Are Washington Post and New York Times commenters becoming more conservative?

One thing I have noticed in the past year is the apparent increasing frequency with which commenters on articles in the New York Times or the Washington Post strikingly, and sometimes overwhelmingly, contest the ideological premises or apparent biases of the reporter/editor. I first noticed this in the Washington Post and thought that it might possibly be associated with the acquisition of that paper last year by Jeff Bezos. But then I began noticing a similar pattern at the New York Times.

At this point I do not know if this is a real phenomenon or simply a product of confirmation bias. Once you notice a pattern, it is irresistible to find instances confirming the pattern.

In Real causes versus imaginary causes I took issue with reporting by Jodi Kantor in her article, A Brand New World In Which Men Ruled. Kantor displayed all the Gramscian tendencies you would expect of a certain cohort of the clerisy: estrangement from quantification and empirical analysis; unfamiliarity with statistics, cause-and-effect, and uncertainty; disavowal of individual agency, freedom and choice, etc.

A few days later the New York Times published three letters to the editor which echoed many of the themes and issues I raised. Interesting but not too unusual.

But then, apparently doubling down on excellent story-telling but flawed reporting, the NYT then ran a Story Behind the Story in which Kantor tells us how she approached this reporting, For Stanford Class of 1994, New Worlds, New Gender Gaps: Reporter’s Notebook. Kantor doesn't really bolster her case much.

Here was her pitch to the editors, highlighting that from the beginning she was interested in a gender story above other angles.

The Stanford class of ’94 reunion. This was one of the first of a series of magical Stanford classes — students who graduated from exactly the right place, at the right time, and went on to build Silicon Valley and make millions. But even though the campus was diverse, even though the industry has a utopian streak, the success stories are white men. The class of ’94 is about to have its 20th reunion, and I wonder whether there’s a way to use that reunion to tell a story about women in Silicon Valley.

She then describes the normal activities that go into reporting a story.

I almost don’t want to tell you about what I did next, because it’s the part we deliberately spare you on these sorts of long-term enterprise projects: the weeks of cold calls, the long conversations that are interesting but don’t end up in the story, the fascinating themes that we never pursue.

My cubicle mates got sick of me making the same calls again and again: “Hi, I’m Jodi Kantor. I write for The Times, and I’m interested in what happened to your college class. Would you mind telling me the story of your career?”

But many of those conversations, even the ones that never surfaced in the article, infused it later, and gave me a basis for making observations and drawing conclusions. Certain anecdotes stayed with me, never showing up in the story but becoming private lodestars as I wrote. Slowly I found my toeholds: Trae Vassallo, whose departure from a major venture firm after a string of successes had become an outrage in Silicon Valley. Jessica DiLullo Herrin, a former community college student who became perhaps the most successful female entrepreneur in the class. Because the 42-year-old alumni were at the peaks of their careers, their stories touched on some of the signature Silicon Valley deals and companies of 2014: WhatsApp, Nest, Opower and Zenefits.

I also had to avoid the main pitfall of writing about gender: that readers are going to take one look at the article and think, “I’ve read this before” or “I know how this ends.”

[snip]

I had to make sure my story was adding something fresh to a growing debate.

There are two critical elements in this passage.

If you view things from a statistical cast of mind, you are always asking whether the sample is representative. Is the population omitted from the sampling different in any material way from those that are included? It is so obvious it is easy to overlook it completely. There are 1,700 graduates of Stanford class of 1994. With how many did she speak? Of those whom she contacted, how many agreed to be interviewed? Are those that declined to be interviewed similar in career arcs as those that did agree? Was the reporter ever aware that she might be dealing with a skewed sample population or consider how that skewing might in turn affect the story she was crafting? There is no evidence to support that she was aware of this fundamental issue.

As a member of an industry mocked for its Dewey Defeats Truman headline of 1948 which in part hinged on issues of poor polling skewed by bad sampling, you would think Kantor would have been more attuned to the risks of letting the skewed sample determine the story rather ensuring that the story is based on representative sampling.

The second critical element is also a common issue in reporting. Kantor acknowledges that the story she wanted to tell had to be different from “I know how this ends.” Which is fine if there is actually new information or analysis which supports a different story. But what if the data actually reinforces that this is in fact the same old story. By seeking to blaze a new story, Kantor almost guarantees that she might not be telling the real story. This phenomenon of chasing the new at the expense of the real is well established in other fields such as psychology where the number of fraudulent papers and papers having to be withdrawn because they are unsupported or can't be replicated actually outnumber the validated research findings. In formal terms it is known as the Publication Bias. Science Journals want primarily to publish papers which appear to push back the Knowledge Frontier and are therefore strongly disposed to publish papers which report new knowledge rather than papers which confirm old knowledge. Hence the plague of retractions.

These issues of statistical illiteracy and seeking evidence to support a theory rather than trying to craft a theory to explain the evidence are cancers in the journalistic profession. They clearly were a driver behind Sabrina Rubin Ederly's Rolling Stone UVA Rape Hoax story.

Kantor ends her self-explanation with run-on mush.

But writing about gender also has an overlooked advantage, I have found again and again: It’s a flashlight with special powers of illumination. Since women are still outsiders in many organizations and fields, they often experience its anxieties and fault lines with particular acuity.

Show me a woman struggling in a workplace, or doing something her mother never had the opportunity to do, and chances are, we can learn a lot about that culture, employer or industry. I hope people remember this not just as an article about gender in Silicon Valley, but about the Valley itself, with its extreme rewards, immense power to create, meritocratic ideals (not always borne out in reality) and a homogeneity that seems both incongruent with, and linked to, its extreme appetite for risk.

Writing from any particular angle (gender, class, religion, wealth, age, orientation, race, etc.) always has the potential benefit of shedding light on a topic that might earlier have only been dealt with at a general level. But specialization and generalization both have advantages, it is not either-or, it is how to get the best from both.

And specialization always carries the risk that it ends up distorting the perspective. This is why a group of informed generalists always do better at forecasting than narrow specialists. The informed generalists don't have as deep knowledge on the particular issue but, being generalists, they are able to more effectively situate the issue in a larger context, incorporating other issues, trade-offs, and constraints which the specialists are prone to overlook.

Specialization, such as on gender, does not, despite Kantor's claim, have "special powers of illumination." It can add to the general store of knowledge in some circumstances. In others, it does not.

A second issue in this concentrated mush is the claim that "women are still outsiders in many organizations and fields." This is defensible only so long as you do not define your terms. If they are participants in any field, then they are insiders. There is the class of participants and there is the class of non-participants. As participants, they may be under or over represented, they may be favored or discriminated against, they may be more or less influential. But if they are participants, then they are insiders. You cannot give them special outsider status solely based on their gender. Go back to the UVA example. Is President of University of Virginia, Teresa A. Sullivan an outsider to the university because she is a woman? A patently absurd claim on the face of it. And yet that it is what Kantor is claiming.

A third issue. Despite having, in both her article and in her Story Behind the Story, established that Kantor was interested in primarily telling a gender based story, she then seeks to redefine the focus of the story: "I hope people remember this not just as an article about gender in Silicon Valley, but about the Valley itself, with its extreme rewards, immense power to create, meritocratic ideals (not always borne out in reality) and a homogeneity that seems both incongruent with, and linked to, its extreme appetite for risk." Again, simply mush. You cannot proclaim a story to be centered on gender and then claim that it is not an article just about gender. Either you tell the gender story or you tell the wider story integrating all sorts of other issues, but you cannot upbraid readers for failing to find the wider story if you have only told the narrow story.

A fourth and final issue. This also probably relates to ideological blinders and to innumeracy. There is the claim that this is a story about "the Valley itself, with its . . . homogeneity that seems both incongruent with, and linked to, its extreme appetite for risk." If the author knows anything about the Valley, she should know that while the employee and owner demographic profiles are not comparable to those of the whole nation, they are none-the-less anything but homogeneous. The evidence is in her own reporting and in the headlines.

Even though women are underrepresented when compared to the whole population, they are equally represented at the senior levels of Silicon Valley in about the same proportion as they are in the population of computer, engineering, and technology majors. Whites are underrepresented in the employee base owing to an outsized representation of Asian Americans. Foreigners are far more represented than native born. There are LGBT leaders of some of the largest technology and VC firms. You can make claims about fairness but it is factually and empirically wrong to claim that the industry is either biased against outsiders or is homogenous.

If Kantor is seeing homogeneity, then she is simply not looking.

All-in-all Kantor's explanation of the Story Behind the Story has the same issues as the original story: monofocus, predicate assumptions at variance with the data, denial of agency, privileging anecdote over data, etc.

What is especially striking to me are the comments. At the time I noticed this article, there were 27 comments. The overwhelming majority make similar observations of bias, assumptions, narrowness, discounting of personal agency as I have done. I'd be surprised if there are many of these commenters who are actual conservatives but they are making conservative criticisms of the article.

If there is indeed more reader pushback to journalist Gramscian memes (TBD), then what is the cause? Are there more conservatives beginning to read the Washington Post and New York Times? Or are more of the small number of conservative readers beginning to comment more? I'd be surprised if either of those were the case.

My suspicion is that there is an emerging disconnect between the weltanschauung of journalists and that of their readers and that readers now have an easy way to call journalists on the unsupported biases and assumptions that are infecting the reporting.

UPDATE 1: The Washington Post has an article What leading feminists want to accomplish this year by Ruth Tam. At this moment there are 93 comments. I have scrolled down the first thirty or so. Every one of them is a criticism of the article or mocks it. Mostly mockery. Samples: "The best takeaway from this piece? I didn't recognize a single name on this list", "Nice of WaPo to give the clinically insane a forum", "Are these really "leading feminists?" Seems like a handful of little-known writers and full-time activists", "I literally have tears in my eyes. This a masterpiece. The Onion could not have done better", "There's no parody that's as wickedly cutting as self-parody", "I understand why a sexist right-wing man would write a satire of modern feminism, but I don't understand why the Washington Post would publish it."

UPDATE 2: Also from the Washington Post, How to find a feminist boyfriend by Lisa Bonos. While the comments are not as overwhelmingly critical as Leading Feminist one, there is still a disproportionate amount of criticism and mockery. Not that there isn't a lot to be critical of and to mock, but for it to be happening in the Post is what is notable.