Welcome back to The Deep Dive. Today, we are
wading into waters that I think most people believe
they know how to navigate, but in reality, they're
probably browning without even realizing it.
We are talking about media bias. And I know as
soon as those words leave my mouth, about half
the audience is probably picturing a specific
cable news anchor screaming at the camera. Right.
And the other half is picturing a different anchor
screaming at a different camera. It's the immediate
reflex, isn't it? We hear media bias. Right.
And our brains just snap right into that culture
war framework. Red versus blue, Fox versus MSNBC.
It's like we treat it as a team sport where the
other side is always cheating and our side is
just. And that's the whole problem. We're so
focused on the players and the teams that we
completely miss the fact that the entire stadium
is tilted. The game itself is rigged, but not
in the way we think. Right. And if we just spend
the next hour bashing pundits or, you know, complaining
about fake news. We are wasting everyone's time.
Because the research we have in front of us today
suggests that the political stuff, that partisan
shouting, is just the tip of the iceberg. A very,
very noisy tip. A very noisy tip, for sure. But
the really dangerous part is the stuff we don't
see. The stuff that's happening below the surface.
Exactly. The mission today is to look at the
mechanics under the hood. We aren't really looking
at who is biased so much as how the machine is
built to produce bias almost automatically. We
need to move beyond this idea that bias is just
some angry editor in a back room plotting to
destroy the country. The reality is much more
boring. And because of that, it's actually much
more terrifying. How so? Because it's structural,
it's economic, and it's deeply psychological.
It's not a conspiracy. It's a business model.
We are going to talk about ski resorts lying
about snow, baseball fans in the 1890s, and maybe
the most uncomfortable part, why your own brain
is actually the one demanding to be lied to.
That's the part people don't like to hear. Yeah,
I bet. But before we get to all the weird history.
We need a baseline. How are we even defining
bias here? Because I feel like that word has
completely lost all meaning. It's just become
a synonym for something I disagree with. Well,
that's definitely the colloquial use. Yeah. But
if we look at the sort of academic definition
provided in the research we're looking at, media
bias is defined very specifically. It's when
journalists and news producers contravene the
standards of journalism. Things like accuracy,
fairness, and objectivity in a way that implies
a pervasive or widespread drift. A drift. I like
that word. It's key. It's not just one guy having
a bad day or, you know, a cranky opinion column.
It's a systemic violation of the rules of the
game. It's a tilt in the floorboards that makes
everything slide in one direction. That's a great
way to visualize it. And I think the most interesting
part of the research we're diving into is that
this tilt isn't always political. In fact, some
of the strongest, most reality -warping biases
have absolutely nothing to do with who you vote
for. No, not at all. They are what you might
call invisible biases that distort reality for
everyone, regardless of their politics. Okay,
so let's start there then. The outline calls
it the taxonomy of bias. We all know partisan
bias. That's the my team good, your team bad
stuff. We can put that to the side for a minute.
But the research lists this whole zoo of other
biases. Where do we even begin? Which one is
the most pervasive? I would argue the most pervasive
and certainly the least discussed is something
called concision bias. Concision, as in being
concise, being brief. Yes, exactly. OK, I'm going
to play devil's advocate here. Why is that bad?
I don't have three hours to read a manifesto
every morning. I want the headlines. I want the
bullet points. Isn't brevity a virtue? Brevity
is absolutely a virtue for communication, but
it can be a poison for understanding. Concision
bias is the tendency of the media to report views
that can be summarized succinctly while crowding
out unconventional or complex views that take
time and effort to explain. Give me a concrete
example of that. Think about a broadcast news
format or even a TikTok video or a Twitter thread.
You have seconds. Right. Second, if I ask a guest
on a show, why is the economy struggling? And
they say, because taxes are too high. That is
punchy. It fits on a bumper sticker. It feels
intuitively true because it's so simple and clean.
But if the real answer is, well, we have a lag
in supply chain logistics from three years ago,
combined with an inverted yield curve and shifting
consumer confidence in the housing sector. Exactly.
You've already lost the audience. And more importantly,
you've lost the producer. The producer is in
your ear screaming, wrap it up. We have commercial
break for insurance coming up. So the complex
truth just gets left on the cutting room floor
and the simple, incomplete explanation gets aired.
Precisely. The bias is toward simplicity. It
privileges the soundbite over the syllabus. And
the real danger is that over time, we start to
equate simple with correct. We start to think
that if something can't be explained in two sentences.
It's probably nonsense or, you know, some academic
gobbledygook. It filters out all nuance. It makes
the world look black and white when it's actually
a million shades of gray. It's like we're being
fed a diet of intellectual fast food because
a three course meal takes too long to cook and
eat. We feel full, but we aren't actually nourished.
That is the perfect metaphor. And that leads
right into the. Next big one on the list, bad
news bias, or as it's more formally known, negativity
bias. This is the whole if it bleeds, it leads
thing, the doom scrolling phenomenon. It is,
but it's deeper than just sad stories get clicks.
It's about the fundamental asymmetry of how events
happen in the world. Asymmetry? Yeah, the researchers
point out something called big news bias. Think
about how the world actually improves. Slowly,
painfully, painfully slowly, inch by inch. Right.
A new vaccine reduces child mortality by 0 .5
% a year. Incomes rise by a few dollars a month.
Poverty declines by a fraction of a percent.
It's incremental. It's a trend, not an event.
You can't take a picture of it. It doesn't break.
But a plane crash, a terrorist attack, a bank
collapse. Those are sudden, they're visual, and
they are catastrophic. They're discrete events.
So the news, by its very nature, covers the sudden
disaster, but it misses. The slow miracle. So
the news covers every single car crash, but it
never covers the millions of cars that arrive
safely at their destination. And this creates
a completely distorted map of risk in our heads.
The source material talks about the hierarchy
of death. We are constantly bombarded with sensational
rare events. We see a shark attack on the front
page of every paper. Right. Makes you afraid
to go in the water. Yeah, but you're more likely
to be killed by a fallen coconut. We don't see
front page stories about heart disease, which
is killing thousands of times more people every
single day because heart disease is boring. It's
slow. It's statistical. This reminds me of that
concept that's been talked about a lot lately,
missing white woman syndrome. Yes, that is a
perfect and tragic specific subset of this kind
of sensationalism. The media has a template for
what a victim looks like to generate maximum
sympathy and viewership. And that template is
usually young, white, attracted, and middle class.
So when someone fitting that profile goes missing,
it becomes wall -to -wall coverage. It's a national
soap opera. Exactly. Meanwhile... thousands of
people of color or men or older people or poor
people go missing. And it's a footnote in the
local paper. If it's covered at all. If at all.
And the cumulative effect on you, the listener,
is that you end up thinking the world is much,
much more dangerous than it actually is, but
you're also afraid of all the wrong things. You're
afraid of being kidnapped by a stranger in a
white van, which is incredibly rare, rather than
being afraid of not wearing your seatbelt or
eating too much processed food. It completely
screws up our internal risk assessment software.
OK, I want to distinguish between two others
mentioned in the notes here, mainstream bias
and normalcy bias. They sound really similar,
but the distinction seems important. They're
like siblings, but they behave very differently.
Mainstream bias is essentially peer pressure
for newsrooms. It's the herd mentality. Chasing
the same story. Right. If The New York Times
and CNN and The Wall Street Journal are all covering
a particular story, every smaller outlet feels
this immense pressure to cover it, too, just
to prove that they are serious journalists. So
you get this homogenization. Everybody is reporting
the same angle on the same story because they're
terrified of being the outlier, of missing the
big one. Exactly. Which means important but less
trendy stories get ignored. Now, normalcy bias
is almost the opposite. or maybe it's better
to call it a coping mechanism. It's the tendency
to try to frame abnormal, catastrophic, or unprecedented
events as if they are, well, normal. Give me
a concrete example of that. What does that look
like in practice? Think about the early days
of a massive crisis like the onset of a pandemic
or the rise of a truly radical political movement
that doesn't play by the old rules. The media
often tries to fit these square pegs into round
holes. They'll cover historic breakdown of democratic
norms as if it's just normal horse race politics.
You know, who won the week? Or they'll cover
a looming climate catastrophe as just a series
of unusual weather events. A wacky heat wave
here, a big flood there. Right. Because admitting
that the entire system is breaking or that something
genuinely unprecedented is happening is, well,
it's too frightening. And it's also just too
hard to categorize. So it's a failure of imagination
as much as anything else. It is. Journalists
are trained to report on the status quo. When
the status quo itself is threatened, the instinct
is to just pretend everything is still functioning
according to the old rules. It's a psychological
defense mechanism. That seems like it links directly
to false balance. This is one I really struggle
with because, you know, I want to be fair. I
want to hear both sides. When does presenting
both sides become a form of bias itself? It becomes
a bias when the evidence is not 50 -50. The classic
example is climate change, though we see it in
other scientific debates too, like vaccines.
Right. If 99 % of climate scientists agree that
the Earth is warming due to human activity, and
1 % of scientists, often funded by interested
parties, disagree. And you put one of each on
a split screen on cable news. Right. Visually,
you have just created an equivalence. You have
implicitly told the viewer this is a legitimate
debate between two equal viewpoints, but factually
you are lying to them. Because it's not a 50
-50 debate in reality. It's a 991 consensus versus
a fringe opinion. By giving them equal time,
you are elevating the fringe opinion to the same
level as the overwhelming scientific consensus.
That isn't objectivity. It's a distortion of
reality in the name of fairness. It's performative
neutrality. Exactly. And finally, in our little
taxonomy here, we have structural bias. This
is the one that bores people at dinner parties
but gets media scholars really excited. Why is
that? Because it's completely non -ideological.
It has nothing to do with left or right. It's
all about logistics and routines. It's about
the how of news gathering. Take the incumbency
bonus, for example. This is why the president
is on TV every single night. Yes. But it's not
because the media loves the president no matter
who it is. It's because the president is a content
machine. A content machine. He has a press secretary.
He has a dedicated briefing room. He has a giant
staff that produces policy papers and announcements
every single day. It is easy to cover the president.
It is logistically simple. And it's hard to cover
a challenger who is, you know, traveling around
in a bus in Iowa. It's incredibly hard. You have
to send a reporter, a camera crew. It's expensive
and difficult. So the bias is toward convenience.
It's the path of least resistance. Journalists
are overworked and underpaid like a lot of people.
That's a huge part of it. If one source like
the White House or the police department spoon
feeds them a prepackaged story and another source
makes them dig for it, guess which one gets the
coverage? The spoon feeder wins every time. OK,
so we've established that the whole machine is
tilted by laziness, by the need for speed, by
our psychological wiring for sensationalism.
But now as we get to the part of the research
that really surprised me. The economics. Because
usually when people say media bias, they follow
it with follow the money. And they should. They're
not wrong to think that. But they often follow
the money to the wrong place. What do you mean?
They assume the money leads to some shadowy billionaire
in a volcano lair, you know, paying for propaganda.
And sometimes it does. That happens. But much
more often it leads to. Well, to ski resorts.
I have to say, when I saw ski resorts in the
outline for an episode on political polarization,
I was sure there was a typo. It's honestly my
favorite study in this entire stack. It was conducted
by Zinman and Zitzowitz. They wanted to test
a concept called supply -driven bias. Okay, explain
that concept first. What is supply -driven bias?
Supply -driven bias is when the person or organization
providing the information, the supplier, distorts
it on purpose to manipulate the consumer into
doing something specific. It's a distortion for
profit. Okay, that makes sense. So back to the
ski resorts. So Zinman and Zitzewitz collected
the daily snow reports that are issued by the
ski resorts themselves. You know, six inches
of fresh powder overnight. And they compared
those reports to the official government weather
data from meteorological stations at the exact
same locations. And I'm guessing the resorts
were a little optimistic. Significantly so. They
found a clear, measurable inflation of snowfall
amounts. But here is the really clever part of
the study, the nuance. Go on. They were most
optimistic on weekends. Of course. Of course
they were. That's when the customers can actually
come. Exactly. On a Tuesday morning, the report
might be pretty honest. But on a Saturday morning,
when people in the city are deciding whether
to make the drive up, that two inches of slush
miraculously becomes four to six inches of fresh
packed powder. Wait, hold on a second. Is that
really bias or is that just, you know, marketing?
If a used car dealer tells me a 20 -year -old
Honda is pristine, I expect him to be lying.
Why do we classify this as media bias? That's
a great question. It's because in many of these
ski towns, these reports are treated as news.
They're distributed through channels that people
trust for factual information, local radio, websites,
newspapers. And it perfectly illustrates the
mechanism on a small scale. The supplier, the
resort, has a clear financial incentive to distort
the truth. And their goal is to change the behavior
of the demander, the skier, to get them to buy
a lift ticket. OK, I see that. It's a perfect,
clean, small, stale model of a much larger and
more complicated problem. Right. Now scale that
up. Think of the theory posed way back in 1988
by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in their book
Manufacturing Consent. They argued that mass
media is essentially a giant ski resort for corporate
America. They called it the propaganda model,
right, with the five filters? Yes, exactly. One
of their key filters was advertising. They argued
that because mainstream media relies so heavily
on advertising revenue, They simply cannot afford
to seriously offend their advertisers. So if
a network is funded primarily by pharmaceutical
ads, are they going to run a hard -hitting, multi
-part investigative series on price gouging in
the pharmaceutical industry? Probably not. Or
if they do, you can bet it'll be watered down.
Herman and Chomsky called this flack. Flack?
Yeah. If you step out of line and report something
that threatens powerful corporate interests,
those interests generate flack. They pull their
funding. Their executives complain to the board.
They fund PR campaigns against you. So the supply
of news is filtered to protect the economic interests
of the owners and their advertisers. That makes
total sense. That's the cynical view we're all
kind of used to. The corporations are controlling
our minds. But then the research pivots, and
it points the finger right back at us. This is
the demand -driven bias. And this is the part
of the conversation that gets really uncomfortable
for a lot of people. Because it's easier to blame
the man behind the curtain. Much easier. Demand
-driven bias argues that, in many cases, media
organizations aren't manipulating us. They are
catering to us. They are businesses. They sell
a product. And if the product that's in high
demand is news that makes you feel good and smart
about your political team, then they will sell
that product by the truckload. The customer is
always right, even when the customer is factually
wrong. Exactly. And to prove this isn't just
some modern internet phenomenon, the research
takes us all the way back to the 1890s. The Gilded
Age. This is the New York Times weather study
you meant. Yes. Researchers Raymond and Taylor
did this incredible deep dive into the weather
forecasts printed in the New York Times between
1890 and 1899. Now, you have to think about that
era. No TV, no radio, no internet. The newspaper
was everything. And baseball, the New York Giants,
was a citywide obsession. So what did they find?
What was the anomaly? They found a statistically
significant anomaly. On days when the Giants
were scheduled to play a home game in Manhattan,
the New York Times was significantly more likely
to predict sunny weather. You're kidding me.
Come on. They were fudging the weather report
for a baseball game. The data is clear. If the
team was playing away or if there was no game
scheduled, the forecast was much more accurate.
It lined up with the actual weather. But if there
was a home game on the schedule, sunny skies
ahead. That is absolutely wild. But why? Was
the Times being paid off by the Giants? Was there
some kind of conspiracy? There's no evidence
of that at all. The implication is much more
subtle and I think much more powerful. OK. The
paper knew its readers wanted to go to the game.
The readers were hoping for Sun. So the paper,
perhaps unconsciously or perhaps just to sell
more copies to hopeful fans, leaned into that
hope. They gave the people the forecast they
wanted, not the forecast that was scientifically
probable. That is profoundly disturbing. I mean.
More than the ski resorts, because weather is
supposed to be objective. It's physics. It's
barometric pressure. If you can bias the weather
report just to make people happy about a baseball
game, you can bias literally anything. Exactly.
And this brings us right into the modern era.
Two economists, Melanathan and Schleifer at Harvard,
built a behavioral model around this exact idea
back in 2005. They basically proved mathematically
that news providers can maximize their profit
by confirming their viewers' existing beliefs.
So if I'm a liberal, I will pay more for news
that tells me liberals are smart and conservatives
are evil. And if a newspaper tries to be perfectly
neutral, I'll just stop buying it. You'll switch
to the competitor who tells you what you want
to hear. In a competitive market, neutrality
can be bad for business. You're selling validation,
not just information. There was also a study
on Weibo, which is like the Chinese version of
Twitter, that backed this up, right? Yes. Dong,
Ren, and Nickerson tracked millions of posts
related to stock market news. They found, unequivocally,
that news which aligned with a user's existing
belief, whether they were bullish or bearish
on a particular stock, got significantly more
traction, more likes, more shares. We don't want
facts. We want validation. It seems to be a very
powerful drive. So. Okay, let me sum this up.
We have the supply side corporations and advertisers
protecting their interests. And we have the demand
side, us, the audience, begging to be lied to
so we can feel smart and validated. That is a
truly toxic cocktail. And we haven't even added
the accelerant yet. Social media. The great accelerant.
We have to talk about the algorithm. Because
if newspapers were biased by profit motives in
the 1890s, at least there were humans in the
loop. Editors, journalists. They had standards,
hopefully. Now we have machines deciding what
we see. And the machine has a very, very simple
goal. Engagement. That's it. It doesn't care
if a story is true. It doesn't care if it's good
for democracy. It doesn't care if it's kind.
It cares if you look at it and if you share it.
And as we already discussed with bad news bias,
the stuff we look at, the stuff we share is usually
the stuff that makes us angry or afraid. Anger
is the highest engagement emotion online. It
generates more clicks, more comments, more shares
than anything else. So the algorithm learns to
prioritize content that triggers outrage. It's
automated demand driven bias on steroids. Now,
there's a study here from Nature Communications
in 2021 about echo chambers and a concept they
called drifting. This one seemed a bit more nuanced
than the usual, everyone is in a bubble take
we always hear. It is. It's really fascinating.
They looked at how users drift ideologically
based on the content they see, and they found
a really interesting asymmetry. Asymmetry. You
mean the left and the right behave differently
in these online spaces? According to this particular
study, yes. They found that right -leaning users
tend to stay on the right. They are effectively
locked in to their ecosystem and they are exposed
to a higher proportion of what the researchers
labeled low credibility content. So what we would
colloquially call fake news or just heavily spun
news. It's a mix of both. Hyper -partisan sources,
conspiracy sites, things that don't adhere to
basic journalistic standards. But here's the
really interesting finding. It was about the
left. When left -leaning users were exposed to
opposing views. So when the algorithm showed
them conservative content, they didn't just dig
in deeper to their own side. They actually tended
to drift toward the center. They moderated their
views. That is fascinating. So exposure to the
other side actually worked for one group in terms
of moderation, but not the other. In that specific
data set, yes. It's a complex finding, and there
are a lot of potential reasons for it, but it
suggests that the echo chamber might have different
kinds of walls depending where you stand politically.
Wow. Now, speaking of left and right on social
media, we have to address the elephant in the
room. If I go on Twitter or X, whatever we're
calling it this week right now, I will see a
thousand posts saying the algorithm is censoring
conservatives. Big tech is woke. They are suppressing
the truth. It's a massive narrative. It's become
a core part of the modern conservative identity.
This idea that they are being persecuted and
silenced by a biased Silicon Valley. Is it true?
What does the data say? Well, let's look at the
data, not the anecdotes. We have a major 2021
report from the NYU Stern Center for Business
and Human Rights and another big study from 2022
published in PNAS, the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. These are serious, heavy
hitting analyses. OK, so what did they find?
Did they find a systemic shadow ban on conservatives?
They found the exact opposite. The opposite.
The PNAS study, for example, looked at algorithmic
amplification across seven different countries.
In six of those countries, including the United
States, the algorithm favored the political right.
It amplified right -wing content more than left
-wing content. Wait, hang on. Let me process
that. You're telling me that the data shows the
algorithm boosts right -wing content more than
left -wing content? Yes. The data consistently
shows that right -wing voices are often dominant
in terms of reach, engagement, and amplification
on these platforms. But why? If the stereotype
is that the engineers are all liberals in San
Francisco, why would their machine be boosting
the... Right. Go back to the core mechanic. The
algorithm doesn't have a political ideology.
It has an appetite. It loves engagement, loves
high emotion. It loves us versus them framing.
And a lot of populist political communication,
which is currently more prevalent on the political
right in many of these countries, tends to be
more emotive, more sensational and more high
arousal. It's better food for the machine. So
the algorithm isn't ideologically conservative.
It's just, for lack of a better word, thirsty
for drama. And the right is currently providing
better, more engaging drama for it to feed on.
That is a perfect way to put it. It's not a conspiracy.
It's a feedback loop. The claim of being censored
is itself a high engagement, emotionally charged
narrative that the algorithm loves. That is a
huge aha moment. The victim complex is actually
a very effective marketing strategy that the
system itself rewards. In a way, yes. The data
suggests the machine love the very content that
people claim is being suppressed. There's one
last piece of this social media puzzle, and it
might be the most insidious, the comment section,
the bottom half of the Internet. The place where
hope goes to die. But it turns out it also kills
our perception of neutrality. This is something
called the hostile media effect and the Gearheart
study. This study is genuinely frightening. Gearheart
and their team found that a viewer's perception
of bias in a news article changes dramatically.
based on the user comments they read below it.
So I can read a perfectly neutral, just -the
-facts news story, but if the comments below
it are all screaming, this is fake news, or the
author is a communist, I will start to believe
the article itself is biased. Yes, you subconsciously
project the hostility and bias of the comments
section onto the journalism itself. The room
biases the content. The conversation around the
article becomes the article in your mind. That
explains so much about why everything feels so
polarized. Even if the reporting itself is straight
down the middle, the conversation around it is
almost always toxic, so the whole experience
feels toxic. Exactly. We aren't consuming news
in a vacuum anymore. We're consuming it in the
middle of a riot. Okay, we've covered the taxonomy
of invisible biases, the economics of supply
and demand, and the algorithmic accelerant. It
really feels like we are living in a uniquely
terrible and confusing time. But I want to step
back. Is any of this new? Or have we always been
this messy? Oh, we have always been this messy.
If anything, and this is going to sound crazy,
we might be slightly less messy than we used
to be, believe it or not. Prove it. Take me back
in time. Let's start in 1798. The ink is barely
dry on the Constitution. The paint is still wet
on the White House. And what does the U .S. Congress
do? They passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
I remember this from high school history, vaguely.
This was under John Adams, right? That's right.
And these acts made it illegal, a federal crime
punishable by prison, to publish a false, scandalous,
or malicious writing against the government.
So literally state -enforced media bias. You
could not legally criticize the president. Right.
If you think cancel culture is bad today, imagine
being thrown in a federal dungeon for writing
an op -ed calling the president fat or incompetent.
That was the reality. Okay, point taken. That's
pretty extreme. What about the Civil War? Abraham
Lincoln. We think of them as Honest Abe, a saint
of American democracy. But during the war, he
ordered newspapers in border states to be closed
by the military because they were sympathetic
to the South. He just shut down the press. With
soldiers. He arrested their editors. He had printing
presses destroyed. He suspended the writ of habeas
corpus for people accused of disloyal speech.
He viewed them as a direct threat to national
security, and he acted accordingly. It puts our
current debates about media responsibility into
a very different perspective. And then we have
the Vietnam era, the nattering nabobs of negativism.
1970, Vice President Spiro Agnew, he goes on
national television and delivers this absolutely
blistering attack on the news media, calling
them these nattering nabobs of negativism. What
a phrase. He accused them of undermining the
war effort in Vietnam, of being out of touch
coastal elites, of being biased against real
Americans in the heartland. That sounds incredibly,
almost word for word familiar. It's the exact
same political script we hear today. Attack the
messenger. Delegitimize the institution so that
people will only trust the administration. It's
a political tactic that is at least 50 years
old in its modern form and much older in general.
But there's one historical example you brought
up that isn't really about politics. And it's
the one that really chills me to the bone. The
satanic panic of the 1980s. This is a critical
case study. Because it shows what happens when
the media gets completely swept up in a moral
panic. It's not about left versus right. It's
about something much deeper. For the younger
listeners who might not know, set the scene.
What was this? The 1980s. It starts with a case
called the McMartin Preschool Trial in California.
And from there, it explodes into a sudden nationwide
hysteria that there was a secret underground
network of Satanists abusing children in daycares
across America. And we aren't talking about one
or two bad teachers. We are talking about allegations
of... We are talking about allegations of underground
tunnels beneath schools, of ritual animal and
human sacrifices, of witches flying, of children
being forced to drink blood. I mean, truly absurd,
cartoonishly evil stuff. And the media. They
reported this as if it were real. They devoured
it. Geraldo Rivera ran a primetime special called
Devil Worship, exposing Satan's underground.
Talk shows like Oprah, local news stations across
the country. They reported these accusations
as if they were credible. They put children on
camera who had been coached by therapists to
tell these wild stories. And it was all fake.
Completely, totally fabricated. There were no
tunnels. There was no cult. It was a mass delusion,
fueled by anxieties about working mothers and
social change. But lives were completely ruined.
People went to prison for decades. Schools were
shut down. The emotional damage was immense.
So why did the media fail so catastrophically
there? That's not left versus right. What bias
was at play? It was a perfect storm of biases.
It was sensationalism, for one. But it was also
a kind of reverse normalcy bias. Let's call it
credulity. The accusation was so horrific, harming
children, that journalists suspended all of their
professional skepticism. They didn't want to
be the one to seem like they were defending child
abusers. Exactly. They didn't want to be the
one to say, hang on, I think this four -year
-old story about flying witches might not be
true. So they became amplifiers of the panic
instead of investigators of the facts. And the
expert insight here in the research is about
the feedback loop of fear. Yes. The media reports
the fear. The police see the reports and feel
pressure to make more arrests. The public sees
the arrests and panics even more. The media then
reports on the growing panic. It becomes this
terrible, self -sustaining engine of destruction
that's almost impossible to turn off. It reminds
me of how media often treats minority religions
in general, the whole cult narrative. Stuart
A. Wright wrote about this phenomenon. He pointed
out that journalists usually lack the resources,
the time or the theological background to understand
a new or minority religion. So if a weird group
gets accused of something, they just run with
the cult accused of X, Y, Z headline. It's what
he calls front end reporting. They report the
dramatic police raid, but they never report the
exoneration two years later when all the charges
are dropped. So the damage is done on page one
and the correction is buried on page 40. If it
runs at all. So we've established that trust
has been eroded by literally centuries of this
stuff. It's not a new problem. But the modern
numbers are just stark. They really are. In 1985,
a Gallup poll found that 55 % of Americans trusted
the media to get the facts straight. By 2022,
a different poll found that half of Americans
believe news organizations deliberately try to
mislead them. That's a fundamental shift. We've
gone from they sometimes make honest mistakes
to they are the enemy and they are lying to me
on purpose. And this brings us to the final section,
the psychology of trust. Why do we believe the
media is biased? I mean, because they are biased.
We just spent the last 50 minutes proving it
with dozens of examples. True. But there's a
metal layer to it that's really fascinating.
Research by a political scientist named Jonathan
Ladd suggests that the primary cause of the belief
in media bias is being told over and over that
the media is biased. It's a self -fulfilling
prophecy. Yes. It's a political strategy. When
political elites spend 30 or 40 years telling
their base, the news is fake, don't trust the
journalists, they are lying to you, eventually
the base believes it, regardless of the actual
quality of the reporting. It becomes a tribal
marker, a badge of identity. Exactly. To be a
good conservative or good liberal in today's
environment, you must performatively distrust
the other side's media outlets. So we are stuck
in a trap. The media has genuine, deep structural
flaws, but our perception of those flaws is then
exaggerated and weaponized by political rhetoric.
How do we get out of this mess? Are there any
solutions? There are attempts. People are trying
things. Don't tell me the solution is just to
put both sides on TV more? No, absolutely not.
As we discussed, both sides. Hedonism often leads
directly to false balance. But there are some
interesting algorithmic solutions being tested.
Look at Taiwan, for example. What's happening
in Taiwan? They use a system in their civic processes
called Pol .is. P -O -L dot I -S. That's the
one. It's a digital platform used for public
deliberation. But instead of optimizing for engagement,
which, as we know, usually just means fighting,
it's designed to optimize for consensus. How
on earth does it do that? It maps out everyone's
opinion on a topic on a visual graph. And then
the algorithm specifically hunts for statements
or ideas that large groups of people, even people
who usually disagree on everything else, can
both agree on. So instead of throwing red meat
to the most extreme bases, it actively searches
for the common ground that everyone's standing
on but nobody's noticed. Exactly. It helps identify
shared values and points of agreement that are
usually drowned out by all the shouting. It's
a tool designed for listening, not for broadcasting.
I love that. Using technology to fix the problem
that technology helped create. What else is there?
A more old -fashioned idea. Radical transparency.
The concept of the ombudsman or public editor.
The person inside the newsroom whose job it is
to criticize the newsroom. Right. NPR tried this
for a while. Every time they cited a think tank
in a story, they would explicitly state its political
leaning. The Heritage Foundation. A conservative
think tank or the Center for American Progress,
a liberal think tank. Just putting all the cards
on the table for the audience. It treats the
listener like an adult. It says, here is the
source. Here is their potential bias. Now you
have the context to decide for yourself. That
seems like a really good place to land. We have
covered a massive amount of ground today from
the. initial definitions to the invisible biases
of concision and negativity that shape everything.
We looked at the ski resorts and the 1890s baseball
fans, the eternal dance of supply and demand.
We saw how the algorithm seems to amplify the
right while the right claims censorship. We traveled
back in time to the sedition acts and the satanic
panic, and we ended on the psychology of distrust.
It's a heavy lift. There's a lot there. So if
the listener is going to walk away with one thing,
one tool for their mental toolbox to navigate
this, what should it be? I think we need to stop
viewing bias as a bug in the system that we can
fix by just firing the bad journalists. Bias
is a feature. A feature, not a bug. It's a feature
of our biology. We are hardwired to crave bad
news. It's a feature of our economy. We pay for
confirmation. And it's a feature of the modern
media environment. Brevity kills nuance. It's
the water we swim in, not a shark that we can
hunt down and kill. Exactly. So the only defense
is to become a more conscious, active swimmer.
It's about critical thinking. When you see a
story, don't just ask yourself, is this true?
Ask, why is this story being presented to me
in this specific way at this specific time? Is
it supply? Is the owner of the outlet pushing
an agenda? Is it demand? Am I clicking on the
story because it makes me feel good and validates
my worldview? Or is it structural? Is this just
a short, simple, sensational story that was easy
to produce? Precisely. You have to diagnose the
type of bias before you can account for it. And
that leads us to the final thought, the provocative
one you wanted to leave everyone with. We love
to blame the media. It's the perfect faceless
villain. But the research, especially all that
demand side stuff. It points the finger right
back at us. We say we want unbiased news. We
say we want the complex, nuanced truth. But our
clicks, our subscriptions, our shares, and our
viewing habits tell a very, very different story.
We vote with our attention. We do. And right
now, we are overwhelmingly voting for comfortable
lies and rage bait. The market isn't broken.
It's just giving us exactly what we ordered.
So the real question isn't how do we fix the
media? The question we have to ask ourselves
is how do we fix our own appetite? Wow. That
is the challenge. The next time you click on
that angry headline, ask yourself, am I ordering
the junk food again? It's the only way to ever
change the menu. Thank you for guiding us through
the mechanics of the machine. Always a pleasure
to take things apart. And thank you all for listening.
We'll see you in the deep end next time.