I can see how this kind of writing plays into the tribalism dynamics, but these specific examples seem to me to be more of an ongoing problem with journalism itself. It's cognitive bias, but journalists are meant to be trained to push all sides of a question really deeply and to continually check their own biases. I get what you're saying, but a long time ago, when I was a Not-Good Journalist, my first boss taught me what was gospel at the time, which was, when you're interviewing someone, to always ask "Why is this m-- fu-- lying to me?" It sounds confrontational but the point is to not accept what you're being told at face value. Like many other outlets, the NYT has succumbed to access journalism on many fronts, and protecting access at all costs means sacrificing the actual journalism. Whatever role these examples play in tribalism, I don't think you can fix that without shaking up journalism itself.
That said, I gave this a lot of thought and one thing that occurred to me is that, while I am obviously a left-wing person, I don't think of NYT as part of my tribe. They've gotten enough things flat-out wrong over the years that I don't trust their reporting in general (part of the problem being the aforementioned access journalism), but I also find their characterizations of regions like mine -- conservative, rural, intermountain West -- to be so off-base that it makes me question how they portray everywhere and everyone else.
Which is only to say that I wonder if better cognition can be found in probing the kinds of disconnects between what is considered one's tribe or not. It seems a generative area to work in. No matter how much I don't consider NYT or Rachel Maddow part of my "tribe," the conservative people around me certainly do so I have to contend with that anyway. The kinds of articles you're describing actually do a lot of damage. But I can't change the NYT's journalism, so put my energies in building relationships that can somewhat mitigate the effects of this kind of "reporting." It gets harder all the time.
(I realize that as an experienced reporter you know all of this about journalism; I'm thinking out loud here particularly for anyone who doesn't have this background.)
And now I am also wondering -- what does the NYT imagine its tribe is? I imagine most of their staff would say they're objective and don't have a tribe, but another way to frame the same question is to ask: When they're writing pieces like this, who is left out of their imagined audience? I'd guess it's not just devoted Fox viewers. That's maybe a more interesting question.
Evidently, the NYT has become so large that it's become almost like a "nation" with various tribes in it. Journalism at this scale is a cause for concern itself.
Good description! It is a problem, especially as NYT -- and many other outlets, not to pick on it in particular -- portrays itself as the voice of a particular tribe without investing resources in covering the many variations within that tribe. (I didn't love it when they hired Brett Stephens, but a big part of my response was that they could have used that money to invest in stringers all over the country who lived and worked in the kinds of communities that they keep trying, and failing, to understand. Instead we got endless "men in diners still like Trump" stories.)
After several writers and editors left (or were fired) by the NYT in the last year or two, the consensus among many former insiders is that the NYT is firmly in the "Woke" Camp, a more militant subset of the Blue Tribe.
I have to admit I find the whole "wokeness" thing hard to take seriously. It's one of those things that's used ubiquitously but rarely defined. And people like Sam Harris seem to use it to apply to anything that doesn't fit within their own frameworks of acceptable discourse. I'm willing to be persuaded! I just haven't heard anything that doesn't sound like an Intellectual Dark Web echo chamber, while at the same time it seems to be applied to anything that might be categorized as "caring about other people." And NYT still runs Brett Stephens's and other very conservative voices. I feel like it's less woke (again, whatever that specifically means) than failing to engage with the real world, real people, and real communities throughout the U.S. Basically, I think that NYT leadership fails to think intelligently about a lot of real issues.
Maybe the AAP community should, with well-framed questions from Robert, think more deeply about what *we* imagine Blue and Red tribes to be.
People are losing their careers and status because of the Woke Camp, so it's definitely a real thing. Its origins lie with Critical Race Theory that started in academia in the 1970's but has now become mainstreamed (Trumpism gave it a big boost). I'm doing extreme paraphrasing here, but its premise is that we have really made no progress in solving racism, sexism, and other isms and that everything must be seen as a constant power struggle between privilege and oppression. Free speech is dangerous so deplatforming the Other side is necessary to avoid pernicious ideas from taking hold.
By the way, Brett Stephens and the other conservatives left at the NYT (Douthat, Brooks) are classically liberal in the Enlightenment sense and can hardly be considered very far right anymore. There are no Trumpers in the opinion section of the Times (they way there are at, say, the Post).
There's a lot going on here, and I'd need more definitions before understanding it (like what is a "Woke Camp"?). I hadn't heard of Critical Race Theory until some extremely right-wing people started throwing the phrase around while trying to take over local school boards a couple months ago. The literally said that CRT is the idea that racism exists and slavery was bad, and that teaching those things is the most dangerous thing our school districts face (this is not paraphrasing). So CRT, as it relates to my specific life experience, is a good thing. I grew up in this area (northwest Montana), which has long harbored extreme white nationalist groups, and any advancement against racism here is progress. This is just to give you context of where my perspective comes from.
Also, I think this is why defining what we imagine tribes to be could be useful. Stephens is right-wing in my book purely due to his stance on climate change. Whether someone is liberal in the Englightenment sense or not, or even whether they're a Trumper or not, isn't actually that useful in my day to day thinking. The structure of my life and the kinds of challenges my community faces require me to engage with specific tangibles. I imagine that's true of a *lot* of people but there aren't many big national voices who give space for that perspective.
"Stephens is right-wing in my book purely due to his stance on climate change."
It's interesting how we often pigeon-hole individuals on the basis of one particular stance they take. I do it all the time, and especially when it comes to climate change, which I consider *the* existential threat, I have very little patience with someone (like Bret Stephens) who doesn't share my view on the urgency to address it (in ways that would get me a 0.001% approval rating if I were to ever run for political office in the US).
The problem I have is that it often takes an incredible amount of time to research someone's position, i.e., whether it's informed by current science, cultural sensitivity, or habitual ways of thinking or blatant self-interest (being on a company payroll or other conflicts of interest)--or not informed at all.
The most efficient way seems to sort (semi-)public figures into pigeon-holes, but nuance is then often loss, and people may talk cross-purposes even when talking about the same person.
Check out Andrew Sullivan's Substack for a pretty good intellectual deconstruction and refutation of "wokeness" from a classically "Englightenment" gay liberal: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/
That was very comprehensive, thank you. I told a lie; I *have* heard this before, maybe on Doug Rushkoff's Team Human podcast? The idea is clear, but maybe unless you've experienced it directly it's hard to perceive how it consistently plays out in the real world. It seems like the kind of thing for which an extreme version would burn itself out over time because if too many people become "victims" of it (as that's described), you're not left with a lot.
Personally, I feel that approaches like Robert's AAP-via-cognitive empathy are the best approach for helping that burnout happen faster. There are so few narratives in the national (and international) discourse; making those narratives more varied and complex gives people more of an "in" to grappling with problems that feel intractable. That, and finding ways to engage people in community-building. That is where the best conversations happen IMHO because building relationships provides a space for people to ask questions and open conversations they might not feel safe to elsewhere. I can only personally control so much, so that's where I put my energy.
My father, who grew up under Stalin in the Soviet Union, always says that the biggest problem with humanity is lack of imagination. I think by that he means the kind of cognitive empathy we discuss here. Without imagination, people do tend to turn to easy solutions and strategies. It's up to all of us to show that there are different ways to build a just society.
I've been thinking some about this lately. Whenever "our side" says, "I wish the red-staters would get their information from some source other than Fox News," I reflexively agree. But then, I step back and realize there's NO WAY we, in our household, are ever going to watch Fox News. Ever. If we won't watch Fox News, how can we ask Fox Newsers to watch CNN or MSNBC?
I used to love watching "The Daily Show with John Stewart." For 20 years, I would laugh at those idiots who made fools of themselves interviewed in correspondent pieces, and shake my head at the ridiculousness of Fox News and its gullible audience.
Now, of course, I see my part in getting Trump elected. Nobody likes to be bullied or made fun of or be the constant butt of jokes but that IS what my Blue tribe did to the Red tribe for lo those many years, mocking their way of life and their values.
Of course, someone won't be able to help themselves and will declare "They deserved it!" but I am fairly convinced we are getting our comeuppance for holding so many of our fellow citizens "in contempt" for so many years. Was it any wonder the Red Tribe's number one priority was "owning the libs" when voting for Trump?
I agree with your much-needed comments. Though I feel you are perhaps a bit over-solicitous of the Times' contemporary slant.
Just because Trump had a difficult relationship with the truth, and a number of right-wing media sources seemingly deliver nonstop dishonest propaganda, is no reason for progressives to do the same. But they do, to an infuriating degree.
Bob, how do you get your news? Do you read a lot of different newspapers' versions of the same story and try to get at the truth by comparing/contrasting them or is there a newspaper that you feel consistently does a great job of combatting these biases and providing as factual an account as possible? If it's the former, is there a news outlet you'd recommended for one-stop-shopping?
I get to a lot of the news via my twitter feed, and since i follow a fairly ideologically diverse group of people on twitter, that leads me to lots of different sources. but I also check in each day with NYT, WPost, and WSJ--in part because they have some good reporting but in part because I know they're influential and help shape the agenda. I also look at Google News, though its algorithm can turn it into your own personal echo chamber.
Now I am retired so I read a lot! If I were working I would probably stop my digital subscriptions to the Washington Post and NY Times (both left of center). I would continue reading the digital editions of news sent to me daily by www.reuters.com, https://apnews.com/, https://www.bbc.com/news that are the least biased sources.
www.unheard.com = right of center bias…as you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places…free
www.readtangle.com = roundup of what the left, right and center are saying about the story of the day with the writer’s personal take…free and paid options
www.vox.com = free and donation requested…left bias
https://quincyinst.org/ = The Quincy Institute promotes ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace. Free and donations requested.
I try to avoid daily news as much as I can (I often fail), except for my local paper. I subscribe to the LA Times and The Guardian (where I mostly read environmental reporting), and sometimes read The American Conservative (I write a lot on walking and walkability, and they used to run a lot of adjacent material about that, connected to their interest in communities). I subscribe to a daily news service from The Overhead Wire, which collects stories related to transit, planning, and pedestrian issues. I don't read through it every day, but those subjects hit a wide variety of areas (the person who compiles it reads hundreds of articles daily). It's a refreshing lens through which to view the same old issues.
Online I also subscribe to Aeon, which does daily "big idea" longform essays on any topic you can think of, Sapiens (articles about anthropology), and The American Scholar. In print, The Atlantic (mostly for science and culture pieces) and High Country News, which only covers the American West and does it really, really well.
I listen to probably too many podcasts to list here, but do my best to make them different from the ones most people I know listen to. And I use an app called Curio -- not free -- where journalists read news stories. All sorts of outlets have their stuff there, from The Financial Times to The Guardian to The Point (more literary) to Nautilus (science essays). They don't record every news story, just particular ones.
I'm a pretty liberal guy who subscribes to the online editions of NYT and WaPo, but I also check The American Conservative and The Dispatch regularly for two different types of conservative views. AmCon tends to be more socially conservative and interventionist skeptical, while The Dispatch features writers like Jonah Goldberg who are more interventionist. My only recent complaint is that some writers at AmCon who used to be interesting (like Rod Dreher) are now just bitching about wokeness and CRT 24/7.
I subscribe to the NYT online edition, but I don't really enjoy reading electronically, so I generally limit myself to a few articles and David Leonhardt's news summary. In addition to the Wright Show and the Nonzero Newsletter, I also read Matt Yglesias's newsletter and listen to various podcasts (Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Loury, and, occasionally, Bill Kristol).
Thanks for writing this piece, Bob, and I'm sort of struck by how much some of the commenters can't help themselves in calling you out. Even after including your thorough disclaimers, some people still refuse to give an intellectually honest inch if it means the Other Tribe will get some credit for anything. This is so disheartening and makes me even more pessimistic that we can overcome any of our tribalism even out of the boxing ring of social media.
Looking at it from a more positive angle, this might be just the first two stages of grief: denial and anger. Looking more broadly, I think many on the left (and also on the right) are in the stage of depression. Here's hoping they'll move to acceptance (mainly of their own faults, including the naive realism that "data" and "facts" reveal an irrevocable truth that can be readily deployed in rational arguments) soon.
Kinda sad that the NYT is considered center left. It shows how far right our left is. After years of examining the content published, overall i find a neoliberal slant and business as usual attitude. And sorry, anything touched by bezos is tainted.
Bob, I agree with your dissection of cognitive bias in center-left outlets like the Times. It's something that I've been increasingly trying to look out for. But I wonder how much this is just more "both sides-ism" that consistently bedevils journalism school writers. Re: your Charlottesville example, you are probably correct that the Times slightly mischaracterized Trump's statements. But on the other hand, there is no doubt at all, based upon dozens of examples over the last 6 (or more) years that Trump sends overt messages to his tribe that he sympathizes with their racist feelings. So perhaps the Times accurately captured the truth of Trump's feelings about the events in Charlottesville.
Bob, do you actually believe, after 6+ years of evidence, going back to the "birther" issue, that Donald Trump doesn't explicitly, overtly, and intentionally appeal to the most racist fringes of the "red tribe"? I think in this case you are attempting, for high-minded and noble reasons, to "both-sides" here, even though there is absolutely no equating the red tribe's outright lies and propoganda with the much more nuanced cognitive bias of the center-left press.
Why would you think I'm taking any position at all on whether Trump is intentionally appealing to racists? I explicitly said in the piece that for all I know his Charlottesville statement *was* a dog whistle--but that has nothing to do with the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that if mainstream (and de facto blue) media misrepresent what Trump says, that makes people in the red tribe even more skeptical of mainstream media, even more convinced that Trump's "fake news" claims are true, even more convinced that blue tribe elites hate Trump, etc., etc. etc. So Trump's followers become even more intensely attached to him and also more likely to cling to or generate misinformation of their own, and so on. So when the Times misreports what Trump said, it ends up being bad for America and, arguably, bad even for the blue tribe.
Since Fisher published this article, he's published The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our minds and Our World (Little, Brown, September 2022). I'm looking forward to hearing what you think of the many ways Fisher uses evolutionary psychology there in analyzing the causes of the nation's current hyper-partisanship -- or maybe to an interview with Max Fisher on the subject!
If exposing a secret meeting between the trump campaign and a Russian spy who had dirt on Hillary 2 weeks prior to wikileaks isn't a smoking gun, I don't know what is.
Also, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single white supremacist who thought Trump condemned them.
Bob, you are comparing apples and oranges. The misstatements of the paper of record are not comparable to the “vibe” in the red tribe. If you were going to compare the Times accurately, a comparable benchmark would have been a “respected” organ of the right-the National Review, etc.
I’m not sure in the post-9/11 world that there has been the same overt misinformation out of this sector (I’m completely holding right wing-neocon-media accountable for misinformation surrounding 9/11) as has been recently evident in the leftist, legacy media.
Yes, I acknowledged that the two aren't strictly comparable. I wrote: "I’m not saying the two kinds of misinformation are equal in quantity or quality. You could do a whole dissertation on differences in the kinds of cognitive distortions the two tribes are most susceptible to. What’s clear is that the two are locked into a vicious circle: the crazier and more hostile the information coming from the other tribe seems, the more threatening that tribe seems, and the more deeply inclined your tribe will be to latch onto and spread dubious information that demonizes the other tribe."
If you click on the word bubble icon it takes you to the comments section without giving Bob a heart and you can then comment without neutrally or even disdainfully, if you so desire.
I can see how this kind of writing plays into the tribalism dynamics, but these specific examples seem to me to be more of an ongoing problem with journalism itself. It's cognitive bias, but journalists are meant to be trained to push all sides of a question really deeply and to continually check their own biases. I get what you're saying, but a long time ago, when I was a Not-Good Journalist, my first boss taught me what was gospel at the time, which was, when you're interviewing someone, to always ask "Why is this m-- fu-- lying to me?" It sounds confrontational but the point is to not accept what you're being told at face value. Like many other outlets, the NYT has succumbed to access journalism on many fronts, and protecting access at all costs means sacrificing the actual journalism. Whatever role these examples play in tribalism, I don't think you can fix that without shaking up journalism itself.
That said, I gave this a lot of thought and one thing that occurred to me is that, while I am obviously a left-wing person, I don't think of NYT as part of my tribe. They've gotten enough things flat-out wrong over the years that I don't trust their reporting in general (part of the problem being the aforementioned access journalism), but I also find their characterizations of regions like mine -- conservative, rural, intermountain West -- to be so off-base that it makes me question how they portray everywhere and everyone else.
Which is only to say that I wonder if better cognition can be found in probing the kinds of disconnects between what is considered one's tribe or not. It seems a generative area to work in. No matter how much I don't consider NYT or Rachel Maddow part of my "tribe," the conservative people around me certainly do so I have to contend with that anyway. The kinds of articles you're describing actually do a lot of damage. But I can't change the NYT's journalism, so put my energies in building relationships that can somewhat mitigate the effects of this kind of "reporting." It gets harder all the time.
(I realize that as an experienced reporter you know all of this about journalism; I'm thinking out loud here particularly for anyone who doesn't have this background.)
And now I am also wondering -- what does the NYT imagine its tribe is? I imagine most of their staff would say they're objective and don't have a tribe, but another way to frame the same question is to ask: When they're writing pieces like this, who is left out of their imagined audience? I'd guess it's not just devoted Fox viewers. That's maybe a more interesting question.
"what does the NYT imagine its tribe is?"
Evidently, the NYT has become so large that it's become almost like a "nation" with various tribes in it. Journalism at this scale is a cause for concern itself.
Good description! It is a problem, especially as NYT -- and many other outlets, not to pick on it in particular -- portrays itself as the voice of a particular tribe without investing resources in covering the many variations within that tribe. (I didn't love it when they hired Brett Stephens, but a big part of my response was that they could have used that money to invest in stringers all over the country who lived and worked in the kinds of communities that they keep trying, and failing, to understand. Instead we got endless "men in diners still like Trump" stories.)
After several writers and editors left (or were fired) by the NYT in the last year or two, the consensus among many former insiders is that the NYT is firmly in the "Woke" Camp, a more militant subset of the Blue Tribe.
I have to admit I find the whole "wokeness" thing hard to take seriously. It's one of those things that's used ubiquitously but rarely defined. And people like Sam Harris seem to use it to apply to anything that doesn't fit within their own frameworks of acceptable discourse. I'm willing to be persuaded! I just haven't heard anything that doesn't sound like an Intellectual Dark Web echo chamber, while at the same time it seems to be applied to anything that might be categorized as "caring about other people." And NYT still runs Brett Stephens's and other very conservative voices. I feel like it's less woke (again, whatever that specifically means) than failing to engage with the real world, real people, and real communities throughout the U.S. Basically, I think that NYT leadership fails to think intelligently about a lot of real issues.
Maybe the AAP community should, with well-framed questions from Robert, think more deeply about what *we* imagine Blue and Red tribes to be.
People are losing their careers and status because of the Woke Camp, so it's definitely a real thing. Its origins lie with Critical Race Theory that started in academia in the 1970's but has now become mainstreamed (Trumpism gave it a big boost). I'm doing extreme paraphrasing here, but its premise is that we have really made no progress in solving racism, sexism, and other isms and that everything must be seen as a constant power struggle between privilege and oppression. Free speech is dangerous so deplatforming the Other side is necessary to avoid pernicious ideas from taking hold.
By the way, Brett Stephens and the other conservatives left at the NYT (Douthat, Brooks) are classically liberal in the Enlightenment sense and can hardly be considered very far right anymore. There are no Trumpers in the opinion section of the Times (they way there are at, say, the Post).
There's a lot going on here, and I'd need more definitions before understanding it (like what is a "Woke Camp"?). I hadn't heard of Critical Race Theory until some extremely right-wing people started throwing the phrase around while trying to take over local school boards a couple months ago. The literally said that CRT is the idea that racism exists and slavery was bad, and that teaching those things is the most dangerous thing our school districts face (this is not paraphrasing). So CRT, as it relates to my specific life experience, is a good thing. I grew up in this area (northwest Montana), which has long harbored extreme white nationalist groups, and any advancement against racism here is progress. This is just to give you context of where my perspective comes from.
Also, I think this is why defining what we imagine tribes to be could be useful. Stephens is right-wing in my book purely due to his stance on climate change. Whether someone is liberal in the Englightenment sense or not, or even whether they're a Trumper or not, isn't actually that useful in my day to day thinking. The structure of my life and the kinds of challenges my community faces require me to engage with specific tangibles. I imagine that's true of a *lot* of people but there aren't many big national voices who give space for that perspective.
"Stephens is right-wing in my book purely due to his stance on climate change."
It's interesting how we often pigeon-hole individuals on the basis of one particular stance they take. I do it all the time, and especially when it comes to climate change, which I consider *the* existential threat, I have very little patience with someone (like Bret Stephens) who doesn't share my view on the urgency to address it (in ways that would get me a 0.001% approval rating if I were to ever run for political office in the US).
The problem I have is that it often takes an incredible amount of time to research someone's position, i.e., whether it's informed by current science, cultural sensitivity, or habitual ways of thinking or blatant self-interest (being on a company payroll or other conflicts of interest)--or not informed at all.
The most efficient way seems to sort (semi-)public figures into pigeon-holes, but nuance is then often loss, and people may talk cross-purposes even when talking about the same person.
Check out Andrew Sullivan's Substack for a pretty good intellectual deconstruction and refutation of "wokeness" from a classically "Englightenment" gay liberal: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/
That was very comprehensive, thank you. I told a lie; I *have* heard this before, maybe on Doug Rushkoff's Team Human podcast? The idea is clear, but maybe unless you've experienced it directly it's hard to perceive how it consistently plays out in the real world. It seems like the kind of thing for which an extreme version would burn itself out over time because if too many people become "victims" of it (as that's described), you're not left with a lot.
Personally, I feel that approaches like Robert's AAP-via-cognitive empathy are the best approach for helping that burnout happen faster. There are so few narratives in the national (and international) discourse; making those narratives more varied and complex gives people more of an "in" to grappling with problems that feel intractable. That, and finding ways to engage people in community-building. That is where the best conversations happen IMHO because building relationships provides a space for people to ask questions and open conversations they might not feel safe to elsewhere. I can only personally control so much, so that's where I put my energy.
My father, who grew up under Stalin in the Soviet Union, always says that the biggest problem with humanity is lack of imagination. I think by that he means the kind of cognitive empathy we discuss here. Without imagination, people do tend to turn to easy solutions and strategies. It's up to all of us to show that there are different ways to build a just society.
I've been thinking some about this lately. Whenever "our side" says, "I wish the red-staters would get their information from some source other than Fox News," I reflexively agree. But then, I step back and realize there's NO WAY we, in our household, are ever going to watch Fox News. Ever. If we won't watch Fox News, how can we ask Fox Newsers to watch CNN or MSNBC?
I used to love watching "The Daily Show with John Stewart." For 20 years, I would laugh at those idiots who made fools of themselves interviewed in correspondent pieces, and shake my head at the ridiculousness of Fox News and its gullible audience.
Now, of course, I see my part in getting Trump elected. Nobody likes to be bullied or made fun of or be the constant butt of jokes but that IS what my Blue tribe did to the Red tribe for lo those many years, mocking their way of life and their values.
Of course, someone won't be able to help themselves and will declare "They deserved it!" but I am fairly convinced we are getting our comeuppance for holding so many of our fellow citizens "in contempt" for so many years. Was it any wonder the Red Tribe's number one priority was "owning the libs" when voting for Trump?
I agree with your much-needed comments. Though I feel you are perhaps a bit over-solicitous of the Times' contemporary slant.
Just because Trump had a difficult relationship with the truth, and a number of right-wing media sources seemingly deliver nonstop dishonest propaganda, is no reason for progressives to do the same. But they do, to an infuriating degree.
You should take a look at Arnold Kling's "Fantasy Intellectual Teams," which is a similar project from the libertarian (if not fully red) tribe.
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/reflections-on-fits-so-far/
Bob is on one of the rosters and is scoring a ton of points . . .
http://www.arnoldkling.com/fits/p5teams.html
In fact, Arnold would make a great guest on a future Wright Show
yeah, he's been on bloggingheads a few times, years ago.
Bob, how do you get your news? Do you read a lot of different newspapers' versions of the same story and try to get at the truth by comparing/contrasting them or is there a newspaper that you feel consistently does a great job of combatting these biases and providing as factual an account as possible? If it's the former, is there a news outlet you'd recommended for one-stop-shopping?
I get to a lot of the news via my twitter feed, and since i follow a fairly ideologically diverse group of people on twitter, that leads me to lots of different sources. but I also check in each day with NYT, WPost, and WSJ--in part because they have some good reporting but in part because I know they're influential and help shape the agenda. I also look at Google News, though its algorithm can turn it into your own personal echo chamber.
This sounds like a good prompt for a separate subscriber-only thread. I'd love to know where other people get their news AND deeper ideas!
Now I am retired so I read a lot! If I were working I would probably stop my digital subscriptions to the Washington Post and NY Times (both left of center). I would continue reading the digital editions of news sent to me daily by www.reuters.com, https://apnews.com/, https://www.bbc.com/news that are the least biased sources.
www.unheard.com = right of center bias…as you may have guessed from our strange spelling, UnHerd aims to do two things: to push back against the herd mentality with new and bold thinking, and to provide a platform for otherwise unheard ideas, people and places…free
www.readtangle.com = roundup of what the left, right and center are saying about the story of the day with the writer’s personal take…free and paid options
https://theconversation.com/us = free and donation requested
https://www.snopes.com/ = free and donation requested…least biased
www.vox.com = free and donation requested…left bias
https://quincyinst.org/ = The Quincy Institute promotes ideas that move U.S. foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace. Free and donations requested.
www.theatlantic.com = subscription…left bias
www.theguardian.com = free and subscription offered
https://www.persuasion.community/ = free and subscription offered
www.orlandosentinel.com = left-center bias…I live in Orlando
and a few I don’t mention ;-).
I try to avoid daily news as much as I can (I often fail), except for my local paper. I subscribe to the LA Times and The Guardian (where I mostly read environmental reporting), and sometimes read The American Conservative (I write a lot on walking and walkability, and they used to run a lot of adjacent material about that, connected to their interest in communities). I subscribe to a daily news service from The Overhead Wire, which collects stories related to transit, planning, and pedestrian issues. I don't read through it every day, but those subjects hit a wide variety of areas (the person who compiles it reads hundreds of articles daily). It's a refreshing lens through which to view the same old issues.
Online I also subscribe to Aeon, which does daily "big idea" longform essays on any topic you can think of, Sapiens (articles about anthropology), and The American Scholar. In print, The Atlantic (mostly for science and culture pieces) and High Country News, which only covers the American West and does it really, really well.
I listen to probably too many podcasts to list here, but do my best to make them different from the ones most people I know listen to. And I use an app called Curio -- not free -- where journalists read news stories. All sorts of outlets have their stuff there, from The Financial Times to The Guardian to The Point (more literary) to Nautilus (science essays). They don't record every news story, just particular ones.
I'm a pretty liberal guy who subscribes to the online editions of NYT and WaPo, but I also check The American Conservative and The Dispatch regularly for two different types of conservative views. AmCon tends to be more socially conservative and interventionist skeptical, while The Dispatch features writers like Jonah Goldberg who are more interventionist. My only recent complaint is that some writers at AmCon who used to be interesting (like Rod Dreher) are now just bitching about wokeness and CRT 24/7.
I subscribe to the NYT online edition, but I don't really enjoy reading electronically, so I generally limit myself to a few articles and David Leonhardt's news summary. In addition to the Wright Show and the Nonzero Newsletter, I also read Matt Yglesias's newsletter and listen to various podcasts (Ezra Klein, Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Loury, and, occasionally, Bill Kristol).
Thanks for writing this piece, Bob, and I'm sort of struck by how much some of the commenters can't help themselves in calling you out. Even after including your thorough disclaimers, some people still refuse to give an intellectually honest inch if it means the Other Tribe will get some credit for anything. This is so disheartening and makes me even more pessimistic that we can overcome any of our tribalism even out of the boxing ring of social media.
Looking at it from a more positive angle, this might be just the first two stages of grief: denial and anger. Looking more broadly, I think many on the left (and also on the right) are in the stage of depression. Here's hoping they'll move to acceptance (mainly of their own faults, including the naive realism that "data" and "facts" reveal an irrevocable truth that can be readily deployed in rational arguments) soon.
Kinda sad that the NYT is considered center left. It shows how far right our left is. After years of examining the content published, overall i find a neoliberal slant and business as usual attitude. And sorry, anything touched by bezos is tainted.
Bob, I agree with your dissection of cognitive bias in center-left outlets like the Times. It's something that I've been increasingly trying to look out for. But I wonder how much this is just more "both sides-ism" that consistently bedevils journalism school writers. Re: your Charlottesville example, you are probably correct that the Times slightly mischaracterized Trump's statements. But on the other hand, there is no doubt at all, based upon dozens of examples over the last 6 (or more) years that Trump sends overt messages to his tribe that he sympathizes with their racist feelings. So perhaps the Times accurately captured the truth of Trump's feelings about the events in Charlottesville.
Bob, do you actually believe, after 6+ years of evidence, going back to the "birther" issue, that Donald Trump doesn't explicitly, overtly, and intentionally appeal to the most racist fringes of the "red tribe"? I think in this case you are attempting, for high-minded and noble reasons, to "both-sides" here, even though there is absolutely no equating the red tribe's outright lies and propoganda with the much more nuanced cognitive bias of the center-left press.
Why would you think I'm taking any position at all on whether Trump is intentionally appealing to racists? I explicitly said in the piece that for all I know his Charlottesville statement *was* a dog whistle--but that has nothing to do with the point I'm making. The point I'm making is that if mainstream (and de facto blue) media misrepresent what Trump says, that makes people in the red tribe even more skeptical of mainstream media, even more convinced that Trump's "fake news" claims are true, even more convinced that blue tribe elites hate Trump, etc., etc. etc. So Trump's followers become even more intensely attached to him and also more likely to cling to or generate misinformation of their own, and so on. So when the Times misreports what Trump said, it ends up being bad for America and, arguably, bad even for the blue tribe.
Since Fisher published this article, he's published The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our minds and Our World (Little, Brown, September 2022). I'm looking forward to hearing what you think of the many ways Fisher uses evolutionary psychology there in analyzing the causes of the nation's current hyper-partisanship -- or maybe to an interview with Max Fisher on the subject!
If exposing a secret meeting between the trump campaign and a Russian spy who had dirt on Hillary 2 weeks prior to wikileaks isn't a smoking gun, I don't know what is.
Also, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a single white supremacist who thought Trump condemned them.
Excellent analysis.
Bob, you are comparing apples and oranges. The misstatements of the paper of record are not comparable to the “vibe” in the red tribe. If you were going to compare the Times accurately, a comparable benchmark would have been a “respected” organ of the right-the National Review, etc.
I’m not sure in the post-9/11 world that there has been the same overt misinformation out of this sector (I’m completely holding right wing-neocon-media accountable for misinformation surrounding 9/11) as has been recently evident in the leftist, legacy media.
Yes, I acknowledged that the two aren't strictly comparable. I wrote: "I’m not saying the two kinds of misinformation are equal in quantity or quality. You could do a whole dissertation on differences in the kinds of cognitive distortions the two tribes are most susceptible to. What’s clear is that the two are locked into a vicious circle: the crazier and more hostile the information coming from the other tribe seems, the more threatening that tribe seems, and the more deeply inclined your tribe will be to latch onto and spread dubious information that demonizes the other tribe."
Is it only possible to like and comment here ? That doesn't seem to allow for much dissent.
If you click on the word bubble icon it takes you to the comments section without giving Bob a heart and you can then comment without neutrally or even disdainfully, if you so desire.