Business models and mental models

Ann Althouse has a couple of points in two different blog posts, that actually reinforce one another.

From "Fire and Fury" author Michael Wolff "acknowledged in a 'Today' show interview that he had been willing to say whatever was 'necessary' to gain access at the White House." there is this remark:

ADDED: It's time once again to quote Janet Malcolm, "The Journalist and the Murderer":

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. ...

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

It's horrendously incompetent to operate at a high level and not already know this.

This much like the advice that used to be given and ignored by anyone not of the preening clerisy. Don't go on the Jon Stewart show. You think you are there for a conversation and exchange of ideas but you are simply fodder for mockery and satire. And Stewart controlled the editing process so "what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject." Stewart and Oliver were/are masters of uninhibited cruelty. Often funny, but inescapably cruel.

There are three observations.

Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect - If you are reading an article on a topic about which you are familiar, it is the norm, as Michael Crichton notes, that there are important omissions, reverse causation, inaccurate summaries, frequent innumeracy, logical inconsistencies, and obvious force fitting to support some reportorial narrative. Most frequent of all is strong assertions of fact about things which are actually hotly disputed. Sure, reporters have limited space to summarize complex events but that does not excuse the errors. If the final report leaves a novice reader with a misunderstanding of reality, then it is bad reporting. And that is, per Crichton, mostly what we get. But because you have direct knowledge of only a small percentage of all that is reported, it is easy to assume that the errors are an aberration and everything else is more accurate. But the erroneous reporting is actually the norm.

Media business model shift - Employees are expensive, knowledge acquisition is expensive, fact-checked reporting is expensive, getting reporters to an event and back is expensive. And revenues are plunging. Compared to the past, news media companies are in a bind. That is why there is so much press release journalism (rewriting of missives from sources), opinion journalism (opinions are cheap and plentiful), and bureau reporting (easier to dress up a generic AP report than to send one of your reporters). It is also why experienced front line reporters are replaced by cheaper, young, inexperienced journalists fresh from journalism school with low standards and little breadth of knowledge (see Ben "They literally know nothing" Rhodes.)

Narrow Journalistic Homogeneity - As the news media industry has contracted, it has also become dramatically less diverse than in the past. Everyone is college educated, young, urban living, Democratic Party supporting, no work experience outside journalism, unaffiliated with a religious institution, and a dues paying member of the chattering class. They are unfamiliar with menial labor, unskilled labor, dangerous work, life outside the urban core, people with high school educations or less, religion, real poverty, etc. Their blinders are big and thick.

These among many other issues have contributed to the low standing of the media in the eyes of the public.

One of the things that makes reporting much easier, and cheaper, is to have a mental model in mind for every situation. A world view, perhaps an ideology. As a reporter, you can interpret all actions you see within the context of that worldview rather than do the much harder work of verifying the underlying facts. It is the difference between interpreting a matrix of information in an excel spreadsheet versus actually verifying the integrity of the underlying data. The first is much easier than the second.

If you are a journalist in a bubble where all you hear is same-speak, and everyone has mostly the same set of assumptions, and where there is a premium on cheap and fast, it is easy to overlook accurate. It is the old manufacturing adage: faster, cheaper, better - pick two. News media have chosen faster and cheaper while still claiming better as well. It is easy for conservatives to interpret biased media reporting as partisanship. Easy because that is what it does look like. More likely, I think, is that the appearances of partisanship is partly, maybe even primarily, a function of journalists responding to the incentives inherent to their industry.

Fast and cheap is rewarded. Expensive quality is not. And if you are using mental models (conscious or unconscious) to interpret the world, then that is going to inject error into the reporting.

Which comes to Althouse's second, and different post which provides a small example of the unacknowledged biases inherent to unexamined mental models. Althouse has a penchant for close textual analysis. Not unexpected given her career as a professor of law.

From The feminist critique of Trump is easy... too easy. She starts with:

"President Trump makes the job of a feminist security analyst almost too easy. No subtle teasing out of subtexts required with this guy."

Writes Carol Cohn, the director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at the University of Massachusetts Boston, in an op-ed in the NYT.

Too easy? If this were a movie, and someone was making it "too easy," you'd know that something really complicated was going on. I'm thinking of the meme (satirized in "Airplane") "It's quiet... too quiet."

Cohn is looking at a Trump tweet that looks too simple — it seems to shout its own Freudian/feminist analysis: "I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!"

He's conflating nuclear bombs and male sexual ego right there in the open, so if you tell him he's doing what he's clearly doing, you're just repeating what he said. His statement and the critique of the statement are both already out there, in as few words as possible. What's left to say? There's nothing for you to feast upon. It's all pre-digested by Trump. Disarming!

He made it too easy. What can you do? Un-pre-digest it?

But then her eye for close text focus yields an interesting tidbit.

Citing her work "among civilian nuclear strategists, war planners, weapons scientists and arms controllers," Cohn says:

Overt impugning of masculinity is still only the most surface level at which ideas about gender play out in strategic thinking. They work in deeper, more subtle ways too. The culturally pervasive associations of masculinity with dispassion, distance, abstraction, toughness and risk-taking, and of femininity with emotion, empathy, bodily vulnerability, fear and caution, are embedded within the professional discourse.

And there they function to make some kinds of ideas seem self-evidently “realist,” hard-nosed and rational, and others patently inadmissible, self-evidently inappropriate. (One white male physicist told me that he and colleagues were once modeling a limited nuclear attack when he suddenly voiced dismay that they were talking so casually about “only 30 million” immediate deaths. “It was awful — I felt like a woman,” he said.)

(Why are we told he was white? He didn't say "It was awful — I felt like a black person.")

Carol Cohn presumably carries a mental model of the world with a set of prisms through which she interprets everything she sees. What is the race of the person? What is the gender? What is the identity? Althouse is correct that Cohn's observation of the gentleman's race is irrelevant to her argument. Cohn's inclusion is a tell that race, along with gender, are important components to her interpretation of the world. The fact that the physicist is white is irrelevant to the factual story but it is critical to Cohn's understanding of what is going on. That is why it is in her account. It's inclusion comes across as racist, and it probably meets the textbook definition of racism even though Cohn would likely be appalled and would refuse to acknowledge that perspective.

The news media business model is driving journalists to faster and cheaper reporting at the expense of quality. Faster and cheaper is facilitated by mental models/worldviews. Most journalists exist in an environment with a shared worldview (social justice postmodernism) not widely shared outside of their circles.

I think the low trust (and the collapse of readership and the seeking of alternate news sources) are in part a function of readers picking up on the subtle biases which drive the selection of what to report and the bias that emerges from the mental models on which journalists rely and which are not shared by most other people.

For example, how on earth does the monomaniacal focus on a new book about the Trump White House, Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, a writer who everyone seems to acknowledge as unreliable, outweigh any reporting on the emerging popular rebellion in the globally consequential theocracy of Iran? The Wolff drivel will be a storm in a teacup and gone from the headlines in a week. The Iran developments will be with us for years. Yet the newspapers and airwaves are filled with Wolff and you have to go hunting to find anything on Iran.

But think about business models and mental models. The Wolff story is all about opinions. It is cheap and fast and compliant with the business model. The Wolff story is also compliant with the journalists's mental models. Trump is the antithesis of anything in the postmodernist social justice worldview and Wolff is attacking Trump. Of course they are investing sympathetic time trying to sort through the factually false claims to find something that might support their opinion. Iran, on the other hand, is far away, difficult to report on, expensive, and not relevant to the postmodernist social justice worldview of a 27-year old who knows nothing (per Rhodes.)

Meanwhile, everyone else is trying to find out about their healthcare coverage, their taxes for this year, what is happening in Iran and North Korea. And finding nothing.