Tuesday, June 11, 2019

What's Wrong with these Headlines?

New York Times today:

As America Turns More Divided The Mood Turns More Tense
It's the first time in more than a century that all but one state legislature is dominated by a single party.
As each state's majority party pushes its agenda, the weaker one has grown more combative

Absolutely nothing there to suggest that the current American president pushes his agenda of division daily, as he did throughout the 2016 campaign. Nothing to suggest that Republicans have been playing extreme hardball in state legislature for decades and Democrats have been slow to catch on to these tactics. And Republican tactics have become more extreme - not only to suppress the votes of citizens, but to thwart the outcome of elections if a Democrat defeats a Republican governor, but the state legislature remains controlled by Republicans, by stripping the incoming governor of powers normally retained by the executive, which were enjoyed by his or her predecessor. See Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Ohio. (Incumbent Ohio governor refused to play, to his credit.)

The NYT has a strong bias toward skewing the facts toward a balanced conclusion when reporting on politics. Thus the NYT fails to distinguish between fair, accurate reporting and balance. Balance in reporting is regarding by traditional reporters as an attribute when a fair and accurate conclusion can not be known. But Republicans in office together with Fox News reporting have teamed together to furnish America with a 24/7 propaganda channel dedicated to keeping Republicans in office and their policies in place. This conspiracy of the right has built on a mountain of lies that has worsened with Trump as president. True balance would mean that a responsible news organization (i.e. NYT or WaPo) would confront the mountain of lies with the hard truth - not after-the-fact fact checking,which always comes too late because liars have already moved on to the next lie, thus controlling the overall narrative - but aggressive reporting on the fact of Fox News as lying propagandists.And not trying so hard with every news story to report "both sides" as equal and opposite as possibly true, when they are not. The net result of the narrative that America hears is Fox News propaganda on one side and NYT maybe-yes-maybe-no "balance", which ironically yields an  imbalance in sum while failing to be accurate by implying that some lies may be true.

The NYT article provides factual information about the contentiousness of activity in the divided state legislatures, but fails to note that extreme gerrymandering has been practiced more by Republicans - to greater effect on election outcomes - than Democrats. This is not to suggest that Democrats have been perfect in all cases, but observing how Republicans behave in office and looking for the same thing in Democrats will always yield some examples, but accurate reporting requires continuing the analysis at that point to report full context, rather than declaring vicotry - done, we found an example of Democrats behaving badly so "both sides do it".

We see this again in the recent NYT:
People are trying to figure out Bill Barr. Meanwhile He's Stockpiling Power. Is he the operator who spun the then-secret Mueller report? Or the straight shooter who later disclosed portions that were damaging to President Trump?
NYT syntax shows how they gravitate to the middle of all stories relating to politics. Their headlines often take the almost comical form "On the One Hand, Yes - But on the Other Hand ,No". Bill Barr wrote an unsolicited paper in support of unbridled presidential power - a job application for AG - prior to his nomination.

The problem with these headlines is that when the NYT is satisfied with any conclusion that validates the middle as true and treats with great skepticism any conclusion that treats one "side" as different qualitatively as different from the other "side" they themselves help to create the reality of a "divided" country because that behavior encourages more extreme tactics. Republicans know that the more extreme their tactics, the more the NYT will be willing to work toward the "safe" conclusion that Democrats do it too.

And why, NYT, is the opposite of "straight shooter" an "operator who spun the then-secret Mueller report"? Isn't the opposite of straight shooter a liar?

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