Doubling Down

In the latest example of reporters doing only what they know how to do -  How Hillary Clinton helped create what she later called a 'vast right wing conspiracy' in  the Washington Post tells us what we could have guessed. You see, it's all her fault. If she had just been open about Whitewater at the beginning, it would have passed quickly and there would be none of these endless investigations. Oh, and this was really her decision, even though Bill, as president, was the decisionmaker. You see, you could tell by Bill's delivery that it was really Hillary talking.

Here we are - more emails. FBI releases Hillary Clinton email investigation documents.

WaPo even doubles down with a guide targeted to Millennials who missed those Clinton scandals that we are all supposed to remain obsessed about if we are "fair and balanced".  Those poor millennials need to understand that they should be less concerned about their future and more concerned about our past.

To Boldly Go Where No Responsible Journalist Has Gone Before

Political journalism faces a unique challenge of objectivity. We all vote or at least as an eligible voter, think about who we would vote for in any race. That makes every journalist suspect of bias in political reporting. In order to remove any possibility of biased reporting, responsible news outlets like the NYT and WaPo employ a traditional fair and balanced standard.

In practice, the fair and balanced standard looks like this:

When something happens, like a quote from a candidate at a rally, a release of emails from Wikileaks, the Supreme Court issues a ruling, it is reported straight - just the facts ma'am. In any situation deemed political in nature, the reaction of "both sides" is then sought and reported straight. It is up to "both sides" to challenge each others statements. Any evaluation of the quality of each side's response is left to the editorial page, but followup questions by the journalist can be ignored. OK, stop right there. That's a problem.  This means that the context - the setting- in which the story is placed is left to a battle between two opposing sides rather than an independent viewpoint. Why? Because we can not trust the independent journalist to fairly determine which issues are important and which are not, or which statements by one side or the other are misleading or distracting and which are right on point. That leaves a lot of room for one side or the other to divert attention away from issues that matter to people and toward issues that may be minor, but make a bigger splash in the news. Now, an independent competent journalist could pursue tough questioning on important issues, rather than gotcha questions that create excitement, but can leave a citizenry uninformed.

This fair and balanced traditional approach to objective reporting may have been effective once upon at time, but it has left an opening a mile wide for the Foxnews channel to report news as they see it, but still claim they are fair and balanced. Fox is news with a specific point of view that is favorable to Republican candidates which results in those candidates sometimes talking exclusively to Fox. Ironically, the NYT and WaPo traditional approach has not done them any favors - both are consistently accused of bias by the usual suspects and WaPo has been banned by the Trump campaign without that campaign having any concern about how that looks. Judging by the comments columns on NYT articles, many commenters accuse some writers of extreme bias ("in the tank for Hillary") while other commenters lament the failure of the NYT to take on objective analysis of political events.

Context is everything, but when the context involves politics, the NYT is deathly afraid of recognizing context and reporting it as fact. For example, anyone can see that while he was president, Bill Clinton and his administration were made subject to endless accusations and investigations. This was and is a simple fact. But NYT and other traditional media always feel compelled to place that fact in a "balanced" context, suggesting that it never would have happened if they (Bill and Hillary) somehow were better people or that they somehow brought it on themselves and therefore deserved it (ignoring the fact that democratic institutions are sorely tested by impeachment and other extreme events.).

The next Democrat to run and win the presidency was Barack Obama. No surprise, he too was made subject to an endless stream of accusations that were false, many of those appealing to the worst instincts among the population. Jumping ahead, we find Hillary Clinton subject to an endless stream of accusations of venality. Here we go again. So the pattern is clear. Every successful Democratic candidate for president, which usually means Dems who are willing to compromise with Republicans,  is being made subject to a series of extreme accusations that are given lasting life by Fox and others who set the narrative. That is a simple fact. The failure of the NYT to report that pattern as a simple fact due to fear of being labeled biased is an abject failure of the traditional objective reporting model. The NYT does not recognize this fundamental failure. It allows other, less responsible organizations to take control of the narrative as the NYT flounders. Meanwhile, no one actually believes that NYT news reporters lack their own points of view.

Wouldn't it make more sense for NYT reporters to constantly seek the truth, which means placing the fact within the proper context for understanding and try to keep their personal points of view from interfering with the search for truth. Then if bias creeps into individual reporting, deal with that as a problem, but do not avoid contextual reporting altogether, which has been the big problem.

 NYT risks being overtaken by the blogosphere.

There are many blogs that boldly go where no NYT piece has gone before.

West Coast Stat Views is one example.

Oh, the Asymmetry! the Asymmetry!

Source:historiesofthingstocom.blogspot.com

Two weeks ago we promised a post on the importance of the asymmetry debate, the argument that "both sides" are not equal and opposite - the "false equivalence" problem.  Actually, there is not much of a debate, which requires two sides that disagree actually engaging in a discussion on the topic.

Vox has an unusual, well researched article today contrasting the media treatment of Hillary Clinton and the Clinton foundation with the treatment of Colin Powell's foundation. Unusual because few media outlets take on the "meta" issue of faulty political reporting that shies away from clear interpretation of the political context - that is, how political news is being covered -- because that would violate the antiquated rule that objective reporting requires asking "each side" what they think without reporting the journalist's own objective interpretation. Got that?

In Colin Powell's Foundation and Hillary Clinton's are treated very differently by the media, Matthew Yglesias writes : 
"Because Colin Powell did not have the reputation in the mid- to late ’90s of being a corrupt or shady character, his decision to launch a charity in 1997 was considered laudable."

...and these other sentences that should sound familiar to longtime readers of this blog:

'Powell was presumed to be innocent — and since Democrats did not make attacks on Powell part of their partisan strategy — his charity was never the subject of a lengthy investigation'.  Which is lucky for him, because as Clinton could tell you, once you are the subject of a lengthy investigation, the press doesn’t like to report, 'Well, we looked into it and we didn’t find anything interesting.'
Hillary's problem is people "know" she is corrupt.  "

"The perception that Clinton is corrupt is one of her most profound handicaps as a politician. And what’s particularly crippling about it is that evidence of her corruption is so widespread exactly because everyone knows she’s corrupt."

"Because people “know” that she is corrupt, every decision she makes and every relationship she has is cast in the most negative possible light."
"The press should contextualize Clinton stories." [Emphasis added]

And so on.
Finally. Somebody gets it. Yes, context is everything.

One problem here is that we should not need the counterexample of Colin Powell's experience to demonstrate the unfair context of the persistent Clinton attacks. What if there were no Powell foundation and we had to make a convincing case of fairness for Clinton based on the fact of the endless stream of personal attacks over decades? Yes, what if we lived in a world where Republican former Presidents go off and mostly play golf while former Democratic Presidents start foundations and do charitable work? Hmmm. There's that pesky asymmetry again that we had best ignore. Instead, let's ask Donald Trump what he thinks.

The Fifth Dimension

As a teenager in the 1960s, I was at one point confined to bed convalescing from an illness during the summer and needed to keep myself occupied. We had a shortwave radio, so I roamed the airwaves to find broadcasts from different countries in Europe and Asia.

I especially enjoyed  listening to Radio Moscow, which was beamed to the U.S.  The endless stream of propaganda was fascinating. Russia had their own inventors of the light bulb and other modern devices. In fact, the Soviet Union was apparently superior in all respects. How did I recognize the propaganda? After all, I could not prove who invented the lightbulb and I was not in a position to observe the Soviet Union directly. But I did know I lived in an open society that really did have freedom of speech and of the press where I was told the truth about the Soviet Union. After all, the U.S. and World War II allies had withdrawn from German occupation while the Soviet Union had maintained control of their occupied territories throughout Central and Eastern Europe. So there was asymmetry between  U.S. and NATO allies vs. the Soviets, not two equal and opposite opponents who were just two sides of the same coin.

Aside from my textbook knowledge of world history, I also observed patterns of behavior of the radio personalities. The Soviet Union was always so wonderful. Never a discouraging word. Bursting with national pride. And never mistaken. Never in doubt.  I could not imagine that the Soviet propaganda machine was fooling anyone and wondered why they kept trying with these transmissions.

Today's New York Times opinion piece The Age of Post-Truth Politics made me think of that Soviet era propaganda. The article argues, vaguely, that there is too much data to sift through these days, too many facts available and therefore people can choose themselves what they wish to believe, which encourages conspiracy theories.

Any consumer of news programming can discern the style and behavior patterns of a reporter who is searching for truth from someone who is searching for “facts” to support their ready-made conclusions. And if that behavior includes ever-changing lines of attack against a political opponent without evidence, maybe serious skepticism is in order. The problem today is too many viewers who are happy to be fooled, not too much data or too many news sources. The willing believer will not be persuaded by better communications as the NYT piece suggests with Brexit politics as the example. The author seems to regard our current state as a confusing universe, similar to the alternate realities where ordinary folks found themselves in the 1960s TV mystery "The Twilight Zone."

Count me unconvinced.

There You Go Again

The NYT never fails to disappoint. In a news article today, a shift in the Clinton campaign is reported - After Shake-Up by Trump, Clinton Camp Keeps Wary Eye on Conspiracy Theories.

First of all, does the Clinton campaign really need to start talking about "conspiracy theories" for the NYT to notice what in the 1990s was called "the politics of personal destruction"? In a word, no.

For example, Bad Pols or Bad Polls was the question we posed June 20 with a follow-up on July 2 on the NYT Upshot response of Exit Polls, and Why The Primary Was Not Stolen From Bernie Sanders. In the Upshot piece, Nate Cohn swatted away the conspiracy theories of a -you guessed it - rigged election. Between June 20 and July 2 the NYT had ignored that conspiracy theory, presumably as unworthy of reporting, until the conspiracy theories became too widespread to ignore.

From what I hear, there is a tense relationship between the NYT news folks and the Upshot.
Still,  why does the NYT News department need to report every story that relates to politics as a "he said/she said story" in this instance waiting for a Clinton campaign response before reporting conspiracy theories? Well, because to meet the NYT standard of journalistic integrity, you must be objective, and to be objective you must report what one side does, then go to the other side for their reaction, then go back to the other side, and so on. Every person is a potential voter and if you vote you are therefore biased and nonobjective and therefore ineligible to make intelligent interpretations of the evidence. So the story goes - there is an Opinion section for opinion. Sorry, but that system fails. Waiting for the Clinton campaign's reaction dignifies all allegations against the candidate and misses the meta-story - the fact of an intense campaign of never-ending allegations of wrongdoing that persists until one of the allegations can stick and then working that allegation to death.

While the NYT has begun to question their definition of objectivity, notably on the Business/Media page, it should not have been necessary to have the extreme case of candidate Trump for this process of questioning to begin.

Some journalism professors emphasize context as just as important to accurate reporting. If we back up from "conspiracy theories" we see that they exist in the context of looking for evidence of problems with a candidate. Without challenges from reporters questioning the dangers of this charged atmosphere, this tactical approach of making unfounded allegations rapidly devolves into claims that allegations are true, regardless of their accuracy or that the allegations are important, even if they are not.

Back to that Media article - it begins,

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

That misidentifies the problem. The problem for a journalist is not having beliefs about the person. The problem is that when a candidate makes an important statement that is false, the journalist need not necessarily go to the opponent to seek the response. Just say the statement is false and important if it is. Say why it is important. If not important, say so. Otherwise readers are left with a back and forth between candidates and a general sense of balance which is responsible for the false equivalency that is intrinsic to political reporting in NYT and a little less so in Wapo. And if attacks by a candidate or supporters are unconscionable, as the relentless personal attacks on Clinton staffer Huma Abedin, certainly appear to be, as a matter of principle, then say so - or at least report that there is a context of continual personal attacks.

We are often told we live in a polarized time, but that so-called polarization is largely a result of failure by the objective media to do their job - not  a problem of giving Trump too much air time, but failing to call it like they see em. Imagine an umpire calling balls and strikes, not objectively based on what he sees, but by asking the batter and the catcher whether it was a ball or a strike and if they disagree, then asking - "he says it was low and inside", "No, it was right down the pipe." Let's check with the manager.

It's The Asymmetry Stupid!

Keep an eye out for an upcoming post on the importance of the asymmetry debate. If you just can't wait and want a taste, take a look at the revised and updated Beyond the Pale and Both Sides Do It. Then read the Difference Between an Actuary and a Statistician, including the new final paragraph. It's all about the asymmetry as Ornstein and Mann below know so well.

Source:fordschool.umich.edu

HealthScare

So tough watching Chris Matthews on MSNBC just now. How does someone with his knowledge and experience not get it. CM asked his balanced panel their thoughts on the insinuations about Hillary's health. (The Democratic strategist said it was a sign of desperation) Matthews suggested there must be something to the allegations because the truth will be out soon enough. Is he kidding? Where has he been? There have been no adverse consequences to any false allegations in Presidential election campaigns for ages. In fact, even when proven false, the stories now continue on in the twittersphere. John Kerry and his family know a lot about this.