Conspiracy versus chance

I have little regard for conspiracy theories and conspiracists. That said, it is easy to see why, in large complex systems, people arrive at the conspiratorial conclusions that they do. And sometimes they are right.

For example, a few years ago there was the Journolist incident. It is well documented that members of the mainstream media lean strongly to the left on the political spectrum and it has long been a trope on the right that that monolithic orientation led to coordination among journalists as to what stories to print and how to spin them. Others argued that the appearance of coordination can arise in large systems simply through randomness and bias and without coordination. I subscribe to that position.

From Wikipedia:

JournoList (sometimes referred to as the J-List)[1] was a private Google Groups forum for discussing politics and the news media with 400 "left-leaning"[2] journalists, academics and others. Ezra Klein created the online forum in February 2007 while blogging at The American Prospect and shut it down on June 25, 2010 amid wider public exposure.

Even Wikipedia can't quite bring itself to say that there was a conspiracy, watering down the description as

Right-leaning journalists later pointed out various off-color statements made by members of the list denigrating conservatives, as well as a seeming conspiracy to prop up then Presidential candidate Barack Obama.

It wasn't a seeming conspiracy. It was a conspiracy.

On July 20, 2010, The Daily Caller (DC) published the dialog of the JournoList concerning Jeremiah Wright.[7] The contributors discussed killing the Wright story, as it was reflecting negatively on Barack Obama. In a separate discussion, about an ABC News-sponsored debate between Obama and Hillary Clinton, Michael Tomasky, a writer for The Guardian, also tried to rally his fellow members of JournoList: “Listen folks – in my opinion, we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy in whatever venues we have. This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people".[7] James Taranto observed that one JournoList contributor, Spencer Ackerman of The Washington Independent, stated "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists".[8]

As Aristotle said, "One swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day." No matter what the original intent of the founding of Journolist might have been, it is documented that it became a forum for those of a like mind to kill off unflattering stories and spin others in a fashion more sympathetic to the journalist's causes. Journolist was the poster child for conspiracy theorists.

I accept that there can be and probably are mechanisms by which subsets of journalists and editors can formally coordinate with one another. As Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty or justice.

It is the nature of the human beast. However, I still argue that the overwhelming majority of instances where there seems to be bias in reporting (or bias in selection of what to report) is most likely to arise from epistemological closure (also known as the echo chamber) arising from uniformity of bias rather than from actual conspiracy.

But then something like this comes along which, while not refuting my position, makes it more tenuous.

So that memo has gone out pic.twitter.com/A40XA02YgT

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) January 15, 2016

Click to access both messages.

Virtually the same message. OK, that can be the epistemological closure.

Virtually the same wording. Perhaps they had a conversation in which this arose as a topic and they are accidentally echoing one another's words.

Virtually the same timing. One minute apart. OK, that's harder. But in a large system with many parts, there are always improbable realities (see the Birthday Paradox where in a room of 23 randomly selected people, there is a 50-50 chance that two of them have the same birthday.)

Any one of those things can be rationalized. But virtually the same message in virtually the same words at virtually the same time? Those odds get pretty astronomical.

I am comfortable that my default position is the closest to the truth but I have to acknowledge that it doesn't always reconcile with all the evidence all the time.