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Yes and when people say that reading the MSM makes you less informed I don't think they realise how badly informed some voters are. Obviously ok you could do better than the MSM if you started pouring time into critically reading academic, industry or legal sources, but most Americans don't even understand how marginal tax rates work. You would probably be in the top 5% (or better) of well-informed voters if you read the NYT (or indeed, so as not to appear partisan, the WSJ) and nothing else cover to cover every day.
I’m reminded of the NYT study of low information voters during the 2024 campaign. Specifically, there was one woman they interviewed who liked Biden but was angry that he’d banned abortion and so planned to vote Trump. This woman lived in a blue state and so could have gotten all the abortions she wanted.
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It doesn’t make you uninformed, it does quite often make you misinformed. Yes, if you read NYT, you’ll know there’s a recession, you’ll know the unemployment rates, stock prices, and so on. But it will be misleadingly contextualized to appear that the recession is All Trump’s fault. And they’ll use their think piece section to push the idea that “is this the end of the Trump Era?”, “Will the Trump-cession cost Republicans control of Congress?” But when Biden was in charge, the NYT would cover the inflation and people not affording groceries as if it just happens like that sometimes. It’s the typical thing where they’re looking to the business cycle, Covid, the Republican Party holding up stimulus checks, bird flu, and everything else even if it’s nonsense. Conversely, economic booms are always caused by the Democrats’ economic policy — even when that democrat hasn’t been in power for years and most of the policies have been curtailed or reversed. The Trump boom, boys and girls, was really the Obama boom, at least according to the NYT.
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The argument is that you can model people as having three axes:
The question is: how does reading a mainstream serious newspaper (NYT/WSJ, etc.) affect each axis?
My personal answer is that I agree that proportion of known information is going to go up for newspaper readers. The accuracy, I don't know. Information directly stated by a newspaper is still usually accurate, but their bias leads them to communicate lots more information through implication that is inaccurate, e.g. reporting accurately on a given murder implies that such murders are common, or accurately reporting the words of an academic on Yasuke the black samurai (see below) may lead people to believe them even though the base research is fraudulent. Finally, confidence. I don't know whether 'low-information voters' are more or less epistemically confidence than the self-professed 'well-informed'; I'd say maybe slightly less?
*to the extent this is philosophically possible for different types of information
Good post overall, but low information voters are waaaaay more confident generally, that's why they don't need more information.
I'm not confident in that! Haha. In either direction. I suspect you have multiple groups of different kinds of non-news-reading voter, and that their confidence varies wildly depending on the topics, and even potentially on how it's brought up. People feel a lot less confident when they're comfortable than when they're under attack, for example. But I think that having an institutional backing telling you that you're a Very Serious Person gives you a bit more arrogance than you might otherwise have.
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