Environment drives bias?

An interesting article despite the conspiracy theory flavor. Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump by Liz Crokin. I am reasonably confident that Apple, Google, Instagram and other tech companies are not "colluding" to defeat Trump. It is possible however, that they are delivering their services in a way biased against Trump - that is the interesting aspect.

What is also unusual is that rather than attempt a rhetorical argument, Crokin pretty much let's the evidence speak for itself. She lists instance after instance of apparent discrimination on the part of the tech companies against conservatives. I have not checked on even half her instances, but the ones I have, she represents them in an accurate light. There's actually even more material out there that she doesn't use. For example, earlier this year, someone compiled the number of official Google visits to the White House as well as the number of Administration people now working at Google and the number of Google people now working in the Administration. Google was visiting the White House on average weekly and there were several dozen employee movements between Google and the Administration.

Crokin's evidence brings to mind three thoughts.

First - this feels a lot like the IRS scandal in which the Administration used the IRS to suppress the voice and activities of conservative opponents. We are encouraged to accept that this was just a once-off aberration with no significance. Three or four years ago before the scandal broke, it was inconceivable that the coercive power of the IRS would be illegally diverted to suppress the free exercise of speech. Just inconceivable. Since then, the media has essentially normalized the transgression and refused to investigate. The excuses have ranged from, and been progressively disproved: it didn't happen at all, it was just a local office matter, it wasn't coordinated, it wasn't coordinated from Washington, it wasn't material, it doesn't still occur. All have been disproved through Freedom of Information requests on the parts of citizens and not any from the mainstream media. I have the same initial feeling here. No, the tech companies can't be doing this. But just because it is inconceivable, as in the case of the IRS, doesn't make it untrue.

Second - Private companies are not subject to the First Amendment so from a legal perspective, Google et al are not committing a crime. But what happens when these companies collude, not with one another, but with government (and government's entrenched interests)? Are we in a situation where a political party in government is able to coordinate the suppression of rights through private ventures so that no constitutional crime has been committed because the action has been undertaken by voluntary third-parties? That almost seems possible. We have definitely been down that path in the past with Teapot Dome, Tammany Hall, the military-industrial complex, etc. But this feels different. In those past cases, the crime was being committed by private enterprises subverting government itself via bribes. In this instance it is subverting rights by the government through its control (moral suasion) of private enterprises. That seems a creepy and dangerous development.

Third - This seems to me, ever the optimist, to be more of an issue of bubbles than of evil intent. Conservative commentators rail against the perceived bias by liberal mainstream media. Some of this is pretty explicit in terms of number of journalists registered as Democrat versus Republican, percentage of media industry participant donations which go to Democrats versus Republicans, etc. Explicit in the sense that we know it is true. Mainstream media spent 40% more broadcast time on the Democratic National Convention than on the Republican. They write more positive stories about Democrats than about Republicans, they vote more for Democrats, they give more money to Democrats, etc. We know these elements to be true, whether or not you believe that those elements then biases their reporting.

I think that the issue is deeper and more challenging than this simple story of Democrat dominance in the media. There are just too many actors for this to be a coordinated conspiracy against conservatives. I think the real issue is that all the mainstream media tend to be concentrated in a handful of key cities. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Virtually all of these have several or all of the following attributes in common.

They are large, dense cities, anchored by multiple universities, with above average educational attainments, disproportionately high income, disproportionately minority, have very high levels of inequality and disproportionately high crime levels, etc. They also have been almost uniformly and uninterruptedly under single party control (Democrat) for half a century or more. They look nothing like America. And yet that is where journalists live and work. Is it any wonder that they are obsessed with race and crime and Democrats and inequality and lawlessness, etc. That is what they see everyday. That is the America they know, even if it isn't anything like America at all. My supposition is that the mainstream media so strongly affiliates with the Democrats not necessarily because all journalists are ideologically aligned with the Democrats but because the Democrats focus on the "city" issues pertinent to the lived experience of journalists.

Journalists carry the Democratic agenda as part of their worldview, not necessarily because they are registered ideological Democrats but because the Democratic agenda best matches what journalists live. This is a much more insidious bias because it is far less apparent. You don't have to have colluding editors secretly editing journalist's work to reflect the Democratic party line. They simply don't have to. Everyone does it electively based on their big city environment which is a Democratic policy environment. Hence the disconnect with the 80% of Americans who do not live in big cities.

I wonder if this same dynamic might be going on in the Tech industry, concentrated as it is in Boston, New York, San Francisco and a handful of other big cities. Facebook was in trouble a few months ago for manipulating its news feed to suppress negative articles damaging to Democrats and magnifying stories that might be damaging to Republicans. It turned out to be the consequence of actions taken by local employees rather than a concerted effort by the executives. The thing is, you don't need the executives to do the discriminating if you hire employees that will do so for free on your behalf. Employees that are city-dwelling, high income, high education attainment, progressive, etc. In other words, perhaps, like the media, the tech companies don't make this bias happen, it happens because of the nature of the people it hires in the locations they hire them.

Like the mainstream media - Not deliberate discrimination but self-selective affiliation and urban context leading to dominance of one world view over others.

What happens when academia, entertainment and media all become aficionados of the Frankfurt School via their sympathy and support of Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, extremist feminism, extremist AGW fanatics, extremist opponents of vaccines and GMO, and social justice warriors? Another way to put it is, what happens when academia, entertainment, media become anti-white, anti-business, anti-men, anti-science, and anti-justice?

Every society has a "burn the place down" anarchist element of 1-10%. This would not usually matter except that, having captured media, entertainment and the academy, the children of the Frankfurt School are in a position to poison the discourse far out of proportion to their numbers.

Almost everyone else has a vested interest in making things better. The academy, entertainment, and media have been infected by or captured by the anarchic destructive 10%. The 90% who want race blind policies, are comfortable with business and men, and who believe in justice and in science, are rebelling against the bully pulpit of the 10%.

Or at least, that's one way of looking at it.