Sometimes the media just lies

This is a recent story which illustrates some of the ways in which the traditional media actively misinforms and deceives its consumers. The context for this is the UAW strike, which is described as the largest autoworker strike in decades. Both of the presumptive presidential nominees (Joe Biden, a Democrat and the current US President and likely Republican nominee Donald Trump) travelled to Michigan in response. Joe Biden actually joined the picket line to address the striking workers. By contrast, Donald Trump travelled to a non-Union shop and delivered a speech critical of the strike and union leadership. Despite this obvious difference, many mainstream media outlets treated Biden and Trump as engaging in equivalent activities with headlines such as the following:

 Biden, Trump to woo union workers in Michigan as auto strikes grow | Reuters

The New York Times ran with a similar headline, and even posted the following on the site formerly known as Twitter:

.@realDonaldTrump greets union members at Drake Enterprises in Clinton Township Michigan. pic.twitter.com/5ggIOQ3nOc

— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) September 28, 2023

As local newspapers reported, the individuals in the picture (including individuals claiming to be union members and autoworkers) were not, in fact, union workers or autoworkers. 

All of this demonstrates, again, the unfortunate truth that we need to be very skeptical of the media and the ways that it reports on stories. 

h/t to Eschaton (eschatonblog.com)

Brainstorm or Green Needle

 Here is another great example of audio pareidolia:

This is another excellent illustration of how our brain seeks to find meaning and comprehensibility in ambiguous perceptual stimuli. This one is particularly surprising given how different the two potential sounds are. 

I cam across this one from the latest episode of The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. 

Optical Illusions 2021

 Here is a great roundup of some of the best optical illusions of 2021. As always, the study of ways vision can be tricked and manipulated teach us a great deal about how our visual systems work. 

The 10 Best Illusions of the Year (gizmodo.com)

Happy Halloween! Ouija Boards and the Ideomotor Effect

An image of a Ouija Board

Here is an excellent article explaining the history of and science behind the Ouija Board. 

How Science Explains The Mysterious Movement Of A Ouija Board (kotaku.com) 

The f*** are you doing?

 Here is another great segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver exploring "sponsored content." This is a practice where advertisers pay local stations to have their advertisements incorporated into local news programs. Here is John Oliver's explanation:

This is an excellent example of the second filter of Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media, the dependence on advertising. 

Affinity Bias

 This is an excellent illustration of the Affinity Bias which is a cognitive bias which is an unconscious tendency to get along with people who are similar to us in various ways (gender, religions, ethnicity, etc.):

The key here is that this is an unconscious bias. The children in the video are not intending to be racist, but they have been raised in a culture that communicates racist assumptions to them which they have internalized. The experiment conducted by the psychologist reveals this. Because these biases are unconscious, the only way to combat them is to draw attention to them so that we can become aware of these tendencies in our thinking. 

Increasingly, conservative media is completely reliant on bullshit

 Here is a clip from CNN that provides  nice survey of the increasing reliance by conservative media (and, more disturbingly, the Republican Party) on bullshit. 

I would also argue that what is described in this video is best classified as bullshit. Bullshit is different from lies in that the bullshitter does not care if what they say is true or false. All they care about is flooding the conversations with so much shit that people stop paying attention or come to the conclusion that there is no such thing as true or false.  As Jim Acosta notes, this is extremely disturbing because this kind of bullshit makes actually conversation and discussion about how to move the country forward almost impossible. 

h/t to Digby

What about...

 Here is a nice article in Salon talking about the increasing reliance on the tu quoque fallacy (otherwise known as whataboutism) by members of the Republican Party in their attempts to defend against the indefensible actions and positions of their elected representatives. 

Science is great, but it isn't perfect

Here is a fantastic cartoon that highlights some of the problems with science. At the end of the day, science is a human activity, so it shouldn't be surprising that all the flaws humans succumb to also infect their scientific activities.  

Like Fox News, Social Media makes you dumber

The Pew Research Center has just released a study which likely confirms what many might have thought already. While the results may seem like common sense, it is very important to actually research this and make sure that "common sense" is actually true. 

The study is quite detailed and the authors go to great lengths to explain their methodology and present their evidence. Here is the authors presenting their main take away from this survey:

A new Pew Research Center analysis of surveys conducted between October 2019 and June 2020 finds that those who rely most on social media for political news stand apart from other news consumers in a number of ways. These U.S. adults, for instance, tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories, such as the coronavirus outbreak and the 2020 presidential election. And, perhaps tied to that, this group also tends to be less knowledgeable about these topics.

As we can see, people who get their information from social media know less about topics than people who get information from other sources, and furthermore, people who primarily get their news from social media have a greater chance of holding false beliefs than people who get their news from other sources. 

h/t to The Washington Post

 

John Oliver on Conspiracy Theories

If you spend much time on this blog, you can see that I am a big fan of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. In particular, Oliver tends to do lengthy segments that are a deep dive into a particular topic. As of this posting, his most recent long segment was about conspiracy theories. While the focus was, given the current context, coronavirus conspiracies, many of the general points he makes about why conspiracy theories are popular and how to combat them are quite relevant to any conspiracy theory one might encounter.

Phil Donahue catches some flak (in 2003)

The fourth filter in Chomsky's and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media is "flak," which is powerful criticism of the media by elites designed to limit the range of acceptable opinion and acceptable sources that are presented in the media.



One particularly dramatic example of this occurred back in 2003 during the run-up to the second US invasion of Iraq.  At that time, Phil Donahue had the top-rated show on MSNBC. Among other things, Donahue would bring on anti-war guests and guests who raised questions and concerns about the actions of the Bush administration. At this time, MSNBC commissioned an internal study to help chart the future course of the network. As reported at the time:

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war......He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

As a result of this report, MSNBC went ahead and cancelled the show and fired Donahue. In effect,  MSNBC cancelled their top-rated show in order to avoid flak for not being perceived as sufficiently pro-American. As a result, the American public was denied to opportunity to hear important anti-war voices and voices skeptical of the Bush administration (voices that ensuing years have proven correct).

To add to this story, one of the people hired by MSNBC in the wake of this firing was former pro wrestler, actor, and former Governor of Minnesota, Jesse "the Body" Ventura. He was signed to a three-year contract, however, once MSNBC discovered that Ventura was anti-war, they basically paid him to do nothing for three-years. This is yet another example that illustrates how the Propaganda Model of the Media helps explain the media environment we find ourselves in.

A similar example can be found in the case of Bill Maher and his show at the time, Politically Incorrect. That story, along with a recounting of the Donahue story, some other examples, and some implications for today, can be found here.

The "Common Enemy" Filter in Action

This article in Current Affairs does an excellent job of highlighting the fifth filter in Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media.  In it, the author, Nathan Robinson, looks at recent reporting from the New York Times about an attempt by hackers affiliated with the Russian government to obtain information about UK and US efforts to research a vaccine for COVID-19. In his analysis, Robinson highlights how the reporting there illustrates the "Common Enemy" filter. The entire article is illuinating and worth a quick read.

Tucker Carlson is not an honest journalist

There is a great deal of sloppy, fallacious, and outright deceptive language surrounding the BLM protests. A good illustration of this comes from a recent episode of Tucker Carlson's show on Fox as illustrated in the following tweet:

i didn't edit this footage at all pic.twitter.com/afEkKzQrXb

— John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) June 17, 2020

This is a both nice illustration of both the Appeal to Emotion (Scare Tactics version) and  a good example of the fifth filter in Chomsky's and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media. As a reminder, the fifth filter is the "Common Enemy" filter, and we can see quite clearly through the use of scary music that Tucker Carlson is attempting to present BLM protestors and activists as scary monsters that lack humanity.

Amazon writes the news

The third filter in Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model of the Media is the idea that the media relies on a limited range of sources. In most cases, the sources in question are the very subjects that we would hope the media would do independent reporting on such as the government and large corporations. The outcome of this practice is that these sources then get to shape how they are covered in the media and can control the narrative around themselves.

One major way that these companies do this is by delivering content directly to TV stations with the expectation that the TV station will use the provided video and script to create a segment for their program. A perfect example of this is described in a recent article on The Verge about Amazon using this practice.  

The article includes a screenshot of the script Amazon sent out:



As well as a video of 11 different news stations reading from that script:

Together, these demonstrate that this practice, described and criticized by Chomsky and Herman, is alive and well in the age of COVID-19.

h/t to the AV Club

What's wrong with this picture

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Georgia Department of Public Health released the following chart:



They key thing to note are the dates along the bottom.

h/t to Tom Sullivan at Digby's Hullabaloo

I knew Subway was bad for our health...

A student sent me the following infographic which is an excellent illustration of our tendency to confuse correlation with causation:

The image displays a  meme that compares 5G coverage with the hot spots for COVID-19 implying that one caused the other. It then shows a variety of other maps with similar distributions. This illustrates how we often mistake correlation for causation.

John Oliver takes on Psychics

The following video from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver is an excellent discussion of tricks and techniques employed by psychics, particularly the techniques known as hot and cold reading.


Another excellent discussion can be found in Season 6, Episode 11 of South Park, "The Biggest Douche in the Universe."

Access trumps the truth

This link to an article in Vox gives a very nice illustration of how large media companies will bury or hide stories in order to gain access to subjects for interviews. In this case, ABC news buried an interview with one of Jeffrey Epstein's victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, because they were concerned that he accusations against Prince Andrew would interfere with ABC News' efforts to interview other members of the English royal family. In effect, they buried an important news story in order to maintain access and the ability to interview people who might have been implicated by that story.

This story in Salon amplifies this point and makes its relevance to Chomsky and Hermann explicit. 

https://www.salon.com/2019/12/15/abc-news-had-the-goods-on-jeffrey-epstein-years-ago-and-killed-the-story/

Of course the world's greatest detective knows his fallacies

Here is a nice example of a Hasty Generalization. I don't really need to explain it since the great Adam West as Batman makes the fallacy explicit.