When the quality of your reporting is the primary evidence for why people aren't buying

This has to be one for the record books in terms of tone-deafness and bubble habitation. From ‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News by Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner.

Their argument is straightforward though they take a few paragraphs to get to it.

In this volatile political moment, information, it would seem, has never been more crucial. The country is in the midst of impeachment proceedings against a president for the third time in modern history. A high-stakes election is less than a year away.

But just when information is needed most, to many Americans it feels most elusive. The rise of social media; the proliferation of information online, including news designed to deceive; and a flood of partisan news are leading to a general exhaustion with news itself.

I agree with the general sentiment. Technology and business evolution are making it much easier for people to communicate more things in more ways to more people than ever before. If you are interested in ensuring data quality management, that is a tough situation. If you are one of the old establishment information providers, this is an existential threat.

And if you are an enthusiast for personal freedom and are concerned about statist tendencies to control information, it is the springtime of information freedom (though with threats everywhere).

Tavernise and Gardiner very much come at this whole issue of the liberation of communication and information from the perspective of the establishment left and as employees of a company that is being remade by the communications revolution and is not assured of survival.

And they simply cannot help themselves. They are trapped in an epistemic echo chamber. Their whole article is riddled with examples of people concerned about bias and distortion in news. And what is their very next paragraph? It is a justification for those concerns on the part of information consumers.

Add to that a president with a documented record of regularly making false statements and the result is a strange new normal: Many people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real in a sea of slant, fake and fact.

A politician with a documented record of making false statements? Do tell. Let me know when you find one who doesn't.

Since his first emergence as a candidate, Trump's bombastic and chopped-up form of communication has been characterized as a series of lies. One of the few journalist with knowledge and insight pegged the root cause of the problem early on in 2016.

The best way, he says, is to provide good education and good jobs in these areas. “Fifty-eight percent of black youth cannot get a job, cannot work,” he says. “Fifty-eight percent. If you are not going to bring jobs back, it is just going to continue to get worse and worse.”

It’s a claim that drives fact-checkers to distraction. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the unemployment rate for blacks between the ages of 16 and 24 at 20.6 percent. Trump prefers to use its employment-population ratio, a figure that shows only 41.5 percent of blacks in that age bracket are working. But that means he includes full time high-school and college students among the jobless.

It’s a familiar split. When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Left-leaning establishment journalists believe Trump to always be lying and always hear him lying. His supporters believe Trump to be speaking fundamental truths through embellishment and rhetoric and think they are hearing the truth.

Left-leaning establishment journalists such as Tavernise and Gardiner try and claim with a straight face that Trump is any more or less to exaggerated communication than any other president or politician of the past fifty years. They and their ilk are constantly leaping to prove that his opinions are factually wrong or that his accurate facts are misleading. And certainly, he is occasionally quite factually wrong. But not nearly as often as journalists claim and certainly it is is unclear that he is more prone to inaccuracy than any other politician.

Is Trump accurate that more jobs will solve more social ills than almost any other government policy? Certainly. Is he accurate that the best program for poor African-American neighborhoods is greater employment and rising wages? Certainly. He is not wrong and you won't find many people outside of some corners of academia or ideologues who would claim those statements to be wrong.

If you are hung-up on the distinction between which of two accurate numbers might be more representative of the truth, then that ought to be a red flag that you might have taken your eye off the ball. 58% not working is an accurate number. 21% unemployed is an accurate number. The journalists are simply claiming that they think the 21% number is a better representation of the economic health of that demographic but that doesn't make 58% wrong, nor is it obviously true which is a superior representation.

Journalists believe him to be a liar. They report him to be lying. And then are shocked when readers interpret journalists as being the liars. "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

Tavernise and Gardiner keep making the point in their report about declining trust in news media and then providing an example of why that trust is declining.

“Now more than ever, the lines between fact-based reporting and opinionated commentary seem blurred for people,” said Evette Alexander, research director at the Knight Foundation, which funds journalism and research. “That means they trust what they are seeing less. They are feeling less informed.”

Sure. When you see supposedly serious mainstream media fact-checkers fact-checking opinions and even repeatedly fact-checking satyrical sites such as the Babylon Bee, then it is not unreasonable to lose confidence in supposed fact-based reporting.

They have one subject comment:

National politics, he said, has started to look like eyewitness testimony: “People can see totally different things, standing right next to each other.”

Forget eyewitness testimony. What about hearsay testimony? Tavernise and Gardiner keep referencing the impeachment inquiry without a hint of acknowledging that most the testimony it seems so far is from witnesses who were not on the call. People who heard things through the grapevine and feelz. If Tavernise and Gardiner want to establish a reputation for fact-based reporting, then they might do well to clean up their own NYT house.

If you look real hard, you can find out that hardly anyone who has testified so far has any direct knowledge, no one has identified a crime. All we have is people with documented track-records of opposition to the president, involvement with Democratic politicians and operatives, appointments from the last administration, and accusations of illegal leaking of confidential information. It is no wonder that the right is claiming that this is a show-trial. And while it is good for column inches and clicks for the media companies, it does not seem to motivate them to accurate reporting.

Back to Tavernise and Gardiner and their complete lack of self-awareness.

Then there are the politicians themselves, first among them Mr. Trump, who has helped create the confusion by asserting, over and over, things that numerous media fact checkers say are not true.

Let's see. What was one of the main story lines for the NYT in the past three years?

A short two-minute video for those of you in the media pitifully insisting that no media reckoning is needed and journalists performed beautifully, soberly and responsibly throughout this whole saga: pic.twitter.com/PF5s2kTcYA

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 25, 2019

All that was around the Russia collusion story which the NYT abetted and peddled, peddled hard, right up to the point when Robert Mueller blew up the claim. Who was "asserting, over and over, things that . . . are not true"? The New York Times.

Perhaps it is Tavernise's background in reporting on Russia, but there seems a demonstrably gratuitous to drag them into this issue of loss of confidence in media.

The loss of shared facts can be corrosive for rational discourse, as in Russia, where political leaders learned to use the online explosion far ahead of the United States.

“They spread this sense that people live in a world of endless conspiracy, and the truth is unknowable, and all that’s left in this confusing world is me,” said Peter Pomerantsev, author of “This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality.” He was referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian rulers. Mr. Trump, he said, has that style too.

Again, they can't help themselves. They are supposed to be doing straight-reporting and they have to work in a gratuitous allusion to Trump as an authoritarian ruler. It is worth remembering that there were many, many more cases brought by the Obama administration against journalists, and even jailing of journalists than there have been by Trump. Claims of authoritarianism shouldn't so patently hinge on whether he is your authoritarian or not.

Tavernise and Gardiner also seem to lack any sort of historical awareness that might add interesting insight to their reporting. They hearken back to the heyday of their company.

The degree of alienation is new. In the late 1970s, nearly three quarters of Americans trusted newspapers, radio and television. Walter Cronkite read the news every night, and most Americans went to bed with the same set of facts, even if they had different political views. These days, less than half of Americans have confidence in the media, according to Gallup.

Hmm. Today we have a multiplicity of news sources from all points of view and from all around the world. We can get as many opinions and as many facts as we want to work for.

In 1970 we could get facts from three national media companies on TV. Newspapers were profoundly local. Even by 1985, it was hit and miss whether you could find a New York Times in any given city in the US. There was no USA Today. Washington Post was a company paper in a company town.

What Tavernise and Gardiner are yearning for was when people had so few news sources that they had to trust the few that existed. They are longing for the time when news consumers were unaware or how skewed and selective was the news being presented.

It is worth noting that:

The decline in confidence is particularly pronounced by party. Today about 69 percent of Democrats have a great deal of confidence in the media, compared to just 15 percent of Republicans and 36 percent of independents, according to Gallup.

You would think it worth also noting that 70-90% of journalists vote or donate left. So what Tavernise and Gardiner are not quite saying is that Democrats trust news from Democrats whereas everyone else does not have that same level of trust.

For thoroughness, one might have hoped that Tavernise and Gardiner would mention that only 31% of Americans identify as Democrats. Doing the maths, you end up with 31% of Americans having 69% of trust in Democratic media sources. Basically about 20% of Americans have a good deal of trust in the mainstream traditional (i.e. Democratic) mainstream media and reporters. 80% of Americans fall short of that level of trust, often, far short.

I would hope that that might suggest to Tavernise and Gardiner that the source of the problem is not that our current politicians are less trustworthy than those in the past. I think the problem they identify is real. News consumers have to work harder to find accurate information than they used to do but it is easier to find more accurate information than it used to be. On top of that, news consumers now have a dramatically wider range of new sources and so they have to process a much wider representation of reality.

This is a story of increasing freedom, improving technology, and a richer range of choices. All of which is good.

Tavernise and Gardiner are rueing the decline in politicians and the loss of interest of news consumers without acknowledging that they are in fact the root cause of the issue. If they would report straight information on more issues of interest to a wider range of Americans, they might have a ghost of a chance to come through commercially.

As it is, they lament that there are fewer people interested in what they are reporting in the way that they are reporting it. It is like GM complaining about Americans not buying their fuel inefficient and poor quality cars in the early eighties. It is true, people, when given the choice of better quality, greater fuel efficiency, and lower costs, were making different choices than in the past. But that was not a reflection on car-buyers. It was a reflection on GM.

What Tavernise and Gardiner are not acknowledging, perhaps because they cannot see it, is that they as journalists, and the New York Times as a news producer are to the 2019 information market as GM was to the 1980 American auto market.

The New York Times needs to improve the quality of its reporting, the breadth of it reporting, and the usefulness of its reporting to remain commercially viable. They don't know how to do that and so, instead, they are doubling down and complaining that people are unwilling to consume slanted and frequently inaccurate news reporting when they have better, cheaper, and more useful alternative sources.

And ‘No One Believes Anything’: Voters Worn Out by a Fog of Political News is Exhibit A of their incapacity to serve better informational fare.