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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   33226 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022

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Earlier today I reread Neutral vs. Conservative: The Eternal Struggle, which seems useful background. My question is, you say:

Then there's what amounts to a very foolish, but understandable strategy.

Why? There's really no hope for conservatives to get fair representation in ostensibly neutral institutions, and nearly all the relevant voices on the Right have abandoned them. By ideology and cultural background, the participants in those institutions are incapable of thinking of alternative viewpoints as anything except motivated by evil. And we've reached a point where in 2021 only 12% of adults had a lot of trust in national news organizations, which is a record low.

At some point in the recent past it was probably true that national news organizations were more accurate/fair in their reporting than the explicit partisanship of right-aligned media. I don't think that's the case anymore. Even if you disagree, it's likely that the Right can convince an outright majority of voters that institutions are just a mirror image of Breitbart. Discrediting and delegitimization seems like a winning move.

I am not sure why you think that poll refers to the "liberal media," given that Fox News has been the #1 cable news channel for 20 years and that in Q2 of 2022, Fox had the top 8 cable news shows, and 9 of the top 10.

Fox News has been the #1 cable news channel for 20 years

And yet none of the CBS, ABC, or NBC newsmagazines or Sunday morning talk shows have taken note and even pivoted to neutrality. They remain staffed with left of center ex-Clinton and ex-Obama staffers with panels that, at best can be expected to have one milktoast Republican as a whipping boy.

That's a fair point, as it just refers to national media organizations and not particular organizations.

Reading the tea leaves, though, the high trust ratings are mostly sustained by Democrats in the same poll. It's unlikely that the organization Democrats are expressing high trust in is Fox, and the decline over the past several years is driven heavily by Republican and Republican-leaning adults, who are the primary targets of this strategy.

I like pointing to this, not because I think the study or survey is especially accurate -- the low quality of the methodology doesn't encourage! -- but because it's the sort of question people are asking when they ask this, and it says something when examined in close detail what that is.

It would be nice to see the leaners analyzed separately. Those are people whom both sides should be trying to reach, so it is their attitudes which should determine whether the strategy is wise.

How does Fox compare to CNN+MSNBC+ABC+NBC+CBS?

Well, based on the total data on the scribd document in the link to the Q2 2022 data, it looks like these are the audience totals (based on the third column, which appears to be how they are ranked):

CNBC 2132

CNN 6874

FBN 2446

FOXN 32390

HLN 288

MSNB 16002

NMX 2334

TOTAL 62466

But the point is not the exact percentages. The point is that, given that Fox is a very popular news organization, it is impossible to infer anything about the public views of "liberal media" from a poll that asks merely about "national news organizations." Perhaps those numbers are driven by declining trust in the "liberal media," or perhaps they are driven by a decline in trust in Fox News, or perhaps there has a decline in trust in all of the above. It is impossible to tell from that source.

My impression is that opinion in Fox had become extremely polarized by the mid Bush II years. Opinions on the other networks didn't really crater until the last 5-10 years. But at this point, almost no one has a generally favorable view of "the media". We might see a more nuanced picture if there were another question like "Is there any national televised news you think is trustworthy?"

At some point in the recent past it was probably true that national news organizations were more accurate/fair in their reporting than the explicit partisanship of right-aligned media.

ABC morning news in 2022 reminds me of clips John Stewart would play of Glenn Beck in 2004. Even the pretense of objectivity feels like gaslighting. They don't care at all that you learn any facts about what happened, the only important thing is that you feel who are the bad guys (the Republicans) and who are the good guys (the Democrats).

Did you see the “Stewart -> Tucker pipeline” article linked on ACX? It’s a closely related theory that Stewart’s Daily Show sold networks on exactly such a tribal news-adjacent program. Obama-era Fox pundits just figured out how to target it for their group, and by today it’s what all the major programs are trying to tap.

I found it pretty convincing.

Yeah, I saw that. Pretty close to my existing opinion on the influence of The Daily Show, except I think TDS had a much more destructive influence on the lefter shows than Fox, because Fox was already pretty low-brow culture war. I think TDS taught an entire generation of progressives that political debate consisted of sneering at maliciously edited caricatures of the outgroup, and we are still deaing with the repercussions of that.

Even if you disagree, it's likely that the Right can convince an outright majority of voters that institutions are just a mirror image of Breitbart. Discrediting and delegitimazation seems like a winning move.

Pushaw's specific strategy is to advocate for the right to stop speaking with journalists deemed "on the left". The problem is that she's just shifting where they'll get their info from the conservative reporter/site as opposed to the person themself. This is fine if your goal is to build up an army of right-friendly reporters (in the literal sense), not if your goal is to delegitimize your enemies. And now, they won't even have to ask that person to speak for themself, since everyone will know that "the right doesn't talk to the NYT". You'll just see "person X did not reply to requests for comment".

In my opinion, Pushaw's view on why people who say they are on the left or right might believe that the NYT is a fair journal is wrong. At the very least, it is not because they think the NYT has access to the comments from both sides, and even in her own hypothetical, they'd still have that access. Compare the following.

"Governor DeSantis told the NYT that he doesn't think he's anti-LGBT."

"Governor DeSantis told Pushaw's Trust Journalists that he doesn't think he's anti-LGBT."

If you saw the same article with only this distinction, would you tell anyone they were meaningfully different? I wouldn't. It's just another chain in the "where did this come from" game we all have to play.

If Pushaw wants to delegitimize the NYT, I don't think any plan is going to revolve significantly around the idea of not talking directly, even if that's something you'd do anyways.

This is fine if your goal is to build up an army of right-friendly reporters (in the literal sense), not if your goal is to delegitimize your enemies.

The right does not have the power to delegitimize its enemies in anyone's eyes but its own, and right now even that task is incomplete.

If you saw the same article with only this distinction, would you tell anyone they were meaningfully different? I wouldn't.

The problem is you would never see that article in the first place, at least framed that way. The interview would be chopped and pasted and recontextualized as something like "DeSantis angrily disputes homophobic concerns from civil rights groups". I watch network news in the morning because my parents do, and they want to talk to me about it, and the problem is exactly what Pushaw is talking about. They see 40 seconds of clips featuring three different question/responses from an interview with Hershel Walker, and they have no idea how long that interview was, what was left out, what context is being omitted, etc. They just get the impression that "Walker was interviewed by the news and this is what he had to say". They don't even notice until I point it out that that 40 seconds features more intense grilling than all Democrats combined have gotten on that channel in the last two years.

Compared to living with that crap, a full court press delegitimating effort is at least an actionable strategy. Actually treat them like the partisan SuperPAC they essentially are.

Gotcha. I agree that this will only marginally push the needle on delegitimization, albeit positively. Perhaps someone will go check out Pushaw Trust Journalists; perhaps the monoculture of who interacts with those institutions will make a couple more people skeptical of what they say or print.

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