An interesting piece by Matt Yglesias, one of a creeping tide of journalists who are at heart classical liberals, no longer allowed to function within the mainstream media, departing to establish a brand entirely under their own control and report truths as they understand them without being held hostage bobble heads.
From What's wrong with the media by Matthew Yglesias. I disagree with a number of his conclusions but we are in synch on a good number. Here is on an aspect of the bubble reality of mainstream media, one of my bugbears.
But Vox is typical of a few trends that exist broadly in the media industry and that I do think are of interest.
The staff skews very young.
The staff is concentrated in big coastal cities, and especially New York.
The staff is overwhelmingly composed of graduates of selective colleges (state university flagship campuses and private schools with names you know).
The media industry has long skewed young, educated, and New Yorky. But digital disruption trends have made it more so than ever before. Daily newspapers published in mid-sized cities and small towns are weaker and less significant. A lot of reporters born in the 1960s and 1970s have left the industry as it has shrunk and few of them work at digital native startups.
Separately from that change, national politics has been polarizing around age, educational attainment and population density in an unprecedented way. A group of young, recent college graduates living in Brooklyn would’ve skewed left in 1990 but this was an era when Al D’Amato could win statewide in New York and Democratic presidential campaigns would win in West Virginia. Today a demographically identical group skews much further left than it used to. None of this is really an outcome that anyone particularly wanted or intended. But it’s put a big thumb on the scales ideologically at the exact same time that economic trends have turned against the startups.
The result is that I think you should expect the instability we’ve seen this fall to be just the leading edge of the wedge.
He has some great examples and stories where his focus on the facts and evidence led him into misalignment with the newsroom in which he was working. A location where ideological fervor was a sufficient alternate to reality to warrant publication.
And then there is this rather significant point which I think is a very good insight.
The basic dynamic is that if you take a normal distribution (say of political views) and then shift the average a bit to one side, you end up with explosive growth in the number of outliers. In this chart, the average of the red line isn’t so different from the average of the black line. But the right-hand tail of the red line is much higher than the black.
If everyone in digital media is an under-fifty college graduate living in a big city, then it’s not that everyone in digital media is a far-left weirdo, but you do get drastically more far-left weirdness.
It is a little like Twitter. I am recalling the numbers from rough recollection. Only about 25% of Americans have a Twitter account (whereas virtually everyone in the mainstream media does). Of those individuals on Twitter, something like 10% of accounts are responsible for perhaps 65% of the activity. If most of the clicks are generated by the oddballs outside the norm, and the ones most ideologically vocal, then significance of the ratio of far left weirdness takes on a lot of significance.
Hence the mounting sense of disconnect between what you see and hear in the mainstream media versus what you actually experience in reality.
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