsides.com website. It comes across as some Republican and Democratic midline tech entrepeneurs playing at politics. It reeks.
The chief “co-founder” and president is somebody named John Gable. He is described as “a professional Republican operative who worked for President George H. W. Bush, Senator Mitch McConnell, and the Republican National Committee. While he now lives in San Francisco, John is originally from Kentucky coal mining country, which has become a heartland of Trump supporters. He remains a proud, active Republican today.
He’s “balanced” by Joan Blades. Her description:
“Joan Blades, co-founder of our non-profit schools program and our partner Living Room Conversations, co-founded the progressive groups Moms Rising and MoveOn.org, which has raised millions of dollars for left-wing candidates. She is from Berkeley — one of the most progressive areas in the country. She still lives there and remains a proud, active Democrat today.”
There’s a third guy who I assume runs the site named Scott MacDonald. He is described as a kind of centrist Republican (whatever that is) and “less politically active”.
So basically we have a political spectrum that runs the gamut from A to B, from registered Republicans to registered Democrats and from San Francisco to Berkeley. You get the picture. You can almost hear the New Age music playing in the background, punctuated by the clink of wine glasses filled with Chardonnay. Like I said, reeks.
Then there is the question of money. Who funds Allsides.com? All of a sudden, this site which is dedicated to transparency goes very vague.
“we have partnered and received some funding from some organizations that are dedicated to bridging divides, and many of these are run mostly by people from the left. Some have received money from people like Tom Steyer, billionaire donor and leader of progressive causes. He is currently funding an impeachment campaign among other causes, and is often vilified by conservatives.
AllSides has also worked with organizations and received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation. Like Tom Steyer on the left, Charles Koch is a wealthy supporter on the right, supporting conservative causes and candidates. ”
Two points jump out. Both Steyer and Koch are billionaires. Allsides doesn’t bother even to pretend it is a product popularly supported by small donors. But note too that Allsides doesn’t actually say it has received dollar one directly from Steyer while it has done so from the Kochs.
As Ian indicated, not every argument has two sides. So the idea of “bridging” falls apart in these cases. If you are a climate change activist, there is no bridge between you and a climate change denier. If the ship you are on is sinking, you act. You do what you need to do to keep it from sinking or you get as many people off as you can. You don’t try to build bridges with those who deny outright that there is a problem or decide to take a wait and see attitude.
Two final points. Most of the listings are straightforward corporate media. So while the NYT and Fox might diverge on some social issues, they are equally corporatist in their outlooks. And this gets to the larger point that the categories themselves are largely meaningless. I doubt anyone at Allsides.com could give a coherent definition of what liberal, conservative, let alone socialist and neoliberal even mean.
Ten Bears
I am/was struck – first glance, image first impression, before even getting to your protestations (fuck yeah!) – by the (fergoodnesssakes) homogenousness of it all. On a typical blogging day I would in all likelihood see something and read as much as seventy-five percent of what I see… at each one of those. Top to bottom, left to right.
Hope it’s a volunteer librarian, I wouldn’t want my tax dollars paying for that.
Paul Harris
It’s an almost Orwellian constriction of thought. Orwell used a denuded language (newspeak) to restrict what was possible to communicate and ultimately imagine.
Chiron
Many leftists are also dumb about international affairs and have hysterical Pavlovian responses, one example is the Kurds who are ethnic cleansing Arabs from oil rich regions of Syria, Kurdistan is about creating a second Israel in the Middle-East for America. The sam with the HK protesters who just hysterical kids being supported by big money from far-righters from the West.
bruce wilder
Then there’s that term, “bias”. Slightly paraphrasing Merriam-Webster: bias is “systematic error introduced . . . by selecting or encouraging one outcome or answer over”
Ian has made a perfectly valid point concerning advocacy and point-of-view: the political and public policy desiderata of the people Jacobin publish are hardly coincident with those typical of writers for the New Yorker.
But that chart is about “bias”, which implies that desired policy outcomes are not what is being measured. If one is measuring “bias” per se, aim is almost irrelevant. What policy targets are favored, if any, is not the point. What is being assessed is the nature of the “errors” being indulged.
Arraying news organizations along a continuum reminds me a bit of the scene in Dead Poets Society, where the Robin Williams character has them tear out pages from the assigned textbook, pages where the author, “Mr. J Evans Pritchard” (an actual author I understand) explains how to apply analytic geometry to analyzing the “greatness” of a poem. I am sure Hugh’s characterization of the mentality “tech” types is accurate.
But (surely you knew this was all leading to a “but”), dismissing this as simply wrong-headed may be a form of missing the forest for the trees. If we look at the trees (“who reading this thinks that the Economist is left wing?”) we are naturally thinking about the aims of a publication (like the Economist).
But, this chart purports to be about something else: “the bias”
In other words, this chart purports to be about the character of the systematic errors that the style of these Media outlets generate and brand.
When Ian shifts to pointing out, for example, “Those who read or watch the BBC will know of its unrelenting hostility to Corbyn and Labour” then he’s talking about “bias” specifically. Is that particular bias not typical “centrist” bias? I expect the same sorts for errors from NPR, whom I loathe for it.
I suppose, without knowing, that the people who made the chart, imagined that “centrist” was a synonym for quantitatively less bias, rather than a qualitatively different sort of bias, a different sort of systematic error.
My point is not to endorse their particular categorization, though. My point is that examining “bias” instead of point-of-view or interest advocacy may be appropriate to a news Media environment in which at least some of these organizations produce little other than “bias”: opinion characterized by systematic errors that are then branded and promoted. (This may be the larger pattern, the forest, that we ought to pay attention to.)
The Guardian, the New York Times, MSNBC, the New Yorker, CNN and on and on generate a lot of narrative speculation, much of it in couched in the subjunctive, with little or no “objective” fact involved. The right-wing Media on the chart I presume has been doing the same for a long-time; I do not have much exposure so I do not feel comfortable characterizing it off-the-cuff.
Ian asks, “People who want to do something about Climate change are the same as Climate change deniers?”
That’s a tough one. I think there are a lot of people — and they are a target audience — who want to feel virtuous about “believing in” the science and “caring” and I am not sure that they are not pretty much equivalent to climate change deniers (important qualification coming!) in their readiness to subscribe to systematic errors of particular kinds. (To a large extent, in terms of effective policy action, they are as much an obstacle to “doing something” as people who are cast as the dramatic foils stubbornly “denying” the need; and, this may well be ‘by design’ of the propaganda.)
Propaganda is “bias” and we live in a Media environment saturated with propaganda. The organizations on that chart are engaged in commercial generation of propaganda, trade-marked and branded. People identify with certain narrative storylines and slogans the way they identify with sports teams and brands of beer.
There are not many of these organizations that do much of anything to demonstrate what used to be considered standards of journalistic integrity and objectivity. Or even considered judgment and moderately sophisticated reasoning. The New York Times, once the epitome of conceited seriousness but also a reliable source of objective facts about political developments abroad and events in the U.S., has become a rag written by privileged young fops for well-off people with no serious curiosity outside of the fashions of the day at all.
I stare at the chart and, yes, I can see the foolishness of its conceit to measure bias and teach young students to be “aware”. I also look with horror with what these propaganda machines are doing to everyone’s brains.
Herman
@Ian,
I agree with you. But again, we are talking about a public where “socialism” means universal healthcare and sometimes even things like roads and the post office. It is amazing to think that at one time Marxism was actually seriously studied in universities and now this is how people arrange the media by ideology but here we are. As you pointed out, today’s “far left” consists of social democrats who would have been considered rather ordinary 50 years ago. I have a good laugh when people talk about how radical today’s young people are. Compared to the 1960s and 1970s they are rather moderate.
In any event, I think part of the reason why there is such a narrow ideological spectrum today is due to the failure of various 20th century political experiments, most notably communism and fascism. Liberal capitalism won and although it is on shaky ground today enough people are doing well enough that few really question the fundamentals of our society. Radical change will only happen when conditions drastically worsen.
ponderer
I kinda think they just made a typo. If you replace “L” with “D” so that we are looking at bias towards Democrats or Republicans I think they are far more accurate. They are all establishment outfits.
Then, I think it is a fairly insightful chart (accidentally I’m sure). At least as far as who dictates their stenography. The mistake is assuming that “left” and “right” labels apply at all to our mainstream media or political parties.
Hugh
“AllSides media bias ratings are based on multi-partisan, scientific analysis.”
The more I think about this the more I think this is all about the validation and propagation of mush. Phrases like “multi-partisan” and “scientific analysis” are meant to convey a kind of legitimacy and lay claim to objectivity. But they are oxymoronic and dishonest when taken together. In the Allsides view, if you are partisan, then you are biased. And last I checked, “biased” equates to prejudiced. So how does prejudice even begin to fit in with what is purported to be a scientific process? As subject matter? Well, that’s the claim of the media bias rating. But it is also part of the methodology as in “multi-partisan.” There is an implicit assumption/fallacy attached to that word in that context. That being that somehow, unstated, “biases” cancel out. They don’t. As in my example above, if the ship is sinking. My view that it is can get canceled out by someone who believes it isn’t. This cancellation doesn’t mean the ship stays afloat. It still sinks. So what is the use of the exercise? Then too there are the set of false equivalents many here have noted: Left (L) = Democrat; Right (R) = Republican; and Center/Centrist (C) = Objective (that is unbiased). But does anyone seriously believe that the media described as Center are really objective?
The silliness of all this comes out when you consider MSNBC. It often has on conservatives who would like to see the backside of Donald Trump. So do these conservatives become liberal by appearing on MSNBC? Does their view that Trump has committed impeachable crimes suddenly make them liberal? Or is MSNBC showing its liberal bias, as happened today, on Morning Joe, where predictably they unloaded on Medicare-for-All with the canard that it will raise taxes on the now largely extinct middle class. (Never stated is that this is a cost-shifting from premiums, deductibles, and co-pays, and that overall most families would end up with more money in their pockets.) Or their love affair with Buttigieg, Mayor Pete as they fondly like to call him? Buttigieg is a conservative Democrat who seems to be trying to carve out a niche as the young Joe Biden, just more of an asshole. So does this make him objective centrist because he dumps on progressives, Left because MSNBC like him, or conservative Right because that’s what he is?
A1
I think ponderer nailed it, and I personally agree with the misuse and abuse of the terms “left” and “right” made by many commentators on this blog.
But unfortunately for us, “left” and “right” are used by most of the public, and lecturing someone about inappropriate definitions just gets blank stares, so we have to accept that left and right have meaning to most everyone and work with what we got. As for Wilders comments about science, it is unfortunate that most people believe facts are like apples and you can just pick them up lying on the ground. It is easier to explain to someone that left and right lack meaning as opposed to facts have bias.
edmondo
OT – but this is too delicious to pass up.
Obama endorses Trudeau four days before election.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/16/world/canada/obama-trudeau-election.html
I thought foreign interference in domestic elections was “an act of war” and an impeachable offence?
bruce wilder
most people believe facts are like apples and you can just pick them up lying on the ground.
I am not sure what that means, but when people do think about facts, I suppose that most people imagine that facts show little respect to wishes.
In other words, I think most people think facts are little distillations of reality and reality does not care what we think about it. So, most people, if they thought about that chart for a while (which of course few would ever bother to do), they might wonder why “bias” is assumed to be correlated with political philosophy.
In a better politics, one would think it was possible to be far-left (or far-right) and still be in direct contact with reality (that is to say, shared reality) at least to the same extent as anyone in the putative “center”.
My point is that “bias” is error and a willingness to indulge in systematic error to please a audience and I look around at media outlets “on the left” and “in the center” and I do not trust many of them. (Of course, I never trusted most of those on the Right, and rarely paid attention in any case.)
I do not think a fact, qua fact, has bias.
I do think mainstream journalism has discarded the kind of methods and standards that might make it reliable as a reporter of facts. I won’t dig them up now, but survey evidence suggests that Americans have been deeply ignorant of critical facts at times when they were being most actively reported and commented on in the mass media. Lots of people thought Saddam Hussein had something to do with the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center back in the day and that he had stockpiles of Weapons of Mass Destruction with which to threaten all and sundry. The New York Times, no less, reported breathlessly on WMD. George W. Bush later made a videotape where he looked for WMD under his chair for the amusement of the White House Press Corps.
The more recent nonsense over Russia,Russia,Russia and now, Ukraine (Biden’s extortion good; Trump’s extortion bad) reveal a real degeneration in the capacity for judgment that balancing facts against values and a point-of-view require. Hour after hour, CNN and MSNBC keep speculation boiling without reporting any facts accurately or “objectively”.
Whether many people share my unease with, say, the carelessness and vacuity of MSNBC or CNN or NPR or The Guardian or the New York Times is an interesting question. When Trump exclaims “fake news” I suppose he is taking advantage of widespread distrust. When I talk to people who like Rachel Maddow’s spiel, they assure me they trust her a lot. Some of them also think Trump might have paid hookers to pee on a hotel bed while he watched.
Hugh
edmondo, Obama is a private citizen and, like any US citizen, has First Amendment rights to endorse whomever he wants wherever he wants. Canadians can weigh in on what is and isn’t legal under Canadian law. You are perhaps thinking of 52 U.S. Code § 30121. Contributions and donations by foreign nationals which states in part: “It shall be unlawful for a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value in connection with a Federal, State, or local election.” You could argue that the endorsement of an important foreign national was a thing of value, but the prosecution of such a claim would fail because under the US Constitution foreign nationals have free speech rights too. This is not analogous to Trump’s violation of a different part of this statute which prohibits the solicitation of a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value from a foreign national.
edmondo
No High, what I was referring to was the constant and ridiculous claims that a \”Russian troll farm\” swayed an election where Hillary Clinton spent almost two billion dollars but couldn\’t afford a bus ticket to fuccking Wisconsin. Perhaps I was referring to the Steel Dossier which was paid for by the DNC and concocted by a foreign national under the employ of the US Government.
And maybe I was referring to the Democrats who insisted foreign interference in OUR election was an act of war but those who suffer from TDS cannot see that American interference in others\’ elections is quite normal and even admirable.
nihil obstet
Many people confuse facts and information. Information is facts set in a context that gives meaning. Easy example: you see a job in South Africa advertised for 25,000 rand a month. Based on pay alone, would you explore the job further? It is a fact that the job would pay R25,000/month. What you need is information, which comes from context (what’s that in dollars/euros, how much is required for your expected lifestyle, etc.). Information is what Hugh gives us in his jobs reports comments, rather than just posting raw numbers.
Journalists frequently need to report information. It’s the context they use to convert the facts into information that constitutes the bias. The elite mainstream media use the context set by experts anointed by the credentialing establishment of expensive prestigious universities, think tanks, and high status employment. Good example today comes from Dean Baker’s takedown of the AP’s “fact” checking of one of Warren’s statements from last night.
The Allsides is absolute nonsense. My best guess at what’s behind it is a judgment of the experts whose views set the context. When a medium uses academics or Democratic operatives to appeal to for “facts” (really information), it’s called left. When it uses corporate executives or Republican operatives, it’s called right.
nihil obstet
@Hugh
This puzzles me. Yes, foreign nationals have free speech rights under the constitution. According to the Supreme Court, donating money to a campaign is protected as exercising free speech. How is it legal to deny anyone, foreign nationals included, free speech rights? Has anyone addressed this question?
Hugh
Great point. I would love to see a court case on this, but I don’t think there has been one.
Hugh
Money is speech came out of Buckley v Valeo (1976). From the per curiam opinion,
https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/424/1
The language of the opinion indicates that its scope is confined to citizens.
nihil obstet
I still don’t get it. The opinion says that citizens need to make informed choices, not that the right to provide information is limited to citizens. The courts have consistently ruled in favor of boundless rights for the American oligarchy, and propagandized their decisions with high-sounding invocations of constitutional freedom. Meanwhile, they make inconsistent rulings to limit the rights of everybody else (“the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact” as they blithely carve out exceptions for the favored).
It reminds me of the old movies of the 40s, 50s, and 60s. In Nazi Germany, citizens longing for freedom secretly listened to BBC broadcasts. In the Soviet Union, citizens longing for good information secretly huddled over radios to hear America’s Radio Free Europe broadcasts. Now, in the new age of American freedom, we’re having fits over Russia publishing information for American citizens, without regard for whether it’s accurate or not, or whether it differs from what an American outlet could publish.
metamars
Many, probably most, lefty media and organization are corrupted and coopted. You can still find old copies of the relevant leftgatekeepers.com on the wayback machine, if you go back far enough. E.g., 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060110052741/http://leftgatekeepers.com/articles.htm
Here is what I think of as their signature graphic (a chart of organizations that fund various left wing media) https://web.archive.org/web/20051213205246/http://leftgatekeepers.com/chart.htm
===================================================
Many, probably most, conservative media are corrupted and coopted. E.g., the more authentic conservative youtuber Vincent James outed Charlie Kirk, of Turning Point USA fame, in “How FAKE Conservatives Took Over the Conservative Movement” @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnlJzJGyfPc&t=11s
Like leftgatekeepers.com, Vincent James follows the money.
Mike Barry
Actually, Vincent James, aka Vincent James Foxx, is a worthless piece of Nazi filth, as exposed in an Orange County site OC WEEKLY‘s post:
Mike Barry
ADL Gave Free Pass to OC’s Alt-Losers in Laguna Beach Report
(Damning screen shots at the link.)
Sorry for the split post.
metamars
The article you link to is not well written, and reeks of being a hit piece.
There is nothing on Vincent James’ Youtube channel about Jason Kessler, but there are 2 hits on his website. The more relevant one is: “Organizer Of ‘Alt-Right’ Rally Speaks “Virginia’s Governor Has Blood On His Hands” @ http://theredelephants.com/alt-right-rally-organizer-speaks-virginias-governor-blood-hands/ (the other is: Charlottesville Smells Like George Soros)
From the article:
“Kessler highlighted in the conversation that the permit for the rally was reinstated by a federal judge after officials in Virginia tried to revoke it. Kessler says that even the ACLU backed them in getting the permit resinated as he worked for months to organize this with rally with the Virginia government.
Kessler says that if their demonstration was allowed to go on inside the park they had a permit in, there wouldn’t have been people clashing in the streets. He also added that if the Charlottesville police had done the job that they stated they would do in separating the two sides and allowing their right to free assembly to happen, no one would have gotten hurt.
“The Charlottesville police didn’t even show up until after the rally was shut down by Virginia state police.” We will be filing a class action lawsuit.”
Apparently, your source would like me to infer that Vincent James is a white supremacist at best, and a crypto Neo-Nazi at worst. An alternative view, not propaganda-friendly, is that he is a conservative, probably sympathetic to the avowed purpose of the Charlottesville demonstration (against removal of a Robert E. Lee statue), and took the time and trouble to interview somebody with first hand knowledge. After all, the events there were sure to be used to smear conservatives and Trump supporters, so why would he NOT want to investigate?
I can’t remember the details, and am not about to go looking them up, but I concluded, at the time, that government officials were ultimately to blame for allowing the chaos. This is reminiscent of what police in NYC did to discredit Occupy Wall Street. They directed homeless people to go camp at the site. Many of them have mental problems. That includes (I’ll guess) the homeless dude who took a dump, right out in the open, while leaning against a car at or near the site at Zucotti Park.
This served as fodder for at least some right wing types (who are as objective and fair as your source) to call the occupiers “disgusting”. E.g., Devvy Kidd, who’s a very conservative constitutionalist. I generally like the things Kidd says, at least when she’s opining on what’s constitutional and what isn’t; and ragging on the Republicans with almost as much gusto as the Democrats; but she just couldn’t control her desire to smear her political opponents.
Not impressive.
I suggest that you not trust your source.
WheresOurTeddy
Everything on that list in the left two columns except Jacobin and The Intercept are center or center-right.
This list is absurd. If CNN and MSNBC are “far left”, I’m Leon Trotsky himself.
Mike Barry
“Apparently, your source would like me to infer that Vincent James is a white supremacist at best, and a crypto Neo-Nazi at worst.” — metamars
Actually my source stated that point blank, and backed it up with damning screen shots. No inferences required.
As for Jason Kessler, I wrote nothing and care less about him. tl;dr.
metamars
Jimmy Dore was in good form, pointing out the media liars who are smearing Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian asset. I think most of the people he mentioned are mainstream, but he did also mention a guy from TheRealNews.com.
“Tulsi Calls Out CNN To Their Face!” @ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_iJsy-bJ-k
I personally don’t view war-mongering (and incessant lying, and lying by omission, in support of same) as either a conservative or liberal position. It’s more about an up/down dichotomy, where the elite agendas encompass both financial motives and lust for power.
450.org
Tulsi isn’t a Russian asset, she’s an AIPAC asset. The alignment of Israel with the Nazis in America is unnervingly ironic and I suppose one could say fitting and inevitable. Fifty years prior they were hunting down German Nazis in South America and North America. Today, they’re enabling a American, homegrown, organic crop of Nazis in a strategy that would make both Orwell and Machiavelli blush.
I’m not sure there’s a full understanding of what Never Again really means; The extent of that slogan and all its implications.
450.org
Case in point. Dig deep on this nice, young, fresh Jewish lad, and you will find he’s affiliated with the same folks who handled and ultimately executed Epstein.
Meet David James Feiner, Recent CSULB Graduate With Far-right Ties
metamars
“Tulsi isn’t a Russian asset, she’s an AIPAC asset. ”
I assume you’re being sarcastic. If Tulsi was an AIPAC asset, she would not have gone to Syria with Rand Paul, and called for dialogue with the Syrian government.
At some point, I assume that Israel will want to make like some Arab governments, and normalize relations with Syria, as that will be their ticket to getting Iranian forces out of Syria; and the regime change death cult gang lost; and Trump appears to be successfully resisting the bipartisan “stay in Syria” crowd. In the meantime, they are probably still more interested in cheap and stolen Syrian oil.
And…., and Putin & Lavrov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fG3jeiJpuBg
different clue
@metamars
The “Tulsi isn’t a Russian asset, she’s an AIPAC asset” statement is not sarcastic. It is sincere and sincerely believed. If I am wrong about that, I suppose 450.org will correct me.