Part One
Certified_Heterosexual
The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
ABSOLUTELY NOT, ARE YOU AN IDIOT?
Now let's explore why journalism has, for its entire history, been riddled with moral and ethical crimes.
From the start we have a definitional problem: what exactly separates a journalist from anyone with an opinion who's looked up a few details about a subject on the Internet? The difference seems to be entirely that the journalist is being paid by a media org to do so, and from there we get right into the swamp of media business practices.
Media consolidation is old news, but its effect on journalistic ethics persists. The media ecosystem is dominated from every angle by megacorps, both as owners and advertisers driving content (it's increasingly difficult to tell a lot of journalism from actual advertisements). To be a working journalist today is to be complicit in the problem. This holds true even for the supposedly high-toned outlets like WaPo and NYT, which simply credentialize ethical lapses. ("If even WaPo and NYT do it," the journalist muses, "is it such a bad thing when little old me slips up?...")
The sensibility at the top is very different, and power accrues at the organizational level— the journalist is actually less powerful, and therefore has to leave more ethical reservations at home. While he has always had to answer to the media owner, that owner is now orders of magnitude more powerful and remote.
The after-effects of consolidation expose another issue, which is the blurring of distinctions between journalism and entertainment as news orgs are absorbed into entertainment companies and as marketing mimics journalistic qualities (there's a fractal quality to this, as at every level everything begins to morph into an inducement to individually consoom). This requires another ethical sacrifice, or, more likely, it attracts people who are so morally compartmentalized that they don't even see the ethical problem.
This also brings into question the claim that journalism is needed to expose misdeeds, even if it does so imperfectly. The problem here is that journalistic activity has itself become a nexus of misdeeds linked to corporate and governmental wrongdoing, and that what little it does expose is comparatively minor next to the mountain of ethical failings it rests upon. (If you are involved in directly undermining democratic elections at the behest of a corporate-government syndicate, it's hard to find too much else that is worse than that.)
The facial claim among journalists is that they scrutinize the rich and powerful and shine light on the truth. This is the whole grift. It is the illusion of the journalist as public servant, selflessly devoting himself to his cause. The reality is that the journalist is ambitious, bears resentments, and makes enemies. He sees everything through the prism of personal bias and is given every opportunity to be petty.
Simply put, no psychologist in the world would proclaim about anyone what journalists routinely say about their own honesty and trustworthiness. For what little we can rely on social science for, the nature of human motive is bedrock: we lie about ourselves and others to protect our self-image and to get what we want. This is why I call journalism a grift, as opposed to a delusion: no journalist is unaware of this tendency— in fact they deal with it as a matter of course— but they conspicuously avoid applying it to themselves.
If that is the grift, the trick then is that journalists themselves are the main source of knowledge about how well and ethically they do journalism, and you will never see such light, delicate, nuanced strokes. Newsroom politics are universally known: left-wing and liberal with a smattering of libertarian useful idiots. Nevertheless, in a feat unique to the study of human nature, this supposedly has no practical effect at all on news coverage. Jonathan Haidt, you are done here! If you only listen to what journalists say about themselves, as a cloistered group with an acute political leaning, you will sleep like a baby every night as you wait for the proof (still forthcoming) that Orange Man did 11/8 Russian collusion.
There are a number of reasons why a group might not be honest about itself. One is that member reputation is established by hearsay from other members, and therefore is influenced by mutual discretion. Another is that members generally share guilt for ethical lapses, therefore exposing peers is personally risky. Another is that adversarial relationships outside the group create social bonding which penalizes those seen as betraying their peers. Another is strong group identity, which creates bias in favor of groupthink. In fact, everything about journalists as a group that makes them likely to be dishonest about themselves is an amplification of the conditions that apply to groups like priests, policemen, and politicians— not occupations that have rewarded a trusting attitude.
But some light does escape this black hole. We have first of all the pretty overt ideological talk from journalists themselves when among their own kind. Occasionally their adversarial behavior brings up unpleasant facts about them. There are disillusioned ex-communicants who sometimes share— with varying degrees of reliability— experiences on the inside. Internal divisions offer other revealing glimpses. Finally there is the mass of anecdotal evidence, which grows larger over time, contributed by those who have had interactions with journalists.
Now, let us look at the psychology of the journalist. Why is he so reliably liberal? Why does he have a reputation for dishonesty and biased treatment of subjects? The two are obviously related. Conformity almost always produces a pronounced bias. This is tempered somewhat by mean group intelligence, but for journalists that does not appear to be especially high (credentials are easily obtained and most journalistic work is drudgery that depends more on motivation than intelligence).
(Side note: a 2017 study found that journalists performed poorly on "exective function" and mental focus https://www.taraswar...Tara-Swart.pdf.)
Why are journalists liberal? Perhaps a more apt question is— why aren't there more conservative journalists? I think the selection process is both push and pull, and once it becomes unbalanced it tends to stay that way due to feedback effects.
One factor is that more prestigious journalistic organizations tend to be based in urban centers, and the urban environment cultivates liberal beliefs (aka transactional, atomizing, self-focused, consumption-focused beliefs). Therefore, as time goes on, gatekeeper roles in academia and business will naturally become dominated by liberals. Urban politics is also sharply liberal, and as local urban politics is a prominent journalistic beat, journalists develop social relationships almost exclusively with other liberals, reinforcing group biases with similar biases outside the group.
Once this imbalance arises, liberal behavior will tend to persist it. We learn from moral psychology research that liberals tend to have more negative attitudes about and less comprehension of conservatives, and liberals (especially liberal women) are much more likely to deliberately exclude conservatives from their social circles. Journalists are dependent on social networking for advancement, therefore conservatives are more likely to get stuck at lower levels and eventually give up— perhaps moving into a related field like becoming a public relations flack or lobbyist. "Newsroom diversity" initiatives and retiring more experienced journalists to save money contribute to this, ensuring an exclusive focus on making newsrooms even more liberal than they already are.
These are structural reasons for liberals to dominate the journalist profession, but what about cultural reasons? One cultural factor is that journalism is a communicative rather than productive profession. I hypothesize here that productive professions are overwhelmingly more appealing to conservatives because they reinforce an important psychological role for both sexes: that of a provider. Productive professions give conservatives a social gratification that connects them to a rooted community, which is a powerful reward for them. Journalists, however, are more strongly motivated by markers of personal achievement— becoming a journalistic celebrity, writing a book, achieving high professional rank— which are more appealing to liberals.
Another cultural factor is that journalism focuses on conflict. This attracts liberals, for whom conflict activates sensitivity to harm and fairness, prominent moral foundations for them. The conservative desire for consensus does not provide nearly as many journalistic outlets. In the debate over gay marriage, for example, there were relatively few opportunities to stress, through journalistic activity, the consequences of the transformation of marriage from a predominantly productive to a predominantly gratifying institution. On the liberal side of the debate, however, there were endless opportunities to highlight cherry-picked gay couples who were in conflict with traditional marriage. Liberal social activists worked aggressively in tandem with journalists to promote such stories. The effect of media coverage was that conservative views tended to be muted or inarticulate, while liberal views received hyper-attention and generally had the sympathy of journalists.
The mutual appeal to journalists and liberals of "conflict stories" cannot be overstated here. This appeal is such a fixture of journalism that it is difficult to imagine what journalism would look like without conflict at its base. Weather reports? Marriage announcements? Store openings? Conflict is the contextual sugar of journalism. The second most prominent journalistic activity involves promotion, which has grown as media orgs have consolidated and corporate pressure on journalism has increased. But while promotion is a highly remunerative aspect of journalism— just look at all the "journalism" that existed solely to promote the latest capeshit and capeshit-adjacent films— it doesn't motivate journalists the way conflict does.
The alternative to conflict stories is social analysis and careful presentation of data, but due to the poorly-educated and relatively low IQ nature of journalists, in addition to the benighted quality of their liberal views, this is practically out of reach of journalists. They simply don't have the temperament, education, or intelligence to conduct it, and it's not clear that what is left of the audience after decades of conflict journalism would pay to read it. (If there ever was such an audience, it got nuked into oblivion by the rock-bottom Russia conspiracy reporting that captured journalistic attention for the last two years.)
Now let's discuss one of the worst ethical lapses in journalism: "access journalism."
The term refers to the bartering of access— to a politician or celebrity, to a company's business plans, to any behind the scenes information— in return for coverage slanted in the subject's favor. The natural exponent of access journalism is the puff piece, of which you've surely encountered many examples. The puff piece is notable for its quality of hype and uncritical enthusiasm— it tends to read like ad copy. Nearly every major article about a new presidential contender is a puff piece, written at the behest of the campaign in return for access to the candidate.
The practice is not confined to politicians. Businesses, especially startups that have generated a lot of buzz, frequently get puff pieces that seem written by their marketing team. Under Steve Jobs, Apple was notorious for orchestrating lavish coverage and favorable spin on garden variety product rollouts. Failure to produce the asked-for copy might mean not getting invited next time. For some business magazines, puff pieces comprise the bulk of their material.
Particularly in entertainment, the obligations of the puff piece are severely enforced. Media companies, including videogame studios, influence coverage in two ways: by controlling access to pre-release information the fans covet, and by marketing spends that prop up industry journalism (journalism, as pathetic as it is, scarcely deserves to be joined to terms like "gaming," and the typical product of a "games journalist" is even more meaningless than waggling a controller at a screen for ten hours straight). Without the access to information and without the generous marketing spends, many websites and periodicals would not exist. You might expect me to talk about Gamergate here, but whatever your opinion on it, it's irrelevant to my larger point— even without a political factor, games coverage would still be a joke.
A crucial element of access journalism is the purposeful obscurity of it. Journalists do not begin their access articles by noting that they ran it by their sources to make sure they were happy with it, or that the entire piece was put together with an understanding. Access journalism is the fulfillment of a lie, and increasingly the lie is never revealed. Where once the pretense was that access journalism was an entry point, nowadays it is a given that the access charade will continue indefinitely.
The companion to access journalism is leak journalism. A source is willing to leak headline-worthy news to a journalist, provided the article treats the information in a way that the source desires. Invariably the leaker's identity and motives are hidden, never to be revealed to the gullible fools who read the news article as though it were real reporting. The reader has no way of factually assessing the information, which is presented with all the ingenuity of a stenographer. Many Russiagate leaks were particularly blatant efforts to influence coverage and hype different parts of the investigation.
Journalists themselves pretend to argue about this kind of sausage-making, but the arguments have a strenuously fake quality, and mainly arise when some liberal is upset that a Republican has benefited from the standard arrangement. Journalists then remind themselves that their role is as "social watchdogs," just like Woodward and Bernstein. But complaints about the way a media-friendly politician like Obama influenced coverage during his administration were not exactly deafening (or even audible). This is a pretty routine double standard. Conservatives do not have access to the same level of journalistic corruption and never will, because journalists really don't like them.
Access journalism prevails because journalists are already corrupt. Businesses and politicians do not need to conquer the ethical scruples of a journalist, any more than a john needs to overcome the blushing modesty of a prostitute. Journalists are used to various kinds of wheedling, and treat this as the same thing.
TL;DR: Journalists pretend to be speaking truth to power, when they're really just mouthpieces for the oligarchy. The factors that make journalism liberal also make it unethical. Conflict journalism is manipulated by activists to produce propaganda. Media consolidation makes journalism a servant to corporate needs. Peer influence hides ethical violations and prevents effective oversight of journalists themselves.
Understanding this problem should prevent conservatives from repeating mistakes and taking ineffective action. Journalism cannot be fixed by getting more conservatives to become journalists (they don't want to, and it wouldn't matter if they did). It cannot be fixed by creating "parallel organizations" that have conservative interests, as these interests will fail for structural reasons. The problem of journalism is a problem of mass society.
Now let's explore why journalism has, for its entire history, been riddled with moral and ethical crimes.
From the start we have a definitional problem: what exactly separates a journalist from anyone with an opinion who's looked up a few details about a subject on the Internet? The difference seems to be entirely that the journalist is being paid by a media org to do so, and from there we get right into the swamp of media business practices.
Media consolidation is old news, but its effect on journalistic ethics persists. The media ecosystem is dominated from every angle by megacorps, both as owners and advertisers driving content (it's increasingly difficult to tell a lot of journalism from actual advertisements). To be a working journalist today is to be complicit in the problem. This holds true even for the supposedly high-toned outlets like WaPo and NYT, which simply credentialize ethical lapses. ("If even WaPo and NYT do it," the journalist muses, "is it such a bad thing when little old me slips up?...")
The sensibility at the top is very different, and power accrues at the organizational level— the journalist is actually less powerful, and therefore has to leave more ethical reservations at home. While he has always had to answer to the media owner, that owner is now orders of magnitude more powerful and remote.
The after-effects of consolidation expose another issue, which is the blurring of distinctions between journalism and entertainment as news orgs are absorbed into entertainment companies and as marketing mimics journalistic qualities (there's a fractal quality to this, as at every level everything begins to morph into an inducement to individually consoom). This requires another ethical sacrifice, or, more likely, it attracts people who are so morally compartmentalized that they don't even see the ethical problem.
This also brings into question the claim that journalism is needed to expose misdeeds, even if it does so imperfectly. The problem here is that journalistic activity has itself become a nexus of misdeeds linked to corporate and governmental wrongdoing, and that what little it does expose is comparatively minor next to the mountain of ethical failings it rests upon. (If you are involved in directly undermining democratic elections at the behest of a corporate-government syndicate, it's hard to find too much else that is worse than that.)
The facial claim among journalists is that they scrutinize the rich and powerful and shine light on the truth. This is the whole grift. It is the illusion of the journalist as public servant, selflessly devoting himself to his cause. The reality is that the journalist is ambitious, bears resentments, and makes enemies. He sees everything through the prism of personal bias and is given every opportunity to be petty.
Simply put, no psychologist in the world would proclaim about anyone what journalists routinely say about their own honesty and trustworthiness. For what little we can rely on social science for, the nature of human motive is bedrock: we lie about ourselves and others to protect our self-image and to get what we want. This is why I call journalism a grift, as opposed to a delusion: no journalist is unaware of this tendency— in fact they deal with it as a matter of course— but they conspicuously avoid applying it to themselves.
If that is the grift, the trick then is that journalists themselves are the main source of knowledge about how well and ethically they do journalism, and you will never see such light, delicate, nuanced strokes. Newsroom politics are universally known: left-wing and liberal with a smattering of libertarian useful idiots. Nevertheless, in a feat unique to the study of human nature, this supposedly has no practical effect at all on news coverage. Jonathan Haidt, you are done here! If you only listen to what journalists say about themselves, as a cloistered group with an acute political leaning, you will sleep like a baby every night as you wait for the proof (still forthcoming) that Orange Man did 11/8 Russian collusion.
There are a number of reasons why a group might not be honest about itself. One is that member reputation is established by hearsay from other members, and therefore is influenced by mutual discretion. Another is that members generally share guilt for ethical lapses, therefore exposing peers is personally risky. Another is that adversarial relationships outside the group create social bonding which penalizes those seen as betraying their peers. Another is strong group identity, which creates bias in favor of groupthink. In fact, everything about journalists as a group that makes them likely to be dishonest about themselves is an amplification of the conditions that apply to groups like priests, policemen, and politicians— not occupations that have rewarded a trusting attitude.
But some light does escape this black hole. We have first of all the pretty overt ideological talk from journalists themselves when among their own kind. Occasionally their adversarial behavior brings up unpleasant facts about them. There are disillusioned ex-communicants who sometimes share— with varying degrees of reliability— experiences on the inside. Internal divisions offer other revealing glimpses. Finally there is the mass of anecdotal evidence, which grows larger over time, contributed by those who have had interactions with journalists.
Now, let us look at the psychology of the journalist. Why is he so reliably liberal? Why does he have a reputation for dishonesty and biased treatment of subjects? The two are obviously related. Conformity almost always produces a pronounced bias. This is tempered somewhat by mean group intelligence, but for journalists that does not appear to be especially high (credentials are easily obtained and most journalistic work is drudgery that depends more on motivation than intelligence).
(Side note: a 2017 study found that journalists performed poorly on "exective function" and mental focus https://www.taraswar...Tara-Swart.pdf.)
Why are journalists liberal? Perhaps a more apt question is— why aren't there more conservative journalists? I think the selection process is both push and pull, and once it becomes unbalanced it tends to stay that way due to feedback effects.
One factor is that more prestigious journalistic organizations tend to be based in urban centers, and the urban environment cultivates liberal beliefs (aka transactional, atomizing, self-focused, consumption-focused beliefs). Therefore, as time goes on, gatekeeper roles in academia and business will naturally become dominated by liberals. Urban politics is also sharply liberal, and as local urban politics is a prominent journalistic beat, journalists develop social relationships almost exclusively with other liberals, reinforcing group biases with similar biases outside the group.
Once this imbalance arises, liberal behavior will tend to persist it. We learn from moral psychology research that liberals tend to have more negative attitudes about and less comprehension of conservatives, and liberals (especially liberal women) are much more likely to deliberately exclude conservatives from their social circles. Journalists are dependent on social networking for advancement, therefore conservatives are more likely to get stuck at lower levels and eventually give up— perhaps moving into a related field like becoming a public relations flack or lobbyist. "Newsroom diversity" initiatives and retiring more experienced journalists to save money contribute to this, ensuring an exclusive focus on making newsrooms even more liberal than they already are.
These are structural reasons for liberals to dominate the journalist profession, but what about cultural reasons? One cultural factor is that journalism is a communicative rather than productive profession. I hypothesize here that productive professions are overwhelmingly more appealing to conservatives because they reinforce an important psychological role for both sexes: that of a provider. Productive professions give conservatives a social gratification that connects them to a rooted community, which is a powerful reward for them. Journalists, however, are more strongly motivated by markers of personal achievement— becoming a journalistic celebrity, writing a book, achieving high professional rank— which are more appealing to liberals.
Another cultural factor is that journalism focuses on conflict. This attracts liberals, for whom conflict activates sensitivity to harm and fairness, prominent moral foundations for them. The conservative desire for consensus does not provide nearly as many journalistic outlets. In the debate over gay marriage, for example, there were relatively few opportunities to stress, through journalistic activity, the consequences of the transformation of marriage from a predominantly productive to a predominantly gratifying institution. On the liberal side of the debate, however, there were endless opportunities to highlight cherry-picked gay couples who were in conflict with traditional marriage. Liberal social activists worked aggressively in tandem with journalists to promote such stories. The effect of media coverage was that conservative views tended to be muted or inarticulate, while liberal views received hyper-attention and generally had the sympathy of journalists.
The mutual appeal to journalists and liberals of "conflict stories" cannot be overstated here. This appeal is such a fixture of journalism that it is difficult to imagine what journalism would look like without conflict at its base. Weather reports? Marriage announcements? Store openings? Conflict is the contextual sugar of journalism. The second most prominent journalistic activity involves promotion, which has grown as media orgs have consolidated and corporate pressure on journalism has increased. But while promotion is a highly remunerative aspect of journalism— just look at all the "journalism" that existed solely to promote the latest capeshit and capeshit-adjacent films— it doesn't motivate journalists the way conflict does.
The alternative to conflict stories is social analysis and careful presentation of data, but due to the poorly-educated and relatively low IQ nature of journalists, in addition to the benighted quality of their liberal views, this is practically out of reach of journalists. They simply don't have the temperament, education, or intelligence to conduct it, and it's not clear that what is left of the audience after decades of conflict journalism would pay to read it. (If there ever was such an audience, it got nuked into oblivion by the rock-bottom Russia conspiracy reporting that captured journalistic attention for the last two years.)
Now let's discuss one of the worst ethical lapses in journalism: "access journalism."
The term refers to the bartering of access— to a politician or celebrity, to a company's business plans, to any behind the scenes information— in return for coverage slanted in the subject's favor. The natural exponent of access journalism is the puff piece, of which you've surely encountered many examples. The puff piece is notable for its quality of hype and uncritical enthusiasm— it tends to read like ad copy. Nearly every major article about a new presidential contender is a puff piece, written at the behest of the campaign in return for access to the candidate.
The practice is not confined to politicians. Businesses, especially startups that have generated a lot of buzz, frequently get puff pieces that seem written by their marketing team. Under Steve Jobs, Apple was notorious for orchestrating lavish coverage and favorable spin on garden variety product rollouts. Failure to produce the asked-for copy might mean not getting invited next time. For some business magazines, puff pieces comprise the bulk of their material.
Particularly in entertainment, the obligations of the puff piece are severely enforced. Media companies, including videogame studios, influence coverage in two ways: by controlling access to pre-release information the fans covet, and by marketing spends that prop up industry journalism (journalism, as pathetic as it is, scarcely deserves to be joined to terms like "gaming," and the typical product of a "games journalist" is even more meaningless than waggling a controller at a screen for ten hours straight). Without the access to information and without the generous marketing spends, many websites and periodicals would not exist. You might expect me to talk about Gamergate here, but whatever your opinion on it, it's irrelevant to my larger point— even without a political factor, games coverage would still be a joke.
A crucial element of access journalism is the purposeful obscurity of it. Journalists do not begin their access articles by noting that they ran it by their sources to make sure they were happy with it, or that the entire piece was put together with an understanding. Access journalism is the fulfillment of a lie, and increasingly the lie is never revealed. Where once the pretense was that access journalism was an entry point, nowadays it is a given that the access charade will continue indefinitely.
The companion to access journalism is leak journalism. A source is willing to leak headline-worthy news to a journalist, provided the article treats the information in a way that the source desires. Invariably the leaker's identity and motives are hidden, never to be revealed to the gullible fools who read the news article as though it were real reporting. The reader has no way of factually assessing the information, which is presented with all the ingenuity of a stenographer. Many Russiagate leaks were particularly blatant efforts to influence coverage and hype different parts of the investigation.
Journalists themselves pretend to argue about this kind of sausage-making, but the arguments have a strenuously fake quality, and mainly arise when some liberal is upset that a Republican has benefited from the standard arrangement. Journalists then remind themselves that their role is as "social watchdogs," just like Woodward and Bernstein. But complaints about the way a media-friendly politician like Obama influenced coverage during his administration were not exactly deafening (or even audible). This is a pretty routine double standard. Conservatives do not have access to the same level of journalistic corruption and never will, because journalists really don't like them.
Access journalism prevails because journalists are already corrupt. Businesses and politicians do not need to conquer the ethical scruples of a journalist, any more than a john needs to overcome the blushing modesty of a prostitute. Journalists are used to various kinds of wheedling, and treat this as the same thing.
TL;DR: Journalists pretend to be speaking truth to power, when they're really just mouthpieces for the oligarchy. The factors that make journalism liberal also make it unethical. Conflict journalism is manipulated by activists to produce propaganda. Media consolidation makes journalism a servant to corporate needs. Peer influence hides ethical violations and prevents effective oversight of journalists themselves.
Understanding this problem should prevent conservatives from repeating mistakes and taking ineffective action. Journalism cannot be fixed by getting more conservatives to become journalists (they don't want to, and it wouldn't matter if they did). It cannot be fixed by creating "parallel organizations" that have conservative interests, as these interests will fail for structural reasons. The problem of journalism is a problem of mass society.
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