January 15th, 2022
A correspondent asked me how to figure out what news to trust. I was about to write a personal response when I realized that the answer was of general interest, so I’m putting it here.
Everything is an approximation
The first point you must grasp is that every single communication — including this one — is a generalization that fails to capture the complexity of the reality. The proof is simple: ask yourself, ‘What is the value of π?’ Well, it’s 3.14. Well, no, that’s an approximation; it’s actually 3.14159. Er, no, it’s actually 3.14159265358979. That’s as far as my memory goes. (Yes, I actually memorize the value of π to a great many decimal places when I was a teenager. With the years, I have lost decimal places. I’ll know that it’s time to shuffle off this mortal coil when I decide that the value of π is 3.) But no! The value of π is infinitely long. If I used the entire capacity of my hard disk to store the value of π, it still wouldn’t get it right. If I used the entire capacity of everything on the Internet, I still wouldn’t get it right. If I used every particle in the universe to encode its value, I STILL wouldn’t get it right. In other words, it is physically impossible to correctly state the value of something so simple as π. So if you want to learn about the latest political developments, start by admitting that you’ll never be able to grasp them fully.
Truth is a network
Everything you can know is based on something simpler. You could understand the paragraph above only if you had enough education in mathematics to know what π is. That knowledge of π in turn is based on simpler concepts of arithmetic that you learned in primary school. In the human mind, knowledge is an immensely complex structure; here’s a simplified representation of how I think knowledge is organized inside the brain:
Each geometric figure represents a tidbit of knowledge. Those tidbits are connected in sometimes strange, almost nonsensical ways. For example, I have long harbored a distaste for microwave horns (the special antennae that they put on top of buildings or hilltops). That’s because, when I was a little boy, I was in the back seat of a car, looking out the window. My attention was attracted by a microwave horn; at the same moment my mom (driving the car) slammed on the brakes and I was thrown against the back of the front seat. The two bits of knowledge (microwave horn and being thrown against the seat) were thereafter linked in my mind.
The point to understand is that our knowledge of the world is based on what we already know. If I tell you that boroganners are green, you will not be able to fit that tidbit of knowledge into your mental network because you don’t know what a boroganner is. You cannot understand knowledge for which you have no connection. Thus, if you see a headline screaming that “Gini Index leaps again!”, and you don’t know what the Gini Index is, you won’t be able to grasp the news story.
Bias: Shallow and Deep
People love to accuse the news media of bias. In truth, bias is spread along a spectrum from shallow to deep. Shallow bias is specific and obvious. One newspaper is clearly biased against Mr. Trump; another is just as clearly biased in his favor. This kind of bias is usually easy to see and discount. But there’s another, deeper source of bias that is more difficult to understand. Think of it as the “world view” of the reporter. People on the far left accuse everybody else of being immersed in the “neoliberal, neocolonial, white, Christian, etc” mindset. There is some truth in the accusation, although it’s not as bad a problem as they make it out to be. After all, everybody has a worldview, and yes, that worldview influences their perception of events. But that doesn’t invalidate their perceptions; it instead makes them relevant to the audience. Imagine the following headline: “Airplane crash kills three mice, a pheasant, and seven shrubs”. The audience doesn’t care about mice, pheasants, or shrubs — it wants to know how many people died. That’s part of the deep bias that influences news reports.
This deep bias can mislead. When you think of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, you probably think about all the killing, but do you have any idea of the ratio of killing Israelis and Palestinians? If you read mostly American news, you might well think that Palestinians and Israelis are killing each other in roughly equal numbers. That’s not the case; in fact, in this century, Israelis have killed roughly ten times as many Palestinians as vice versa. That’s because most Americans identify more closely with Israelis than Palestinians, so news about one Israeli getting killing grabs more headlines in America than news of ten Palestinians being killed.
How misleading is bias?
I do not think that deep bias is a problem, but shallow bias is. In my judgement, Fox News is easily the most biased news source in America, and in fact there’s plenty of evidence that Fox News misleads its viewers:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/21/a-rigorous-scientific-look-into-the-fox-news-effect/?sh=51a9407a12ab
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/fox-news-media-bias
https://www.psypost.org/2020/07/consuming-content-from-foxnews-com-is-associated-with-decreased-knowledge-of-science-and-society-57499
Yes, there’s plenty of bias on the leftish side of the news media, but conservative news sources in America have truly gone off the deep end. We’re seeing flat-out lies presented as news. The right wing accuses the news media of a leftist bias, but that is only the result of the mainstream news media hewing close to the truth. As Stephen Colbert put it, “Reality has a well-known leftist bias.”
How to cope
So how can a citizen cope with all these contradictory claims and make sense of the world? Here are some strategies:
Expand your base of knowledge
Be worldly-wise. The more you know about the real world, the harder it is to pull the wool over your eyes. Read history; there are a great many patterns of human behavior that just keep repeating themselves. I can usually fill in many of the blanks in a story just by knowing how similar events in the past have developed.
Reject dumb news
Lots of news is really dumb. Thoreau wrote:
If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter -- we never need read of another. One is enough.
A good example is the news on plane crashes. People love to read these stories — and they are a complete waste of time. Yes, we know, planes sometimes crash, and people are killed. So fucking what???? What does that tell you about the world you live in? How does that knowledge benefit you? The same thing goes for news about celebrities, Hollywood, or musicians — although I make a personal exception for news about heroic dogs.
Do not get ANY of your news on social media!!!! Social media is a festering cesspit of misinformation, on the wildest falsehoods teem. Mark Twain supposedly said that a lie can travel around the world before the truth can tie its shoelaces. The modern version is that a lie can travel around social media before the truth even learns about it.
A good rule of thumb is, the more pictures there are in a news story, the less useful it is.
Good news sources
You are inundated in so much misinformation that you really need some discipline in getting reliable news. On what can you rely? Here are some news sources that I trust:
The Economist: This is a British weekly news magazine. It’s primarily targeted at businesspeople who have no time for populist bullshit. Its coverage is international in scope — when was the last time that you read a news story about Nicaragua in an American news source? There are a lot of other countries out there, and a lot of other things going on outside the borders of the USA. Its coverage is the best I’ve seen anywhere. They’re not infallible; over the years, I’ve detected a few minor errors in stories about topics I happen to know personally. The Economist is my primary source of news. It’s a bit pricey at $225/year.
The New York Times: This is the newspaper that all conservatives love to hate, but it remains the most eminent and most reliable American newspaper. Sure, they’ve flubbed a few times, but they quickly acknowledge and correct their mistakes. It costs about the same as The Economist. I do not subscribe, but I read their stories sometimes to get a different point of view.
The Washington Post: Egad, yet ANOTHER “liberal mainstream media” slime-sheet!!!! Yes, the conservatives will tell you that the Washington Post is a pack of liberal lies. They’re the ones lying. The Post does lean left, in my opinion, but I don’t think that they lean far.
The Wall Street Journal: This is the only conservative source that I respect. It’s surprising how often their stories match the versions we see in the supposedly left-wing sources.
International sources
It’s eye-opening to see what newspapers around the world say about events; you should check some of these every now and then:
Japan: The Asahi Shimbun
Germany: Der Spiegel and Die Stern
UK: The Times of London. The Guardian gets a lot of space in the US, but it’s definitely leftish.
Al-Jazeera: Sure, you’re likely to dismiss it because it’s Muslim, but its reporting is actually pretty good.
Media Evaluation Websites
There’s so much brouhaha over bias in media that a number of websites have popped up providing fairly objective assessment of the biases of various media sources. My one objection to these is that they are based on American values, which are pretty far to the right compared to the rest of the world. For example, one website lists The Economist as “leans left”. When I first started reading The Economist back in the 1980s, it was definitely “leans right”. I judge The Economist to be centrist by global standards, and “leans left” by American standards.
There are two primary sites for media evaluation: my preferred is AdfontesMedia. The other is AllSides.
Finally, if you want to see what Americans really think, here are two excellent sources of polling data:
PollingReport: a compilation of every poll they can get.
Good luck; and remember: It’s always more complicated than you thought!
