Joel Litman on confirmation bias in the media

In many cases I think the media, they come up with a narrative and then they find the data to support it. It's the opposite of the scientific method. 

~ Joel Litman, "A 'Not-So Secret Weapon' in Finance," Stansberry Investor Hour, 30:35 mark, September 19, 2022

Stephen Kinzer on the sinking of the Maine and pro-war propaganda

Many Americans already felt a passionate hatred for Spanish colonialism and a romantic attachment to the idea of "Cuba Libre."  Their emotions had been fired by a series of wildly sensational newspaper reports that together consitute one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press.  William Randolph Hearst, the owner of the New York Journal and a string of other newspapers across the country, had been attracting readers for months with vivid denunciations of Spanish colonialists...

[...]

The moment Hearst heard about the sinking of the Maine, he recognized it as a great opportunity.  For weeks after the explosion, he filled page after page with mendacious "scoops," fabricated interviews with unnamed government officials, and declarations that the battleship had been "destroyed by treachery" and "split in two by an enemy's secret infernal machine."  The Journal's daily circulation doubled in four weeks.  Other newspapers joined the frenzy, and their campaign brought Americans to near-hysteria.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, pp. 36-37

(Editor's note: The role of yellow journalism in whipping Americans into a pro-war frenzy may be overstated.)

H.L. Mencken on American journalism

American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

~ H.L. Mencken

Carl Sagan on the dumbing down of America

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media... lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstitution, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

~ Carl Sagan, 1995

Thomas Jefferson on education and newspapers

The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

~ Thomas Jefferson

George Orwell on media spin

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

~ George Orwell

Rolf Dobelli on how news media distorts risk assessement

As a result of news, we walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads.

• Terrorism is overrated.  Chronic stress is underrated.
• The collapse of Lehman Brothers is overrated.  Fiscal irresponsibility is underrated.
• Astronauts are overrated.  Nurses are underrated.
• Britney Spears is overrated.  IPCC reports are underrated.
• Airplane crashes are overrated.  Resistance to antibiotics is underrated.

We are not rational enough to be exposed to the news-mongering press.  It is a very dangerous thing, because the probabilistic mapping we get from consuming news is entirely different from the actual risks that we face.  Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk regardless of its real probability, no matter your intellectual sophistication.  If you think you can compensate for this bias with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong.

~ Rolf Dobelli, "Avoid News," p. 2, 2010

Rolf Dobelli on how the news media focuses on the highly visible

News reports do not represent the real world. 

Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, peoplerelated, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias. 

News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty. 

The highly visible misleads us.

~ Rolf Dobelli, "Avoid News," p. 2

Thomas Sowell on the corruption of journalism

Journalists cannot serve two masters. To the extent that they take on the task of suppressing information or biting their tongue for the sake of some political agenda, they are betraying the trust of the public and corrupting their own profession.

~ Thomas Sowell

Robert Higgs on how the mainstream media has changed over the past 50 years

Go back fifty years or so, and you can find news that was, to some extent, actually news: you know, more or less factual answers to the classic journalistic questions: what, who, when, where, and how. I'm not sure exactly when the change happened, but at some point the news became entertainment. Not funny entertainment, mind you, but something aimed less at informing and more at arousing people, especially by stimulating their fears, keeping them in a state of constant apprehension, and confirming people's ideological beliefs and cementing their allegiance with one political team or another. 

Discussions of current events became shouting matches between sets of nincompoops who could speak of political trivia, but had no understanding of anything truly important in social, political, and economic affairs. Along the way, truth -- even a clear understanding of how truth differs from falsehood or from one's sentiments or wishful thinking -- fell completely out of favor. It is now no longer "a thing," as the lingo goes.

~ Robert Higgs, Facebook post, October 6, 2020

Jenin Younes on media coverage of the coronavirus

[T]he media’s dereliction of duty is beyond evident.  As [Karina] Reiss and [Sucharit] Bhakdi observe, broadcasters and the press became “servile mouthpieces of the government” and never “critically questioned” the “disturbing images and frightening numbers."  Incidentally, a letter recently published by 200 Belgian scientists similarly criticized the media: “[t]he relentless bombardment of numbers, unleashed on the population day after day, hour after hour, without indicating those numbers, without comparing them to flu deaths in other years, without comparing them with deaths from other causes, has induced a true psychosis of fear in the population.  This is not information, but manipulation.” 

As an avid consumer of the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR, I can attest to the media having operated no differently in the United States.  Apart from a few pieces in early March that questioned the wisdom of the course we had set upon, there was no serious discussion and no debate, at least in the left-leaning media, and anyone who dissented from the prevailing view was and continues to be dismissed as stupid or selfish.  Early on, and without any nuanced analysis, Sweden was deemed a failure.  The public has been beset by such terror, driven by anecdotes often presented without context, that it has become virtually impossible to dispel these many misconceptions using facts, figures, and logic.

~ Jenin Younes, "Disease Panic vs. Medical Reality," AIER.org, September 28, 2020

Rolf Dobelli: "our addiction to the news has become a dangerous mania"

In the past 20 years, since the advent of the internet and the smartphone, our addiction to the news has become a dangerous mania. You can barely escape it. It’s high time we reconsidered our approach to this glut of news. It’s high time we realised the impact of consuming it and began a detox.

~ Rolf Dobelli, "Avoid the News," 2011

Barbara Tuchman on how negative events are exaggerated

The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold.

~ Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror (1978)

Allan Stevo on trusting coronavirus experts

Now, more than ever, as more people get fearful, as the media stokes that fear, as the grocery store shelves get more empty, as the government steps in to say they are here to help, the more vital it is than ever to trust your BS detector.

~ Allan Stevo, "Suddenly Everyone is a Coronavirus Expert," LewRockwell.com, March 13, 2020

Allan Stevo on news and confirmation bias

There’s an aspect of confirmation bias that marketers have long understood as significant: the more education you have, the more successful you’ve been inside a system, the less likely you are to see contradictory information from unfamiliar sources as valid. Also, the less likely you are to approach the ideas presented to you by a trusted source in a circumspect fashion.

Basically, if you’ve got a PhD, you eat most of what’s fed to you, as long as it’s fed to you by the right people.

And the news doesn’t just have a way of getting people opinionated, it has a way of making one feel educated, almost expert on a topic.

~ Allan Stevo, "Suddenly Everyone is a Coronavirus Expert," LewRockwell.com, March 13, 2020

Rolf Dobelli on news consumption

News is for the mind what sugar is for the body. News is appetizing, easily digestible and at the same time extremely harmful. The media feed us small snippets of trivial stories, treats that in no way satisfy our hunger for knowledge. Unlike books and long, well-researched, long articles, there is no saturation when it comes to news consumption. We can devour unlimited amounts of messages; they remain cheap sugar candies. As with sugar, the side effects only become apparent with a delay.

That's why I haven't read a newspaper, consumed online news, watched a TV or listened to the radio for almost ten years.

~ Rolf Dobelli, "News lunch," Dobelli.com, March 2019

Joseph Goebbels on the media

Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.

~ Joseph Goebbels

Ludwig von Mises on indoctrination in public schools vs. popular culture

On the high school level and even on the college level the handing down of historical and economic knowledge is virtually indoctrination.  The greater part of the students are certainly not mature enough to form their own opinion on the ground of a critical examination of their teachers' representation of the subject.

If public education were more efficient than it really is, the political parties would urgently aim at the domination of the school system in order to determine the mode in which these subjects are to be taught.  However, general education plays only a minor role in the formation of the political, social, and economic ideas of the rising generation. The impact of the press, the radio, and environmental conditions is much more powerful than that of teachers and textbooks.  The propaganda of the churches, the political parties, and the pressure groups outstrips the influence of the schools, whatever they may teach.  What is learned in school is often very soon forgotten and cannot carry on against the continuous hammering of the social milieu in which a man moves.

~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, pp. 877-878

Nassim Taleb on the value of newspapers

To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers.

~ Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes, p. 21

Nassim Taleb on the media and knowledge

Most info-Web-media-newspaper types have a hard time swallowing the idea that knowledge is reached (mostly) by removing junk from people's heads.

Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes, p. 58