No quibbles with the column, but the bigger problem with over-hiring from this cohort is the lack of subject matter expertise. They have a lot of ideological commitments, high confidence, and very little knowledge. So they fill in the gaps with their assumptions or repeat the conventional wisdom in their newsroom.
Example: an Army friend was complaining to me the other day about crappy coverage of military topics. I saw an analysis showing that less than 0.5% of NYT staffers have any military background, and those people mostly work on the tech side. So it’s not surprising that they’d make errors of fact and analysis. But why? The military has trained journalists that the NYT could hire from.
And for the love of God, foreign correspondents should speak the language. At a minimum, they should be able to have a basic conversation on the street. If they can’t even communicate, who knows what cultural assumptions or biased filters are showing up in their work. Imagine trying to report on the US without speaking English. But this means more hiring of immigrant kids, Mormons, etc., not Penn grads.
Oh no. Then they would also have to hire an Air Force-trained reporter, and one from Navy Times, and an ex-Marine and even, heaven help us, a Space Command-bred reporter. Man, what am I saying. An "Army" reporter? Which branch? Can an infantry-branch reporter do full justice to issues affecting the armor branch or even, I laugh just thinking about it, Army aviation?
But seriously, of course you need journalists who know their beat but it's always the case that people inside an institution will have problems with journalists who, because they have to cover a wide beat, will never know as much of the details as someone who lives it every day. And there have been truly fine military correspondents. I'll name Thomas Ricks as just one.
"And there have been truly fine military correspondents. I'll name Thomas Ricks as just one."
Add C. J. Chivers, who is a vet, and Tyler Rogoway, who I think is not. (Rogoway, as far as I can tell, is more of a tech enthusiast who just likes military tech. But he is knowledgeable about his subjects!)
I have to reluctantly agree that subject matter (and/or institutional) knowledge is increasingly necessary. Reluctantly because I have known beat reporters who knew squat become not only expert but able to bring a broader, less captured perspective to their reporting.
The economic challenges facing news outlets of every type are as understood as they are mostly ignored. It will get worse before it gets better. Perhaps we will see the rise of loosely organized citizen-reporters working with more established reporters and writers to deliver a broader and deeper range of coverage. Perhaps a consortium of Substack writers!
The danger of biased perspectives in such an arrangement are hard to address. Today’s media are growing less objective because their readers are more ideological and less tolerant, demanding not only coverage but favoritism. Being profit-making institutions, news media will give them what they want. How does someone get a less curated depiction of events? Watching both Fox News and MSNBC to figure out “reality” would make me both insane and deaf.
Ryan McBeth did the research on the minuscule portion of staff at NYT and WaPo that served in the military. You can find the YouTube episode or read his Substack.
Both newspapers consulted ‘military experts’ regarding the chances the IDF has in fighting Hamas above and below ground. They haven’t really adjusted in the face of the IDF’s masterful use of combined arms in urban fighting, nor the fact that 17 of 22 Hamas battalions are inoperable beyond tiny cells. The pro Palestinian indoctrination these journalists received in J-school and their personal urge to be pro Hamas propagandists has been a disservice to their useful idiot progressive readership.
"...foreign correspondents should speak the language."
Totally agree, but note that this is easier when you have more foreign beats, harder when you have fewer. Your "Middle East" correspondent should certainly speak Arabic; should they speak Persian as well? When your paper has only one African correspondent , which is "the language" that they should speak? Does your Asian Bureau have enough people to have Thai, Burmese, and Laotian speakers as well as the speakers of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese?
In the old days, the papers would have lots of correspondents in the field, speaking lots of languages. But it's expensive.
Yeah I think you hit on it. The real issue is just general decline of news readership overall. Which has meant the first thing to go is usually foreign correspondents given how expensive it is how little non domestic topics get read. Which means foreign policy coverage in general is almost certainly worse. I think it’s a huge part of why the Afghan coverage was so unbelievably and disproportionately negative to Biden. So many of the people writing about it probably hadn’t even thought about Afghanistan for years let along be stationed there.
Sort of on that note. Was blown away to find out from David Simon that the Baltimore Sun used to have a plethora of foreign correspondents as it was one of the top 10 newspapers in the country.
You're right about the expense, especially for smaller outlets that only have one or two people covering a region. A big outlet like the NYT would still need to prioritize based on the area's importance. Correspondents sitting in their Mideast bureaus should speak Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, or something. They shouldn't be reporting from Jerusalem speaking only English, which happens pretty often (I've met them).
Something I've often wondered is why newspapers don't jointly fund foreign bureaus.
There must be twenty "Middle East correspondents" for twenty different newspapers (assuming the NYT and WaPo have it more broken down than that). Wouldn't they be better off if half of those newspapers organised a consortium and had a bureau chief and eight correspondents, locating six in specific countries and then the other two to cover the rest of the region?
I suspect that this did happen sometimes, and was the origin of the "exclusive" report, i.e. a report that was not shared by all members of the consortium. After all, if the Guardian and Telegraph share a "pool reporter" whereas the Times can afford its own correspondent in Kabul, then it can run "exclusives" that you can only read if you purchase the Times.
Some of our current terminology makes more sense if those were the earlier customs.
Africa correspondents should speak French in addition to English (that's gotta be 80% of the continent south of the Sahara between those two).
Middle east correspondents should speak one of Farsi, Turkish, or Arabic, and should be assigned to stories based on language skills (Hebrew, Pashto, etc. can be a plus).
For covering India and Pakistan, I think English should actually be fine (though obviously Indian languages don't hurt).
I think Chinese is the most important East Asian language, followed by Japanese, then Korean, then other languages.
And obviously, Spanish for Latin America (with Portuguese as a nice plus).
Journalism does not pay a wage competitive with almost any other application of genuine competence, let alone expertise.
It *cannot* attract the talent it needs to help the audience understand most topics, and fills the gap with idealistic but deeply ideological journalists coming from programs which themselves are increasingly run by ideologues rather than people with genuine expertise.
My own half-assed spitball is "recognized experts (defined loosely) should be required to spend 40 hours a year writing public interest pieces on their field with the aid of an editor for publication in a major media outlet, and major media outlets (also defined loosely) should be required to publish at least 4 of those works every publication. They should be in the public domain immediately and available for publication by any news periodical without charge, forever."
"Journalism does not pay a wage competitive with almost any other application of genuine competence, let alone expertise. It *cannot* attract the talent it needs to help the audience understand most topics..."
The wages may not be competitive in terms of dollars, but there are competent people who highly value agency, status, etc. E.g. professors in STEM fields are often payed much less at a university than they would if they worked in industry; it's pretty common for newly graduated STEM PhDs to make more money than their advisors if they go into industry.
So, there are situations in which experts are willing to take a pay cut in exchange for non-monetary benefits. I'm sure that major publications could offer an acceptable package of monetary and non-monetary benefits if they really wanted.
The last sentence, yes. I see no possible path for print media corporations to offer an attractive combinations of pay, benefits, and prestige for anyone except their very, very best.
If the NYT offered $90k with remote work and a fair amount of autonomy, they'd have zero problem filling the job with a qualified applicant. I'm confident they could offer less.
Assistant professor salaries at a generic R1 public university aren't that high [1], and the NYT is much more prestigious than say, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. A NYT job is also pretty easily monetizable. If you do a good job writing articles, you can easily make some extra money with a side hustle of writing popular science books.
I would love to see this sort of work being valued in tenure and promotion packets. My husband had a colleague who was featured in the New York Times a couple of times, but administration didn't see that as worthy at all even though it reached way more people than anything else he or anyone else in the department did.
Conversely, I am kind of annoyed with the attention some of my colleagues get from being featured in the NYT. Maybe it's just bitterness talking, but I find what gets picked up for public interest stories are *never* the most impactful science being done.
With regards to administration though, they will always claim not to value what you excel in. If it's research, then your teaching isn't impactful enough. If it's public outreach, then your research isn't deep enough. etc. etc. etc.
Oh, that's exactly how it is in academia too. I've gotten some modest raises here and there by raising a stink about productivity vs. colleagues (hey, I'm not posting here all the time!), but I know the only way to get the big money is to get a competing offer.
We need the cultural norm that not doing it gets you put at the back of the line. Academics have, among their many, many problems, a tendency to ignore or downplay public scholarship. We need to beat them bloody until they rediscover its value.
Let's start with a 5% income tax surcharge for not doing it, to help that norm to grow.
It would be entirely constitutional for a state licensure board to mandate an either/or: 40 hours of public engagement and scholarship annually, or an additional licensure fee equivalent to 5% of the field's median income paid into the state general fund.
The number of times that people trot out "but the Constitution" as an attempt to slap down discussion of something they find personally unpleasant around here is sad. We have a million ways to enforce an in-kind contribution from experts in many fields, including most of the important ones.
I don’t find it personally unpleasant, David. But the First Amendment does not allow the government to compel speech, and I am reasonably sure that your proposal violates it because you would have people penalized by a state board for not engaging in a particular type of speech.
I think you are far better off using a carrot than a stick. Make it something to be proud of and reputationally beneficial and people will do it. Tell someone they have to do it or get penalized and you'll get some crappy product that is of no use to anyone.
Good luck with that norm here in the States. It actually, in the main, exists in China. A book of public scholarship is something academics are proud to put on a CV, an invitation to give a public lecture to a generalist audience is an honor and privilege, and the sort of anti-social, narrow-minded, elitist fools who sit at the pinnacle of academia in most American universities are marginalized and derided.
Recreating that norm in the United States (we had this too once upon a time) would require turning academia inside out and deliberately privileging those scholars who have been confined to its margins because they choose to educate the public. They are the folks with the power to dispense carrots and they must be overruled by the government wielding a big stick.
I see no clear path other than to incentivize the proper behavior until it becomes something people expect and require.
I will restate my previous point - if the culture doesn't support and reward "40 hours a year writing public interest pieces" than using government force to make people to do it will be EXTREMELY unlikely to result in positive outcomes. Most of them will probably publish an article talking about why its bad for their field that the government forces people to do this.
This sounds very much like a Republican trying to accomplish a cultural change by law, but if the culture isn't already supportive it will be very difficult to have a law passed and even more difficult to enforce it in a meaningful (and non biased) way.
No, I've asked folks like you to do something you don't want to do but may be necessary for the health of the body politic and you're throwing a hissy fit about it.
I don’t like your punitive or authoritarian tone, much less you personally directed animus. The fact you open with a projection and personally directed lie is completely uncalled for. I am describing your behavior.
You want to punish a group you hold in contempt for a failure to meet your arbitrary set standards. Nowhere have you expressed a willingness to actually contribute to a public provision problem, just blame.
You just what “free stuff” and want anyone but you to provide for it.
Hence why you are being silly and being dishonest.
A couple dozen over the years, though I doubt that I'd be an acknowledged expert in any particular field. Peripherally so in project delivery, about which I've written quite a lot, and China-related economic policy for the developed world, about which I've written a bit.
And just to add, I specifically joined my local civic organization to lend my expertise to the maintenance of our park, our interactions with the city about infrastructure maintenance in the region, and the discussions of housing and development we have.
While I'm still thinking about your spitball, on your first part, it's always seemed like the people skilled in communications who want to make a lot of money will be able to do so in PR or advertising, thus siphoning away their talent and leaving journalism with talent that is driven by things bigger than money.
>In the USA we do a perverse version of it: you put in your time as a low paid government employee and then jump to the private sector where you lobby for your industry’s interests, nevermind the common good
My understanding is that the French and the Japanese practice the exact same model though (and probably other developed countries too, these are just the ones that I've read about). The Japanese famously force their bureaucrats to retire at age 50, so they all jump straight into working for the companies that they were just regulating. In other words, this is a pretty common arrangement
This strikes me as a pretty “kids these days” take. Young people are overconfident and lack expertise, so what’s new? I can believe this specific generation is more ideological but mostly because society as a whole is.
Also, media orgs aren’t exactly flush with cash these days. Expertise is expensive. So idk that there’s an easy solution to this problem even if the diagnosis is correct.
This last point is an important one. I believe "media employment has collapsed" and "media is dominated by young people with strong ideological commitments" are the same trend.
Same thing has happened in humanities at the collegiate level. When access to a stable and financially viable career disappears, then you only get people who ignore economic incentives. Those people tend to be ideologues or those with trust funds.
"Work for 7 years in a nice place with extremely good job security and interesting colleagues" is well within the class of normal reasons people choose jobs, especially a ones that leave you capable of pivoting somewhere else after your 20s. I think making this out to be more special than it is confuses the discussion
Grad school is a lot different than being a professor. Also you are wasting time on a PhD if it takes longer than 5 (extending the clock to a degree is a perverse result of incentives.) Tenure track jobs have disappeared in many disciplines, and you don’t get COLAs any more.
Honestly as a former humanities grad student myself, I think it is much less about putting ideology above financial reward and much more "I am good at school. I want to keep doing school" without a whole lot of thought beyond that.
"Work for 7 years in a nice place with extremely good job security and interesting colleagues" is a description of being a grad student! Most 24 year old band members won't be doing it when they're 60 either
Sure, but what are we going to do about it? I think the future of American reporting is going to look like party newspapers that dominated between the Civil War and WW2. Matt is right the current equilibrium where non-right media is biased towards Democrats still doesn't produce the most optimal reporting for Democratic party interests. But we're mostly on track to get there, and I'd say he should look on the bright side. Americans mostly agree with him in that they distrust these outlets he thinks are emphasizing the wrong things. The information fracturing will continue until morale improves.
I ran across an article from Teen Vogue this weekend on the latest COVID data. It was a far, far departure from the days of me reading teen magazines and not in a good way!
Would it though? The Army Times vet would have a career on their CV and a certain level of salary expectations, but the recent Ivy grad would still just be a 22 year old.
Also, the recent Ivy grad would likely have rich parents prepared to fund them living in New York for a few years while they try to make it in journalism.
As long as there are a few well-paid jobs for an occasional Matt Yglesias, it's not unreasonable for a parent who can afford to do so to subsidise a kid who will work hard at journalism in the hope that when they're 35, they can make a good living (and if they haven't made it, then they'll change careers before that - which is why journalism is full of young people; older people either move up or move out).
The Army Times vet would be much less likely to be in the position where they can afford to live and work in New York or wherever without being paid a salary sufficient to sustain a reasonable lifestyle.
Would we accept this in other environments? I think it was Matt Bruenig who said that if a company can't afford to pay a living wage, then perhaps they should go out of business...
I don't think we should. But also, there's a difference between a living wage (ie the equivalent of the lifestyle of waitstaff or a bartender) and what I called "a salary sufficient to sustain a reasonable lifestyle".
I bet most of these junior people are being paid $15 an hour, probably even $20 an hour (if they're employed, not freelancers or interns), but there's a huge difference between that and the sort of salary that an Ivy grad would reasonably expect to get (and could get doing something else), or the salary than a ten-year vet with the sort of CV than an Army Times reporter could look to get in some sort of defense/security consulting or PR job.
If the vet were 40 years old, you're right. But can't you find people who aren't not necessarily career military, but got a few years' experience in military journalism and would have better knowledge and instincts for the subject matter than a kid out of college?
They definitely could find qualified reporters from military press. The problem is that generic beat reporter wages are very low and someone who writes well with these qualifications will have far better paying options, notably in PR for military contractors or lobbyists. Financially, they’d be better off staying in the military than going to the NYT if they can hold on for a pension.
This seems very unlikely. Median pay for a journalist at the NYT is 82k per Glassdoor. You would need to be a Captain with 6 years experience to make that much in the army. More likely, you're making 20k less.
The vast, vast majority of my classmates who end up in New York will not be subsidized by their parents—they will be making six figures on Wall Street or at an MBB firm.
Right, but your classmates that are working in non-profits, publishing, fashion, journalism, are likely to be subsidized by their parents. I am old enough to be your parent and see this often in my kid's cohort among those who have wealthier parents. Parents also subsidize summer internships in NYC, and most families can't afford that either.
Agree. When I think of the hundreds of classmates I had studying policy between college and grad school, maybe two or three went into media (and it was either specialty media, Thomas Reuters, or the Washington Post). Most of the people I went to school with who went into media had a writing, not policy background. If you went to a professor for career advice and they suggested either going into media or Capitol Hill, most students would just ignore them since those were seen as thankless career paths. Most of the people who were serious about policy that I went to school with basically went into one of the more prestigious federal agencies (State, Treasury, DOJ, DOE, DOD), the UN, Big Law, or major consulting firms. Going into even legacy media was an afterthought.
We all know that NYT mostly hires Ivy grads. Rarely they will poach talent like Ezra (who had a really unique career pathway that probably doesn't exist any more. I find his experience/challenges with formal education very humanizing,)
When you think about it , the connection of the economy to epistemology is under appreciated. Or put simply, the current economy doesn’t incentivize people being trained and employed to be competent truth seekers and propagators, be it in journalism or academia (as different as those two are). Ironically at the age of the Internet we seem to be experience a decline in our ability to understand the world and it seems the causes are mostly economic (although post truth ideology left and right certainly comes into it).
The third paragraph I will agree with in totality. But I'd argue that it's wholly unimportant for actual reporters to have prior subject matter expertise, and in fact better for journalists to approach difficult (whether in complexity or political heat) subjects as complete tabulas rasa. The goal is to *become* a subject matter expert through talking to the real experts in the field and doing extensive research with an open mind - which is where I'd say modern journalists often fall short. But when there are truly competing ideas or schools of thought on a subject, vast prior educational or applied experience is likelier to create bias than to create understanding.
Former journalist who works in tech now for 5x+ the money and way more job security. I reluctantly admit that I would only feel comfortable reporting on the tiniest sliver of the tech industry in which I'm involved day-to-day. Anything outside of that, and I know I would get roasted. Let's be practical about what we expect journalists to know given the terrible state of the industry.
No disagreement about speaking the language being a requirement for foreign correspondents, but a lot of people study foreign languages in college (including, presumably, at Penn).
I complete agree with your friend Amy...In addition I have also noticed that when professional media have people with professional experience, they are either crazily partisan (the right) or obviously had bad experiences in those professions and basically are used to support the preconceived and incorrect notions of those who do not have any experience (these "professional voices" left the professions, often after relatively short stints and had a bad experience that supports a prevailing ideology).
I know we used to laugh about some of the people who left our profession to go into the media or who would do all these interviews. It was kind of a joke about how they could not succeed in the job so now they were going to go explain it to other people.
My guess is that they are hired not because they have professional experience that could add to a readers understanding of the field but because they have some kind of quasi-professional experience that can allow the organization to use them as an "expert" but also come with an ideology that is comfortable (and familiar) to those hiring them. Thus they can have an expert who conforms to their bias.
Sure, but this is probably the most challenging to address in a time of news media’s economic collapse. Hiring actual specialists is expensive and limits your flexibility in staffing.
"An industry full of young, educated, urban progressives, ...American journalists are ... left-wing."
As a claim about individual journalists, this seems broadly true, for the demographic reasons you cite.
"The media is on the left...it’s precisely because the media tends to be left-wing that the media tends to focus on ideas that divide Democrats...."
As a claim about an industry, i.e. the media, this seems broadly false. "The media" is not equivalent to a bunch of cub reporters: it is the owners of Sinclair and Fox, as well as the owners of the Wall Street Journal and NYT, all of them much further right than their employees.
The WSJ is a good example: it's reportage has generally been excellent, while it's editorials have generally been laughably bad. It's clear which of these is the journalists and which is the owners. But which is "the media"?
To make the point about journalists that you want to make, references to "the media" obscure more than they clarify.
You make a good point about the distinction between reporters and the editorial direction they are under. That is an interesting wrinkle to analyze.
One thing I would add is the growing realization both in newsrooms and everywhere else is that the Internet is not real life. There was a real responsiveness in the real world to online discourse nonsense from what felt like 2016-2021 or so, but that era is definitely over. I think some of the more unhinged position taking and leftist on liberal vitriol is a response to this loss of ability to drive real world results from Twitter screeds.
But it was so very nice to be able to "change the world" by hammering out spam on Twitter.
Actual organizing is hard, voting requires consistent effort year after year.
I'm becoming increasingly persuaded by "many/most online leftists are mentally ill and using Twitter and shared doomist sentiment to substitute for friendships, social ties, real-world achievements, and good therapy" as the best explanation for why they are the way they are.
It's true that ownership is, in the aggregate, much more conservative than reporters. But it mostly doesn't matter because they don't have the personnel to operationalize their preferences, a manifestation of the trend Tracing Woodgrains wrote about in "The Republican Party is Doomed" (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed).
"...they don't have the personnel to operationalize their preferences...."
Owners fire journalists all the time. Ask Dave Weigel, of this parish. Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, ask Tucker Carlson -- he was not a journalist, but the dynamic is the same. Owners have no problem selecting their preferred journalists, and firing the ones who stray.
I do think this illustrates a key underlying element of Matt’s article: it isn’t the high profile stuff that is key. Instead, it’s the drip, drip, drip of articles that choose to focus certain things that highlight divisions in the left and negatives of our society without any interest in successes or issues on which left of center is largely undivided. Those things don’t get anyone fired and aren’t the types of editorial decisions that management would usually get involved with.
"Mostly doesn't matter" was a little hyperbolic. But the power to say "no" is less significant when your only choices are Coke and Pepsi. (Not to say it's that extreme, I'm just trying to make a point about the structural dynamic.)
Are they really just Coke and Pepsi? This made me wonder, like maybe they could hire student journalists from The O'Colly, the newspaper of Oklahoma State University, so I repaired to its website just now to see what kind of journalism they produce, and the featured story is, um, this:
I know Matt refers to "the media" a couple of times, but in reading the piece, I thought it was fairly clear that, overall, he was referring to the composition of individual journalists and not necessarily making a point about "the media" as an overall institution
You said it much better than I tried to in my own meandering post. Matt not distinguishing between younger reporters and older centrist editors and owners is a real flaw in his column.
Also, the older reporters are clearly the ones with more influence and power. We all know the name Maggie Habberman. And I rant rail about Peter Baker all the time. These two alone have way more power than any super lefty reporter. The most famous is probably Taylor Lorenz. And she’s famous in part from lots of people dunking on her precisely for being the doomerist on Covid that Matt describes. Honestly, how much of the agenda at large on anything is Taylor Lorenz influencing at all?
"the older reporters are clearly the ones with more influence and power"
Can you elaborate on this?
I can see how people who have been around for a while are going to have more name recognition than someone who is new, but how and does that translate into power and influence - and for whom do they have more power and influence over?
I said it in my own (again more meandering) post but see the Claudine Gay coverage. This was 'front page" coverage for basically a month. Multiple stories, multiple news analysis pieces, multiple op-eds for weeks on end. There is no way that story gets that sort of coverage if the young super lefty writers Yglesias describes have as much power as he says they do.
Maggie Habberman clearly has sources close to Trump in some capacity. Her news stories were lead articles all the time. Peter Baker is a consistent guest on MTP. He heads the New York Times political desk, his news analysis articles are given "front page" prominence on the actual pages and website most of which are basically a byword for "extremists on both sides" garbage.
Young reporters just out of college basically by definition are not getting plum "above the fold" stories that drive news cycles except on one of basis. Taylor Lorenz articles were almost never given place of prominence on WaPo with the exception that proves the rule when she uncovered who was behind LibsofTikTock. She's also a good example of someone who has lots of name recognition among people like Matt as a paradigm example of these super lefty reporters. In fact, she may be the most famous. Which again serves my point. How much influence does she have? As far as I can tell, she still wants 2020 style Covid restrictions. I don't think there is anywhere in the country that has any meaningful Covid restrictions.
As I understand, you're saying that their articles get better positioning in the paper and on the website and they get better stories because they have had time to develop more sources and contacts.
I guess that makes sense, though I suspect those are heavily related. I vehemently disagree about the Claudine Gay coverage and suspect that if newspapers were full of old school blue collar reporters, it would have barely made the paper. Its only because they are full of Ivy grads that they spend so much time talking about them.
Oh we are actually in huge agreement on the Claudine Gay coverage. Reporters being disproportionately from the ranks of elite schools has been a reality for decades now. I mean Matt after all is himself a Harvard grad. My point isn't in tension with yours. The amount of coverage this story got is definitely (at least in part) reflective of the fact that so many reporter are elite school graduates. The tenor of the coverage (and most important how it drove news cycles) is result of the fact that the older more centrist reporters have more clout.
My view of the MSM coverage of the Gay story was that it was in no way hyper critical of her in the way that most centrists were. The MSM coverage was largely in defense of her and focused heavily on where the accusations were coming from (RIGHT WING AGITATORS!) rather than doing real reporting to determine how problematic her behavior really was. The volume of coverage was driven by the outrage machinery on the right, so the left-wing response needed to be proportional but opposite in tone and tenor.
"The tenor of the coverage (and most important how it drove news cycles) is result of the fact that the older more centrist reporters have more clout."
I went more into length in another response, but I think "more" is doing a lot of work in that "more centrist" descriptor. I'd also like to see some evidence of them having the influence you think they do on "tenor."
I certainly recognize Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker. I'd be very hard pressed to name five prominent young journalists at the New York Times. And the ones I can -- like Jane Coasten, Sarah Kliff and Brad Plumer -- are pretty darn good and don't fit Matt's stereotype. (You might say that Plumer represents an overemphasis (?) on climate change, but he was hired to report that beat; he didn't force himself on the Times.)
What does the fact that you recognize the names mean? Do you ascribe more accuracy to their articles than you do for articles written by people you don't recognize?
Again I ask, what does that mean? Do you think others are ascribing more importance or accuracy to their articles beyond their ability to do more sourced reporting?
This is not particularly germane to the main point of discussion we're having here, but is it actually true that the owners of NYT are "much further right" than their employees? I was under the impression Sulzberger is something of a true believer, maybe mildly more moderate than his journalists but certainly no centrist
It may be mistaken to say “the media” as a whole is “left”, but there are systematic biases you get from the structure of who gets hired as reporters, and there are systematic biases you get from the structure of who goes into ownership and management, and those systematic biases are not precisely diametrically opposed but instead align in several ways (even if there are some ways that they might cancel).
"...those systematic biases are not precisely diametrically opposed...."
That sounds right.
My intended point was not really about canceling out, in any case, but just about the non-equivalence of "journalists" with "the media." It makes sense to say "journalists are predominantly young, educated, urban, etc."; it makes no sense to say "the media are predominantly young, educated, urban, etc.". They are just different kinds of things: to start with, journalists are people whereas the media -- newspapers, networks, and so on -- are corporations. "The media" don't have demographics characteristics, although some of the owners of the corporations do.
But my point got interpreted as a claim that reporting skews right because the ownership skews right, and then it was off to the races with refuting something I had not said. Ah, well. At least I got my normal day's wages for commenting here.
I'm not sure how substantive this comment's edits were* and how much of my original top-level response was a product of my own tunnel-vision but I'll cop to being excessively focused on the terms "NYT" and "WSJ" and only thinking about text-first center-left journalism.
Half a day later, the conversation is ranging over several different subjects - and people aren't always talking about the same thing.
As you imply and other commenters note more explicitly, television doesn't fit as neatly into the paradigm Matt laid out in the article. What's more, internet successors like TikTok and YouTube have even more complicated relationships between "owners" and "journalists". YouTube is often in the exact opposite position of the NYT/WSJ: the "owners" are often appalled by the right-wing slant of the "journalists". Of course, I'm stretching the terminology. But it seemed to me that Matt was talking about Journalism with a capital J, for which I think his critique is quite accurate.
It's another thing entirely to try to comprehend the role of text-first, center-left Journalism in a world dominated by MEDIA: the local television news, TikToks, and YouTube, among others. And I appreciate the reminder that the landscape doesn't begin and end with the NYT.
It’s not just or even mainly a matter of getting fired for ideology; that’s not all that common as far as I can tell. It’s a matter of what content gets run in the first place. Some rogue Oberlin grad at Fox News isn’t going to be able to sneak some global warming is real content onto Fox News; the ship they run there is too tight.
The right-wing media is reporting on widely unexpected temperature and range constraints to EVs, ensuring the industry will both adapt and inform consumers how to mitigate this drawback while enjoying their CO2-reducing sedans. That's good for CO2-reducing sedans in the long run; just because media is adversarial or ideological doesn't mean it cannot helpfully induce others to solve real problems.
I promise I wasn't trying to get into an argument about ideological media on the merits. I was using a hypothetical example to show how "does right-wing ownership influence the media" cannot be answered just with reference to who gets fired for what, but also has to consider coverage/programming decisions. No one's getting fired from Fox News but that's not because management there gives reporters maximum leeway.
It’s not just that Fox News is genetically right-wing. They enforce message discipline; they make some GOP candidates look reasonable and others foolish; they boot people like Carlson who wander off the reservation. But also, I don’t think I understand the distinction between “the owner influences the output of the outlet” and “the owner establishes an explicitly ideological outlet.” Why isn’t that influence?
But fine, you don’t like Fox as an example. What about Sinclair? Those stations *aren’t* explicitly right-wing but the owners make sure their content is consistently right-wing.
I watch local news every morning. Yes, some of it may be a bit too focused on crime, but I also find out about things like local events of interest, human interest stories, and even mundane things like a boil water advisory. And the weather, omg, the weather - every 10-15 minutes.
As part of the 38 percent who don't watch television of any kind, I would like to add that I do read the local news. Does that count? It really helps to know what's going on in the 25 - 30 mile radius around me. Also - working in two counties, and those news stories are of interest as well.
I've known multiple journalists who work for outlets like WaPo and CNN- literally none of them have ever talked about ownership input on topics as being some sort of balancing force between the left wing staff and the right wing corporate class. All of them talk about newsrooms heavily focused on left wing agenda setting. To claim, without evidence, that the owners are somehow preventing mainstream media from swinging significantly to the left strikes me as bizarre wishful thinking.
Where you’re right is that there’s a kind of polarization: there are some carriers like Sinclair that force a right-wing perspective, but moderate to center-right owners at other media are not forcing a center-right perspective; they’re basically allowing the journalists to be left-wing.
Talking about "right wing media ownership" is the standard predictable liberal response to the overwhelmingly left wing slant of print and TV journalists.
"Some owners potentialy being right-wing has had virtually zero evidence on journalistic output...."
Do you mean this claim to apply to the output of Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcasting network? Because it seems to me that the preferences of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, as well as the preferences of the Sinclair owners who dictate the content of TV editorials from their main office, have had more than zero effect on their journalistic output.
Maybe you wanted to restrict the "zero evidence" claim to the NYT, WaPo, and CNN?
Your point on RCP 8-5 hits close to home. So many things from EPA and the White House still rely on this model when they write about climate change and no action scenarios.
It’s frustrating. Part of me thinks it’s selection effects (I am an economist. I strive to be accurate and look for data to inform rather than confirm my opinions on lots of stuff.) Lots of people who go into politics and law look to win an argument and thus seek positions that give them the strongest rhetorical positions. I think lots of people take a shortcut and just assert things they find convenient rather than do the hard work of knowing and learning.
Even when learning and knowing more would actually make them feel better about the world! It seems like some people just want to feel as bad as possible and are willing to shut out any evidence that might prompt a reevaluation.
The number of times climate doomers on Reddit get angry when I link “OurWorldInData” or cite the IPCC is far too high. Heck you got people asserting RCP 8-5 is a lie because it isn’t bad enough.
Bringing this back to media, you got common phrases like “climate crisis” and framing climate change as an existential struggle all the time. It’s a debasement of language that both overstates and understates the real material challenges of climate change.
I think the generally window in which hurricanes occur has broadened. There is still work being done on severity and frequency. The biggest problem is low N so you cannot easily use statistical methods to identify causality. We know mechanically if you add more energy into the system that hurricanes will get more intense and will be more likely to occur (unless our models are wrong.) Heck the IPCC describes the cyclone intensity and frequency relationship as a likely hypothesis, not an established relationship with a bounds of confidence.
Unless you had countervailing factors which, given that hurricane formation is complex, isn’t out of the question. The key is for the assertions not to get ahead of the science.
Which makes the period we have to plan for disruptions and damage broader which increases the economic cost of hurricanes. It isn't existential. Though maybe the storm surge is existential for places like Miami?
FWIW -- It's not just warm water. It's also the pressure system that creates vertical wind shear. Just look at what happened during the 2023 season:
"Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures were at record warm levels during the peak of the 2023 hurricane season. These anomalously warm waters and associated low pressures in the tropical Atlantic were likely the reason why El Niño did not have its normal teleconnection to above-normal shear across the tropical Atlantic. Model output included in our forecast methodology was helpful in predicting this anomalous behavior in advance."
Come on, man. Get real. It's raining in Los Angeles right now and I just realized my roof has developed a leak. If that's not powerful evidence of climate change, I don't know what is.
I posted this last time the topic came up - but the industry I currently work in relies on hurricane forecasts. We work with Phil Klotzbach out of CSU: (1) he's awesome and (2) I'm just going to "trust science" here that we don't know what effect climate change will have on hurricanes in the US. If anyone tells you differently - they have an agenda.
I have a number of family members who listen to way too much NPR and still think that 8.5 is a likely temp rise. I've had them freak out over a very low quality paper that implied that something was being mismeasured and so all our models are off and anything can happen. A lot of the doomerism is obviously absurd and clearly contradicted by the things that are happening right now, but they swallow it because NPR is supposed to be a reliable news source. It's not good for their mental health to listen to this constant doomerism, which sometimes crosses into misinformation (don't get me started on the whole gas stove thing) but NPR is so ingrained in people's brains as something that educated liberals listen to that they're never going to give it up.
I was reading your comment and thinking Yeah and also the gas stove thing! and then you said it. After that flurry of fear-mongering articles, I actually had neighbors ask me how I liked my electric stove bc they heard gas stoves were bad. Plenty of people just believe what the “trusted” Doomer News tells them.
(Not sure what my overall point is except the gas stove thing is like Exhibit A for shit reporting driven by left wing journalists.)
No, it’s misinformation that gas stoves make you much more likely to become asthmatic and develop COPD (though it’s probably not misinformation that they do contribute slightly to those things).
Yes. I think this claim was being pushed by climate activists who want to get rid of gas appliances for climate reasons but the claim was that they were a major health risk - and my understanding is the evidence for that is weak.
Counterpoint: contra Will Stancil it's not because of Twitter bad vibes and lack of attention to the "great" Biden economy people are unhappy.
Liberals over my adult lifetime have succeeded in building the more hyper individualistic, secular, irreligious society they always wanted where people are free from traditional natural attachments such as to family members they don't like, "heteronormativity", to the gender they were "assigned" at birth but now feel uncomfortable with...this kind of society doesn't actually make most people happy.
You could forget the meaninglessness when Obama was president and social media and the possibilities of great "online communities" were still a new and exciting thing or later when joining the anti Trump "resistance" made an otherwise pointless life meaningful and purpose driven.
But in the Biden years ennui has set in. It's all so pointless. Talking about all the wonderful improvements Biden has given on Medicare and the low unemployment rates or hard fought gains in carbon emissions just doesn't scratch where most people... including left wing people... itch. Something is just not right. Something seems missing.
And I will gently suggest the traditional things that make most people happy... getting married, watching your kids grow up are hard to replace with politics and online entertainments. It's a sad world where fewer and fewer people get married and have families. My $.02.
The supposed link between persecution of outliers and the happiness of the many was wrong when you were using it to justify persecution, and it’s still wrong now that you’re trying to blame contemporary unhappiness on the absence of persecution.
Nobody on “the left” made it so you can’t get married or watch your kids grow up. We might have made it so that people who were already never going to do that, don’t have to get beaten into a pulp by you for their deviance.
Exactly. It’s a strange world we live in where being more accepting of your neighbors means being less likely to talk to your neighbors. Why can’t we try to have both at the same time?
republicans are still more likely to be married but marriage is an increasingly "elite" milestone where highly educated people are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced so IDK.
The ones who do report higher levels of happiness I think. There were lots of successful center left people in Obama years too. But now marriage, kids and owning a home to build your life around seem to a lot of people like luxury goods they may never attain.
So your theory is that, rather than this being a hangover from inflation of a kind we’ve seen before, the way polls measure people’s happiness and satisfaction has totally changed in the last 15-20 years? I will take the other side of that action.
Well, the Republican Study Committee doesn't say it such explicit terms. But their 2024 budget includes steeeeep per-capita cuts to Medicaid that would likely kick millions off health insurance. That means people with disabilities and low-income parents forgoing healthcare because they can't pay for it.
Right, that's exactly my point. Nobody believes in letting people without health insurance die, yet the liberty has been taken to claim as much based on a surmise.
And I'm not sure how such needless hyberbole really adds credence to the argument.
People absolutely can die when they lose access to health insurance. I don't necessarily know what Kevin Hern believes or doesn't believe, so just judging the policies he and the GOP are putting out there.
I'm generally in support of a government funded universal health care service. That being said, I'm hesitant to describe not covering people with government insurance as wanting them to die. By that perspective - if someone dies because they freeze to death or overheat to death its because the government doesn't provide heating and cooling for people.
I don't think the claim is that conservatives on health care want people to die. I think the claim is that they don't care enough about not having poor people die to pay for their health care. If you are poor and dying, the motives or enthusiasm of folks for you death isn't that material.
When people use the term "free market" you believe they're generally referring to ideas from the RSC, Kevin Hern, or a typical Republican?
Because I don't think anyone associates free markets with that person or those people.
A stronger argument would be to show how some like Michael Cannon, who does openly advocate for free markets, wants people without insurance to get sick and die.
Or, even better yet, you could drop the hyberbole and discuss whether the market solutions he advocates for leads to better healthcare outcomes or not.
That would be a more sensible thing to do instead of just lazily making blanket generalizations about people's positions.
It's an election year, so Matt's writing sometimes includes these types of rhetorical flourishes. Best to just read past them to his usually spot-on analyses.
Eh, I'm a lower-case "L" libertarian and I think that's a fair characterization of the free market position on health care. I mean, yes, health care should become cheaper, and, yes, we can presume there will be charities to help cover health care expenses for low-income people, but there's ultimately nothing backstopping that for anyone who can't find sufficient charitable support.
This is the effective position of any person who does not believe in government provision of healthcare to the poor.
That they hope charity will backfill the need is essentially the same thing as progressives who believe in radically reducing the production of hydrocarbons to reduce climate change and just hope that the costs are born by corporations and not median consumers.
I'd bet Hanania does, but I don't read him frequently enough to know that with certainty. He's libertarian enough to support "If I don't lose X pounds you can legally kill me" contracts, and he's at minimum social darwinist-adjacent, so it doesn't seem out of character. I suspect a whopping 0.5-2% of the country would unironically endorse "If you're poor you should just get sick and die."
>Can you point to one person who supports "the free market idea that if you’re poor you should just get sick and die?"<
Grover Norquist, one of the father's of contemporary, libertarian-hued Movement Conservatism in the US, wants to shrink the public sector to a size small enough to drown in a bathtub. Now, not being an idiot, he's not going to *openly* call for the premature deaths of uninsured Americans; he's just pushing for policies that would nonetheless achieve such an end. I call that "support."
Needless to say even the mere repeal of the Affordable Care Act (never mind deep cuts in Medicaid/Medicare)—one of Trump's public positions—would result in an increase in deaths. You can't slash healthcare problems and not expect at least *some* years of lost life.
Anyway, I think you're conflating the support of policies that result in more deaths with the "open" support of the *result* of such policies. But the two are distinct, and most politicians—and most conservative policy analysts—aren't stupid enough to say the quiet part (the results of their preferred policies) out loud.
should hospitals be forced to treat people who cannot pay because that is what we have and it is essentially universal health insurance, just done very shittily and financed by safety net hospitals.
All those GOP politicians that refused Medicaid expansion and the parity payments to state hospitals effectively endorsed the "if you’re poor you should just get sick and die?"
I don't believe the "free market" framing because information asymmetries and the acuteness of much medical care prohibit/limit the existence of a "free market" in healthcare.
I chose to interpret that as the "theoretical free market idea", which Democrats care _more_ about pushing against than Republicans, and are willing to give up more to get.
Me. I think if we had a free market in healthcare this would be as common a problem as is “people who cannot afford food would starve” because costs would come down and most of the big spending is marginal anyways, but yes I think the free market opinion entails that if you cannot pay for care or receive it as charity you will not get care.
Obviously “then poor will be dying from percentage illnesses all the time due to fiscal constraint” is a prediction I do not think is accurate and the quotes frame g is maximally uncharitable, but it’s not really a slander of the libertarian view IMO.
It was 2015 or 16 so I can’t find the link but there was that group of Trump supporters who confronted a terminally ill silent protester outside a Trump rally (I think), and afterwards were shaken to realize they had mockingly told him it wasn’t their job to keep him alive.
There are definitely Republican voters who are gleeful at the idea of kicking people off government health care that they otherwise have no means of affording.
Healthcare is like the one policy area where campaign donations and interest group desires actually have an effect on Republican politicians. Conservative policy wonks at like AEI never discuss things like lifetime limits (they focus on how to make America's healthcare system more like those found in Singapore and Switzerland), but insurance companies would surely love the world to come back where lifetime limits are allowed. And that is the world Republican politicians most advocate for, even implicitly.
I gotta be honest, this is kind of a strange column to me. I truly don’t know how you can look at absolutely insane amount of coverage (multiple banner headlines on New York Times and absurd number of op-eds) for weeks on end about Claudine Gay and Harvard and conclude that young left wing journalist are setting the agenda at left of center publications.
I say strange because your personal annoyance at young super lefties (will get to that in a second) is overshadowing what I think is a very correct take of yours; the particular incentives of left of center media and right wing media is putting Biden and Democrats at a huge propaganda disadvantage. Right wing media is partisan in a way (most) mainstream media is not which means they exercise message discipline in ways that left of center media doesn’t. But then I think you made what is actually a pretty profound point; there is very particular incentives (especially financial) for left of center news to emphasize issues that divide the Democratic coalition.
Weirdly, you don’t take the next step to tie the incentives that cause left of center media and MSM to focus on issues that divide the Democratic coalition to why so much of young far left media figures seemed to be committed to “doomerism”. Because I think you’re completely correct that doomerism is bad strategy to both win elections and get your preferred policies enacted. Something your old enemy and now frenemy Will Stancil agrees with you on which is why you two are no longer enemies. The doomers are not trying to convince hardcore Fox watchers or Fox News hosts. They are trying to fight with…well you. And it’s clearly not working. But it this fight also stems from the incentives you describe that lead to issues that divide the Democratic coalition being emphasized.
Which brings me lastly to your conflict with young lefty reporters. Because this is clearly what this is about. Reality is I can agree with you that a lot of stories seem to have some unnecessarily lefty bent (more than once I’ve read stories that emphasize how a particular policy is harmful to POC. And my first thought is often “this is like the 5th most important reason this story is a story. Why is this being emphasized”?). But because a lot of these reporters clearly don’t like you personally it’s lead you to overemphasize their power. Because it’s very clear the reporters (and probably most importantly editors) who drive the biggest stories are NOT these reporters, at least not yet. Again, please see that absolute amount of coverage* (and most important it’s slant) the Claudine gay story got.
*The DEI Times story was so revealing. Like Times at its best getting a great scoop. But also no acknowledgment of their role in helping disseminate right wing propagandists. Oh and also, can’t emphasize enough how unsurprising it is that Heather Macdonald appears to be an absolute bigot.
Because the Claudine Gay issue, like Israel and academic issues more broadly is, like climate change a fissure on the left that people and reporters on the left can argue about with people on 'their side' and therefore a perfect illustration of what he's talking about.
This is not a new thing. For years it was a pre internet rw meme, that basically every NYT article no matter the topic had the headline "women and minorities hit hardest.".
It made me laugh that even non right wing folks are getting bored with the race marxism.
Lesbians and trans men can still be victims of assaults that result in pregnancy. And anyone with a uterus can have a wanted pregnancy that they should not continue due to health complications.
"Lesbians and trans men can still be victims of assaults that result in pregnancy."
Yes, that's true. However, the majority of pregnancies are not the result of sexual assault.
"And anyone with a uterus can have a wanted pregnancy that they should not continue due to health complications."
Also true, but one would again expect that in a population where the overwhelming majority of pregnancies are, by definition, planned (since they can't happen naturally), that would be less likely than in a population where pregnancies can happen accidentally.
"one would again expect that in a population where the overwhelming majority of pregnancies are, by definition, planned (since they can't happen naturally), that would be less likely than in a population where pregnancies can happen accidentally." Why would that be the case, though? Planned pregnancies are more likely to be at "advanced maternal age", which is when you're more likely to see various complications for both the fetus and the pregnant person.
I guess as a queer I think it's a little much for anyone to say that needing an abortion is doing homosexuality wrong. I did IVF and I knew lesbians in the same clinic who had miscarriages and high-risk pregnancies because there are many blockers to getting pregnant as a lesbian at an earlier, less-risky age.
Also tells you that Matt's sort of unstated claim that reporters being educated and super lefty is some new phenomenon is probably wrong. Yes back in the 50s, reporting was more of a working class pursuit. But journalism being dominated by left or left of center college graduates has been a truism for quite a while now. I mean, Matt was one of those people who middle aged reporters dunked on for being bloggers as losers who didn't leave their parents basement.
Matt's not making that claim. What's new is that as newsrooms have shrunk, the smaller, younger workforce is more exclusively educated and lefty than before. Not that it never has been those things to some degree
I think you should pause and re-examine where you think the center is for the median American. Your argument sounds to me like saying that Matt as a center leftist has more power and influence than the average member of the DSA and therefore isn't really slanted left. But Matt is significantly to the left compared to the median American!
I'm not actually sure this is true. I mean given that Matt has staked his views on an enormous number of issues, yes there are probably some where he has views to the left of the median voter. The social issues that exploded into consciousness in 2020 and 2021 and where public is likely against the policies of the far left are issues that Matt is also against too. He's been pretty big proponent that hiring more cops cops is good. He's called out Robin DeAngelo and Tema Okun as hucksters. Then there's what got him trouble at Vox. But other issues? Expansion of Child income tax credit, support for Obamacare, more spending on green energy etc.. These are all issues that have majority support*. As Matt has noted, it's not majority of public is against tackling climate change, most are actually supportive of tackling climate change. The problem is that support is an inch deep.
Which actually gets at the real median voter position...status quo bias. Which is categorically different than where you stand on the issues. I will continue to repeat one of my favorite anecdotes from the 2010 town halls. A man (supposedly) got up to tell his Congressman "Keep government out of my Medicare". I mean chef's kiss perfect encapsulation of median voter brain. But to give this guy some credit, if you really were to interrogate his views I suspect what's he's really saying is "I like thing just the way they are. Don't things up".
*depending on question wording of course. Which is also party of the problem trying to gauge how the public feels about a particular issue or policy. See GOP mistake in thinking overturning Roe vs. Wade would be a political winner for them.
I agree with your point about status quo bias, but if you don't think Matt is left of center... I would be willing to bet that Matt is to the left of the median Democrat, much less the median American. 47% of people voted for Trump in 2020 and a majority might do so in 2024! Is he getting a ton of left leaning voters?
"Whig Men and Tory measures" Google this phrase and the first thing comes up is an Atlantic blog post from someone we know. But it describes really what I'm getting at. Namely there appears to be a lot of voters who vote Republican but don't actually agree with a lot of the GOP platform.
I think maybe the ultimate example of this phenomenon is recent referendums on minimum wage and abortion restrictions. Over and over again, voters even in pretty red states have voted against measures severely restricting abortion and also raise minimum wage. And yet continue to vote for far right reps who continue to try to ban all abortion and in places like Missouri literally try to ignore voter referendum.
I mean there is a flip side to this. Until quite recently there were more registered Democrats than Republicans in West Virginia. And it's pretty clear in the 80s and 90s there were still tons of people voting Democrat without actually agreeing with much of the platform almost out historical habit and history as much as anything.
But what I'm getting at is I think I'm on pretty firm ground in saying 47% of voters voting for Mitt Romney in 2012 is not actually indicative of 47% voters agreeing with Paul Ryan's budget plans that undergirded is campaign.
What defines left or right is often pretty jumbled - see for example free trade and immigration. It also spans across multiple quadrants to say the least. That being said, Matt was more supportive of Sanders in 2020 than Biden. Does that sound like someone to the right of the average Democrat much less American?
Matt's case for Bernie Sanders was that despite his rhetoric Bernie has shown himself to be much more pragmatic in his past. He was pretty anti-gun control for a long time. And he worked with the police union when mayor of Burlington. It was also clearly a bit of a tongue in cheek "O'Malley would have won" argument; Bernie clearly reaches a subset of voters that may not be inclined to vote normally.
In a way, Matt's endorsement serves my point. He was supporting (or least made the case for Bernie. I think Matt noted that it was basically an assignment from Vox that one writer had to make the case for each viable Presidential candidate on the Democratic side) Bernie while not actually being all that supportive or enthusiastic about Bernie's policies in part because he knew that a) Bernie is a lot more talk than action b) Veto points being what they are, very unlikely Bernie's full agenda gets close to being fully enacted. In other words, supporting a candidate despite not actually being in support (or at least full support) of that candidate's preferred policy preferences.
To me since local newspapers are basically dead there has been a big shift in the basic focus of media coverage. The purpose of the local newspaper was to inform people of what's going on in the community. In some cases this would involve uncovering scandals but in other cases this was like covering what's going on with local industry, sports, etc.
Now the bent of like every news outlet seems like it's some version of attempting to speak truth to power. This means basically negative coverage of the US government, the Democratic and Republican parties, the technology and finance industries, etc. etc. All these entities clearly have flaws but if you read like Pro Publica it is constantly skewering the tech industry but does it actually help you understand the tech industry? https://www.propublica.org/topics/technology I don't think any of the pieces here or the collection of them together shows an understanding of the benefits and dilemmas posed by big tech.
I think if you reading a trade publication like The Information which does not shy away from critical coverage of Google gives you a much better picture of what is actually going on and what the stakes are precisely because it is connected and broadly sympathetic to the people in power in the tech industry. You see a lot of analysis of who's in charge of what, what companies are working on and focusing on, etc. etc. So the thesis of the coverage is we will be critical of the tech industry when warranted because it has tremendous potential.
The way political coverage has been trending seems fairly nihilistic by comparison, where speaking truth to power is done just via rampant negativity without a thesis of why people in power are acting the way they are or what citizens should do about it. I think this essentially causes folks to tune out any media they disagree with...
But this is the downside of the media essentially operating by and for donors. People who donate and subscribe to publications essentially for political validation are not really looking for boosterism about their local economy or industry or whatever. They are wanting "impact" journalism even though the very fact that they (partisans/billionaires/people with specific agendas, whatever) are sponsoring it means it will not be all that impactful outside their peer group.
Academia is also very bought into the "truth-to-power-is-the-only-truth-worth-speaking" mode of thinking. I wonder if there's a common source or if the latter is causing the former
I think writing in terms of power analysis essentially allows you to launder opinion into what would otherwise be a straight news piece. The idea that "punching up" is OK is so well accepted at this point as long as your article can be remotely framed as "punching up" it's not even considered to have a thesis, it's just neutral.
Seems like a core problem of political hobbyism. I’m actually not that interested in the price of insulin except as a specific example of the quite interesting question of how to organize a health care system in big picture terms.
I can get super into something like this when it’s personally effecting me or is part of my job but it’s a lot to expect people to be excited enough to spend time sharing it and risk confrontation with rl people.
We clearly have a segment of people on the left - and many of them seem to have actual power- who are addicted to stirring up messy drama essentially for social media clout. I was listening to the 538 podcast this morning and they were discussing the incredible PITA the New Hampshire Democratic primary has turned into - for entirely self- inflected reasons. For those who blessedly have tuned this drama out- someone at the DNC got it in their heads that it was bad white supremacy something something that the first primary in the country is New Hampshire because it is a virtually all-white state and a place more diverse (like South Carolina or Nevada) should be first instead. So the DNC tried to get New Hampshire to move their primary later, but it turns out that New Hampshire actually has it in their constitution that they have to be first so they wouldn’t / couldn’t do it. So the DNC retaliates by saying that any delegates won in NH won’t count at the convention. The DNC thinks that should be the final nail, but Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson (the only Dems challenging Biden) realize that even if they don’t get delegates, they WILL get media attention if the do well in NH so they still stay in. Belatedly, the Biden campaign realizes this too, but it’s too late to get on the ballot, so now they have to organize a last ditch WRITE-IN campaign for the SITTING PRESIDENT and fly in people like Ro Khanna to campaign for it so he won’t be humiliated.
And all for what? Yes, if non-white voters are being disenfranchised in the Democratic primary system that would be bad and we should fix it. But that’s clearly not the case - recall that it was the largely non-white voters of South Carolina who basically picked Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, over the preferences of the mostly white voters of Iowa and NH. (For the record, I’m glad they did- I don’t think Buttigieg, Sanders or Warren would have beaten Trump in the general). The issue should be power, not which state goes first, and at least in the Democratic primary system, non white voters appear to have plenty of power - and thank God they do!
When it’s all said and done I guess it isn’t that big a deal but Biden has enough real problems he has to deal with - why are we generating additional drama for no reason?
"someone at the DNC got it in their heads that it was bad white supremacy something something that the first primary in the country is New Hampshire because it is a virtually all-white state"
Or maybe it's that the DNC is in the business of winning elections and needs to highlight primaries that help it select candidates that best increases the chances of that happening.
The smart move would be to order primaries by competitiveness - start with Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and end with California and Wyoming. You could keep the small-state bias by sorting by absolute vote margin rather than % margin.
But in either case NH would be way before SC based on 2016 and 2020 votes. NH was much more competitive than SC in both of those elections, so I'm not sure why you'd move it from a tossup state that you need to win to a state that Democrats are almost certain to lose (at least if the election is close).
States have to agree to move their primaries. Not sure many states would agree when it comes to this idea.
Constantly moving when your elections are is bad for turnout levels/democracy as a whole. Low-info voters at least kind of know "election day is in March" but if it moves every few years? Unhelpful
Many states want to have their presidential and congressional primaries at the same time, and so they do not want to go super early in the election cycle
I guess it might be impractical for various reasons and I hadn't considered the turnout issue.
But I still think it's a good idea in theory. The pros, ie selecting a candidate who will be competetive in swing states seem to outweigh the cons you mentioned, imho. I don't know how many people know their usual primary day, for example, and it's not uncommon for states to change their order now, but ymmv.
Maybe it could be tried with a pool of states that would be willing to agree to it? The current order had to be negotiated somehow, and reorderings continue to occur and get negotiated for, so why not tilt things in this direction if the DNC can?
Instead they seem to be prioritize "blocks" of voters - so SC's selling point is that "it will tell you what Black voters think". But that assumes SC Black voters are identical to Michigan or Arizona Black voters, and I'm sure they're not. If you're in the business of winning elections, you want to know what swing voters think wherever and whoever they happen to be. So just start with the swing states (if you can)
One other problem with your idea (and to be clear, I'm not trying to criticize in particular...I don't think it's the worst idea, I'm just not sure how much better it is than status quo) is that there's no real evidence swing *states* have a disproportionate number of swing *voters* so I don't know what this accomplishes.
Prioritizing states with large numbers of swing voters, I see the case for, but that would include (for example) North Dakota which had a massive swing in 2016, while excluding Georgia where there are fewer swing votes than average, and much just comes down to racial turnout discrepancies.
Swing voters tend to be non-college, non-evangelical, and non-Black so the best idea would probably be to have the lower-education non-Southern states go first under that idea. Places like...Iowa!
What it accomplishes is allowing the states that will decide the "real" election to decide the primary. I'm not really thinking about this in terms of swing voters - I don't how you would count them before the election begins and marginal, low-turnout voters are also important
What I am saying us that we can reasonably predict which states will be competitive battlegrounds in 2024, and a simple way to ballpark that is to look at which states were close in 2020 and those should be the priority. If the general election is most likely to be decided in Nevada, Georgia and Michigan and Arizona, then why not have the key primaries in those key states rather than trying to find piece together their profiles from similar states
What exactly is the problem they are trying to solve? In 2020 Iowa was the first contest, New Hampshire was the first primary and both were ultimately irrelevant. The state with the real power was South Carolina, which made a different choice and the Democrats won. What is the problem here? Why are we doing this?
The problem is that it puts an incredibly idiotic amount of pressure on primary candidates to please voters in two largely irrelevant states. The media coverage of those two states is just stupid, but impactful. So we have truly idiotic policies like ethanol subsidies that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
Ethanol is a very good point, but that wasn’t how the latest push to delay New Hampshire was sold- it was all about racial representation (because that’s what gets the clicks!) Your other point about candidates being forced to spend time in unrepresentative states is also good, but if we keep having situations where places like South Carolina overturn the earlier states it may resolve itself with candidates minimizing the time they spend in Iowa/New Hampshire or skipping them completely.
I’m from Iowa. It is a tradition every election cycle to extract ethanol guarantees from all the candidates for president. Even died in the wool opponents of that kind of subsidy always agree. It’s viewed as essential to being competitive in Iowa, which is viewed as essential to being competitive in the primaries at all.
Now that Iowa is deep red and unlikely to matter to a national election again in my lifetime, I’d prefer it be ignored entirely in the primaries. But the nature of our primary system coupled with the way media and donors treat it means it is hugely impactful.
Yes, this is basically the question that I've brought up over and over again when anyone complains about the primary calendar going back literally decades: who do you contend would have been the BETTER final nominee that would have resulted with a different primary calendar for any election going back to 1972? And no one will even begin to engage with that question even though literally the only case for changing the primary calendar is wanting to try to get candidates nominated who are more likely to win the general election than the candidates getting nominated under the current primary schedule.
Personally, the only Democratic primaries where I think changing the schedule would likely have changed the final nominees were: 1988 (I think Jesse Jackson could have been the nominee if Iowa and NH weren't first) and 2008 (Clinton would have been more likely to be the nominee if primary states were front-loaded). But nominating Jesse Jackson in 1988 probably results in the Democrats losing at least as badly in the general election as with Dukakis and arguably even worse (I think you would have seen something approaching a Reagan '84 scale win for Bush). And while Clinton would probably have defeated McCain in 2008, I don't know that it would be by any bigger margin than Obama did.
If the goal of each party is to win in swing states, the obvious way to order the primary is to simply sort all 50 states from smallest to largest margin of victory in the prior general election. For 2024, that would mean Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin get to first, while Wyoming and West Virginia go last.
But, of course, instead of doing it the logical way, they have to look at it through a mixture of tradition and checking the box on all the ethnic groups. But the irony is that the purported purpose of starting with South Carolina (giving black voters more influence) would happen anyway if you start with Georgia, but with the voter organization done for the primary being in a state that will actually matter in the general.
Agree with the points of this column re left-wing vibes... But I think it is worth noting that there IS symmetry in both sides pushing super-negative world views. The entire media industry unfortunately benefits from tales of "omg the world is in danger - tune in tomorrow to see what happens next."
Also I think Ukraine getting attention is better for Biden (unlike student loans). First of all it is the most important issue right now, even if people are "bored". Secondly, aiding Ukraine is pretty popular compared to a lot of left-wing priorities. Thirdly, Ukraine getting more attention is better than Israel-Palestine because it is an issue that mostly unites rather than divides Dems. Finally, and most importantly, the gap between the Dem position and MAGA position is very stark on this issue and it divides Republicans, which is an electoral benefit for Biden. Both lefties and Trump can't defend their anti-Ukraine position coherently, so they look foolish, and anything that makes Trump look like a wimp is a benefit. I kind of wish Biden and Ukraine defenders would emphasize the practical danger that a total Russian victory would bring over the "democracy vs. authoritarian" rhetoric (it would still be bad if Ukraine was the corrupt dictatorship its detractors call it!) but maybe that rhetoric does play better, idk.
This article makes some sense, but I wonder about Matt's theory of effective propaganda.
Matt's theory seems to be more or less about policy:
What the media is doing -- "Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is awesome and will reduce racial inequalities by X% blah blah blah"
What the media should do -- "Biden's plans to reduce drug prices are awesome and will increase life expectancy by X% and lower healthcare costs by Y% blah blah blah"
I'd consider an alternative theory based on the visceral feeling people get from reading news:
What the media is doing -- "You're all terrible white supremacists unless you convert to full-on progressive zealotry. Also, we speak for Joe Biden and the Democratic party. Vote Biden!"
What the media should do -- "America is generally a good country and we like its populace. We believe the Democratic party will be better for the American people. Vote Biden!"
Matt seems to consistently overrate the value of policy in the discourse, e.g., claiming that Trump won in 2016 because he said he wouldn't touch Medicare and Social Security. But as much as I wish it wasn't so, most people don't seem to pay much attention to the nuts and bolts of governing, and consistently reporting on it is probably a fast track for a media company to bankruptcy (or at least irrelevancy).
To be clear, when I say "should," I'm taking the perspective of someone who wants to be a propagandist for the Democrats (rather than taking my own perspective on how society should operate).
Unfortunately, the Democrats seem hung up on “saving democracy,” rather than focusing on their kitchen table accomplishments, including Medicare, infrastructure projects and student loans. And it doesn’t help when the mainstream media simply echo that nebulous approach.
The NYT Pitchbot's schtick is more arguing that the NYT excessively tries to bothsides issues too much, and that its columnists (and also non-NYT columnists--not even Matt can escape its wrath) aren't sufficiently left wing enough and often provide what it deems to be clueless and dumb takes that don't adhere to what it deems to be the clear and obviously correct left wing position.
Just took at look at it now, and the recent tweets continue to be plenty of "both sides" mockery, and a huge string of Old Takes Exposed style mockery at the NYT for taking Ron DeSantis seriously, which seems what I would expect.
Yeah, kinda harsh. I tend to overreact to the tone of arrogant condescension. I guess journalists are *supposed* to tell you stuff you don't know, so that tone is hard to avoid.
I liked Nassim Taleb's idea of the Noise Bottleneck (here is a short write up - https://fs.blog/noise-and-signal-nassim-taleb/). Basically, it is not so much the journalists as it is the fact that we are all fools and overconsuming information just makes us more foolish. It explains why some really intelligent people I know, who listen/read the news all day (on both the right and left) are often painfully misinformed.
Thanks, I'll take a look at it. Certainly true that we're bombarded with too much and nobody can process it all. However I agree with Matt that media bias is real, widespread, and flagrant, and while my irate comment that they're a bunch of fools is unhelpful and basically silly, I don't see how noise can explain a tendency toward monolithic reactions.
The feeling I seem to get from Matt lately is that he thinks that the shortcomings of the progressive movement as well as the failings of Democratic Party at large are going to sink Biden's chances of victory in 2024, handing the election (at least the electoral college win) to Haley or worse, Trump.
If he is correct, then Democrats are probably going to spend some time in the wilderness. If that is the case, and assuming Trump & Co. aren't successful in instituting permanent authoritarian rule, then I really hope that this time in the wilderness brings progressive & moderate Democrats back to reality for when they cycle back into power in '32 or '36.
We Dems really need a new way to think about politics and who our constituency is; which is really similar to the older pre-Obama consensus. But mostly we need new leaders who understand this and are able to communicate in a way that doesn't alienate the progressive left or centrist swing voters.
No quibbles with the column, but the bigger problem with over-hiring from this cohort is the lack of subject matter expertise. They have a lot of ideological commitments, high confidence, and very little knowledge. So they fill in the gaps with their assumptions or repeat the conventional wisdom in their newsroom.
Example: an Army friend was complaining to me the other day about crappy coverage of military topics. I saw an analysis showing that less than 0.5% of NYT staffers have any military background, and those people mostly work on the tech side. So it’s not surprising that they’d make errors of fact and analysis. But why? The military has trained journalists that the NYT could hire from.
And for the love of God, foreign correspondents should speak the language. At a minimum, they should be able to have a basic conversation on the street. If they can’t even communicate, who knows what cultural assumptions or biased filters are showing up in their work. Imagine trying to report on the US without speaking English. But this means more hiring of immigrant kids, Mormons, etc., not Penn grads.
Interesting, the Army point is one I've never heard before but it seems like a great idea and makes tons of sense.
Oh no. Then they would also have to hire an Air Force-trained reporter, and one from Navy Times, and an ex-Marine and even, heaven help us, a Space Command-bred reporter. Man, what am I saying. An "Army" reporter? Which branch? Can an infantry-branch reporter do full justice to issues affecting the armor branch or even, I laugh just thinking about it, Army aviation?
But seriously, of course you need journalists who know their beat but it's always the case that people inside an institution will have problems with journalists who, because they have to cover a wide beat, will never know as much of the details as someone who lives it every day. And there have been truly fine military correspondents. I'll name Thomas Ricks as just one.
"And there have been truly fine military correspondents. I'll name Thomas Ricks as just one."
Add C. J. Chivers, who is a vet, and Tyler Rogoway, who I think is not. (Rogoway, as far as I can tell, is more of a tech enthusiast who just likes military tech. But he is knowledgeable about his subjects!)
I have to reluctantly agree that subject matter (and/or institutional) knowledge is increasingly necessary. Reluctantly because I have known beat reporters who knew squat become not only expert but able to bring a broader, less captured perspective to their reporting.
The economic challenges facing news outlets of every type are as understood as they are mostly ignored. It will get worse before it gets better. Perhaps we will see the rise of loosely organized citizen-reporters working with more established reporters and writers to deliver a broader and deeper range of coverage. Perhaps a consortium of Substack writers!
The danger of biased perspectives in such an arrangement are hard to address. Today’s media are growing less objective because their readers are more ideological and less tolerant, demanding not only coverage but favoritism. Being profit-making institutions, news media will give them what they want. How does someone get a less curated depiction of events? Watching both Fox News and MSNBC to figure out “reality” would make me both insane and deaf.
Ryan McBeth did the research on the minuscule portion of staff at NYT and WaPo that served in the military. You can find the YouTube episode or read his Substack.
Both newspapers consulted ‘military experts’ regarding the chances the IDF has in fighting Hamas above and below ground. They haven’t really adjusted in the face of the IDF’s masterful use of combined arms in urban fighting, nor the fact that 17 of 22 Hamas battalions are inoperable beyond tiny cells. The pro Palestinian indoctrination these journalists received in J-school and their personal urge to be pro Hamas propagandists has been a disservice to their useful idiot progressive readership.
"...foreign correspondents should speak the language."
Totally agree, but note that this is easier when you have more foreign beats, harder when you have fewer. Your "Middle East" correspondent should certainly speak Arabic; should they speak Persian as well? When your paper has only one African correspondent , which is "the language" that they should speak? Does your Asian Bureau have enough people to have Thai, Burmese, and Laotian speakers as well as the speakers of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese?
In the old days, the papers would have lots of correspondents in the field, speaking lots of languages. But it's expensive.
Yeah I think you hit on it. The real issue is just general decline of news readership overall. Which has meant the first thing to go is usually foreign correspondents given how expensive it is how little non domestic topics get read. Which means foreign policy coverage in general is almost certainly worse. I think it’s a huge part of why the Afghan coverage was so unbelievably and disproportionately negative to Biden. So many of the people writing about it probably hadn’t even thought about Afghanistan for years let along be stationed there.
Sort of on that note. Was blown away to find out from David Simon that the Baltimore Sun used to have a plethora of foreign correspondents as it was one of the top 10 newspapers in the country.
Watch the wire season 5!
You're right about the expense, especially for smaller outlets that only have one or two people covering a region. A big outlet like the NYT would still need to prioritize based on the area's importance. Correspondents sitting in their Mideast bureaus should speak Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, or something. They shouldn't be reporting from Jerusalem speaking only English, which happens pretty often (I've met them).
Something I've often wondered is why newspapers don't jointly fund foreign bureaus.
There must be twenty "Middle East correspondents" for twenty different newspapers (assuming the NYT and WaPo have it more broken down than that). Wouldn't they be better off if half of those newspapers organised a consortium and had a bureau chief and eight correspondents, locating six in specific countries and then the other two to cover the rest of the region?
You are describing UPI and, to a lesser extent, AP.
"...those newspapers organised a consortium...."
I suspect that this did happen sometimes, and was the origin of the "exclusive" report, i.e. a report that was not shared by all members of the consortium. After all, if the Guardian and Telegraph share a "pool reporter" whereas the Times can afford its own correspondent in Kabul, then it can run "exclusives" that you can only read if you purchase the Times.
Some of our current terminology makes more sense if those were the earlier customs.
As John from FL replied separately, that is sort of how UPI, AP, and some other wire services operated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Press_International
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press
The loss of advertising rents in media has not been replaced.
Africa correspondents should speak French in addition to English (that's gotta be 80% of the continent south of the Sahara between those two).
Middle east correspondents should speak one of Farsi, Turkish, or Arabic, and should be assigned to stories based on language skills (Hebrew, Pashto, etc. can be a plus).
For covering India and Pakistan, I think English should actually be fine (though obviously Indian languages don't hurt).
I think Chinese is the most important East Asian language, followed by Japanese, then Korean, then other languages.
And obviously, Spanish for Latin America (with Portuguese as a nice plus).
Journalism does not pay a wage competitive with almost any other application of genuine competence, let alone expertise.
It *cannot* attract the talent it needs to help the audience understand most topics, and fills the gap with idealistic but deeply ideological journalists coming from programs which themselves are increasingly run by ideologues rather than people with genuine expertise.
My own half-assed spitball is "recognized experts (defined loosely) should be required to spend 40 hours a year writing public interest pieces on their field with the aid of an editor for publication in a major media outlet, and major media outlets (also defined loosely) should be required to publish at least 4 of those works every publication. They should be in the public domain immediately and available for publication by any news periodical without charge, forever."
I have no idea how to implement that.
"Journalism does not pay a wage competitive with almost any other application of genuine competence, let alone expertise. It *cannot* attract the talent it needs to help the audience understand most topics..."
The wages may not be competitive in terms of dollars, but there are competent people who highly value agency, status, etc. E.g. professors in STEM fields are often payed much less at a university than they would if they worked in industry; it's pretty common for newly graduated STEM PhDs to make more money than their advisors if they go into industry.
So, there are situations in which experts are willing to take a pay cut in exchange for non-monetary benefits. I'm sure that major publications could offer an acceptable package of monetary and non-monetary benefits if they really wanted.
How?
I'm not sure what specifically you're responding to. Are you asking what package of benefits a publication could offer?
The last sentence, yes. I see no possible path for print media corporations to offer an attractive combinations of pay, benefits, and prestige for anyone except their very, very best.
If the NYT offered $90k with remote work and a fair amount of autonomy, they'd have zero problem filling the job with a qualified applicant. I'm confident they could offer less.
Assistant professor salaries at a generic R1 public university aren't that high [1], and the NYT is much more prestigious than say, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. A NYT job is also pretty easily monetizable. If you do a good job writing articles, you can easily make some extra money with a side hustle of writing popular science books.
[1] https://oira.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/297/2023/07/Faculty-Salaries-at-Research-and-AAU-Universities-2022-23_20230613.pdf
Is this going to go towards their tenure and promotion packets?
I would love to see this sort of work being valued in tenure and promotion packets. My husband had a colleague who was featured in the New York Times a couple of times, but administration didn't see that as worthy at all even though it reached way more people than anything else he or anyone else in the department did.
Conversely, I am kind of annoyed with the attention some of my colleagues get from being featured in the NYT. Maybe it's just bitterness talking, but I find what gets picked up for public interest stories are *never* the most impactful science being done.
With regards to administration though, they will always claim not to value what you excel in. If it's research, then your teaching isn't impactful enough. If it's public outreach, then your research isn't deep enough. etc. etc. etc.
Most science journalists aren't scientists and don't understand the subject matter enough to make it legible to non-scientists.
Oh, that's exactly how it is in academia too. I've gotten some modest raises here and there by raising a stink about productivity vs. colleagues (hey, I'm not posting here all the time!), but I know the only way to get the big money is to get a competing offer.
A lot of the standards are asinine, arbitrary, and ever increasing.
We need the cultural norm that not doing it gets you put at the back of the line. Academics have, among their many, many problems, a tendency to ignore or downplay public scholarship. We need to beat them bloody until they rediscover its value.
Let's start with a 5% income tax surcharge for not doing it, to help that norm to grow.
That 5% tax idea sounds unconstitutional.
It would be entirely constitutional for a state licensure board to mandate an either/or: 40 hours of public engagement and scholarship annually, or an additional licensure fee equivalent to 5% of the field's median income paid into the state general fund.
The number of times that people trot out "but the Constitution" as an attempt to slap down discussion of something they find personally unpleasant around here is sad. We have a million ways to enforce an in-kind contribution from experts in many fields, including most of the important ones.
I don’t find it personally unpleasant, David. But the First Amendment does not allow the government to compel speech, and I am reasonably sure that your proposal violates it because you would have people penalized by a state board for not engaging in a particular type of speech.
I think you are far better off using a carrot than a stick. Make it something to be proud of and reputationally beneficial and people will do it. Tell someone they have to do it or get penalized and you'll get some crappy product that is of no use to anyone.
Good luck with that norm here in the States. It actually, in the main, exists in China. A book of public scholarship is something academics are proud to put on a CV, an invitation to give a public lecture to a generalist audience is an honor and privilege, and the sort of anti-social, narrow-minded, elitist fools who sit at the pinnacle of academia in most American universities are marginalized and derided.
Recreating that norm in the United States (we had this too once upon a time) would require turning academia inside out and deliberately privileging those scholars who have been confined to its margins because they choose to educate the public. They are the folks with the power to dispense carrots and they must be overruled by the government wielding a big stick.
I see no clear path other than to incentivize the proper behavior until it becomes something people expect and require.
I don’t think the US should be copying speech norms from China.
I will restate my previous point - if the culture doesn't support and reward "40 hours a year writing public interest pieces" than using government force to make people to do it will be EXTREMELY unlikely to result in positive outcomes. Most of them will probably publish an article talking about why its bad for their field that the government forces people to do this.
This sounds very much like a Republican trying to accomplish a cultural change by law, but if the culture isn't already supportive it will be very difficult to have a law passed and even more difficult to enforce it in a meaningful (and non biased) way.
You are being silly.
No, I've asked folks like you to do something you don't want to do but may be necessary for the health of the body politic and you're throwing a hissy fit about it.
I don't care.
I don’t like your punitive or authoritarian tone, much less you personally directed animus. The fact you open with a projection and personally directed lie is completely uncalled for. I am describing your behavior.
You want to punish a group you hold in contempt for a failure to meet your arbitrary set standards. Nowhere have you expressed a willingness to actually contribute to a public provision problem, just blame.
You just what “free stuff” and want anyone but you to provide for it.
Hence why you are being silly and being dishonest.
Have you written your first piece?
Yes.
A couple dozen over the years, though I doubt that I'd be an acknowledged expert in any particular field. Peripherally so in project delivery, about which I've written quite a lot, and China-related economic policy for the developed world, about which I've written a bit.
And just to add, I specifically joined my local civic organization to lend my expertise to the maintenance of our park, our interactions with the city about infrastructure maintenance in the region, and the discussions of housing and development we have.
While I'm still thinking about your spitball, on your first part, it's always seemed like the people skilled in communications who want to make a lot of money will be able to do so in PR or advertising, thus siphoning away their talent and leaving journalism with talent that is driven by things bigger than money.
This idea seems like the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences except much, much less technical.
>In the USA we do a perverse version of it: you put in your time as a low paid government employee and then jump to the private sector where you lobby for your industry’s interests, nevermind the common good
My understanding is that the French and the Japanese practice the exact same model though (and probably other developed countries too, these are just the ones that I've read about). The Japanese famously force their bureaucrats to retire at age 50, so they all jump straight into working for the companies that they were just regulating. In other words, this is a pretty common arrangement
This strikes me as a pretty “kids these days” take. Young people are overconfident and lack expertise, so what’s new? I can believe this specific generation is more ideological but mostly because society as a whole is.
Also, media orgs aren’t exactly flush with cash these days. Expertise is expensive. So idk that there’s an easy solution to this problem even if the diagnosis is correct.
This last point is an important one. I believe "media employment has collapsed" and "media is dominated by young people with strong ideological commitments" are the same trend.
Same thing has happened in humanities at the collegiate level. When access to a stable and financially viable career disappears, then you only get people who ignore economic incentives. Those people tend to be ideologues or those with trust funds.
"Work for 7 years in a nice place with extremely good job security and interesting colleagues" is well within the class of normal reasons people choose jobs, especially a ones that leave you capable of pivoting somewhere else after your 20s. I think making this out to be more special than it is confuses the discussion
Grad school is a lot different than being a professor. Also you are wasting time on a PhD if it takes longer than 5 (extending the clock to a degree is a perverse result of incentives.) Tenure track jobs have disappeared in many disciplines, and you don’t get COLAs any more.
Honestly as a former humanities grad student myself, I think it is much less about putting ideology above financial reward and much more "I am good at school. I want to keep doing school" without a whole lot of thought beyond that.
"Work for 7 years in a nice place with extremely good job security and interesting colleagues" is a description of being a grad student! Most 24 year old band members won't be doing it when they're 60 either
Sure, but what are we going to do about it? I think the future of American reporting is going to look like party newspapers that dominated between the Civil War and WW2. Matt is right the current equilibrium where non-right media is biased towards Democrats still doesn't produce the most optimal reporting for Democratic party interests. But we're mostly on track to get there, and I'd say he should look on the bright side. Americans mostly agree with him in that they distrust these outlets he thinks are emphasizing the wrong things. The information fracturing will continue until morale improves.
I ran across an article from Teen Vogue this weekend on the latest COVID data. It was a far, far departure from the days of me reading teen magazines and not in a good way!
Fair, but I think hiring someone out of the Army Times might be cheaper than a Yale grad.
Would it though? The Army Times vet would have a career on their CV and a certain level of salary expectations, but the recent Ivy grad would still just be a 22 year old.
Also, the recent Ivy grad would likely have rich parents prepared to fund them living in New York for a few years while they try to make it in journalism.
As long as there are a few well-paid jobs for an occasional Matt Yglesias, it's not unreasonable for a parent who can afford to do so to subsidise a kid who will work hard at journalism in the hope that when they're 35, they can make a good living (and if they haven't made it, then they'll change careers before that - which is why journalism is full of young people; older people either move up or move out).
The Army Times vet would be much less likely to be in the position where they can afford to live and work in New York or wherever without being paid a salary sufficient to sustain a reasonable lifestyle.
Would we accept this in other environments? I think it was Matt Bruenig who said that if a company can't afford to pay a living wage, then perhaps they should go out of business...
That’s basically what’s happening-journalism is in a death spiral and has been for about 2 decades.
I don't think we should. But also, there's a difference between a living wage (ie the equivalent of the lifestyle of waitstaff or a bartender) and what I called "a salary sufficient to sustain a reasonable lifestyle".
I bet most of these junior people are being paid $15 an hour, probably even $20 an hour (if they're employed, not freelancers or interns), but there's a huge difference between that and the sort of salary that an Ivy grad would reasonably expect to get (and could get doing something else), or the salary than a ten-year vet with the sort of CV than an Army Times reporter could look to get in some sort of defense/security consulting or PR job.
If the vet were 40 years old, you're right. But can't you find people who aren't not necessarily career military, but got a few years' experience in military journalism and would have better knowledge and instincts for the subject matter than a kid out of college?
They definitely could find qualified reporters from military press. The problem is that generic beat reporter wages are very low and someone who writes well with these qualifications will have far better paying options, notably in PR for military contractors or lobbyists. Financially, they’d be better off staying in the military than going to the NYT if they can hold on for a pension.
This seems very unlikely. Median pay for a journalist at the NYT is 82k per Glassdoor. You would need to be a Captain with 6 years experience to make that much in the army. More likely, you're making 20k less.
Oh, I definitely agree that the Army Times alum would probably be better suited to the job. Whether they would be cheaper to hire is another story.
I doubt this.
The Army times person requires a living wage and will not move to NYC without a sufficient COLA. The Yale grad is subsidized by their parents.
The vast, vast majority of my classmates who end up in New York will not be subsidized by their parents—they will be making six figures on Wall Street or at an MBB firm.
Right, but your classmates that are working in non-profits, publishing, fashion, journalism, are likely to be subsidized by their parents. I am old enough to be your parent and see this often in my kid's cohort among those who have wealthier parents. Parents also subsidize summer internships in NYC, and most families can't afford that either.
Agree. When I think of the hundreds of classmates I had studying policy between college and grad school, maybe two or three went into media (and it was either specialty media, Thomas Reuters, or the Washington Post). Most of the people I went to school with who went into media had a writing, not policy background. If you went to a professor for career advice and they suggested either going into media or Capitol Hill, most students would just ignore them since those were seen as thankless career paths. Most of the people who were serious about policy that I went to school with basically went into one of the more prestigious federal agencies (State, Treasury, DOJ, DOE, DOD), the UN, Big Law, or major consulting firms. Going into even legacy media was an afterthought.
Does your friend follow Ryan McBeth?
We all know that NYT mostly hires Ivy grads. Rarely they will poach talent like Ezra (who had a really unique career pathway that probably doesn't exist any more. I find his experience/challenges with formal education very humanizing,)
No idea, but I can recommend! Thanks :)
Ya, because Ryan just did a critique of NYT’s military coverage.
When you think about it , the connection of the economy to epistemology is under appreciated. Or put simply, the current economy doesn’t incentivize people being trained and employed to be competent truth seekers and propagators, be it in journalism or academia (as different as those two are). Ironically at the age of the Internet we seem to be experience a decline in our ability to understand the world and it seems the causes are mostly economic (although post truth ideology left and right certainly comes into it).
Look, it's Monday morning, but this is probably a strong contender for Comment of the Week.
The third paragraph I will agree with in totality. But I'd argue that it's wholly unimportant for actual reporters to have prior subject matter expertise, and in fact better for journalists to approach difficult (whether in complexity or political heat) subjects as complete tabulas rasa. The goal is to *become* a subject matter expert through talking to the real experts in the field and doing extensive research with an open mind - which is where I'd say modern journalists often fall short. But when there are truly competing ideas or schools of thought on a subject, vast prior educational or applied experience is likelier to create bias than to create understanding.
Former journalist who works in tech now for 5x+ the money and way more job security. I reluctantly admit that I would only feel comfortable reporting on the tiniest sliver of the tech industry in which I'm involved day-to-day. Anything outside of that, and I know I would get roasted. Let's be practical about what we expect journalists to know given the terrible state of the industry.
No disagreement about speaking the language being a requirement for foreign correspondents, but a lot of people study foreign languages in college (including, presumably, at Penn).
I complete agree with your friend Amy...In addition I have also noticed that when professional media have people with professional experience, they are either crazily partisan (the right) or obviously had bad experiences in those professions and basically are used to support the preconceived and incorrect notions of those who do not have any experience (these "professional voices" left the professions, often after relatively short stints and had a bad experience that supports a prevailing ideology).
I know we used to laugh about some of the people who left our profession to go into the media or who would do all these interviews. It was kind of a joke about how they could not succeed in the job so now they were going to go explain it to other people.
My guess is that they are hired not because they have professional experience that could add to a readers understanding of the field but because they have some kind of quasi-professional experience that can allow the organization to use them as an "expert" but also come with an ideology that is comfortable (and familiar) to those hiring them. Thus they can have an expert who conforms to their bias.
Sure, but this is probably the most challenging to address in a time of news media’s economic collapse. Hiring actual specialists is expensive and limits your flexibility in staffing.
"Foreign coverage is a huge minus for American prestige media."
I agree with this take.
For some reason, FW, I am "blocked from liking" your comments. If it's a personal thing, let me know and maybe we can work it out.
"An industry full of young, educated, urban progressives, ...American journalists are ... left-wing."
As a claim about individual journalists, this seems broadly true, for the demographic reasons you cite.
"The media is on the left...it’s precisely because the media tends to be left-wing that the media tends to focus on ideas that divide Democrats...."
As a claim about an industry, i.e. the media, this seems broadly false. "The media" is not equivalent to a bunch of cub reporters: it is the owners of Sinclair and Fox, as well as the owners of the Wall Street Journal and NYT, all of them much further right than their employees.
The WSJ is a good example: it's reportage has generally been excellent, while it's editorials have generally been laughably bad. It's clear which of these is the journalists and which is the owners. But which is "the media"?
To make the point about journalists that you want to make, references to "the media" obscure more than they clarify.
You make a good point about the distinction between reporters and the editorial direction they are under. That is an interesting wrinkle to analyze.
One thing I would add is the growing realization both in newsrooms and everywhere else is that the Internet is not real life. There was a real responsiveness in the real world to online discourse nonsense from what felt like 2016-2021 or so, but that era is definitely over. I think some of the more unhinged position taking and leftist on liberal vitriol is a response to this loss of ability to drive real world results from Twitter screeds.
But it was so very nice to be able to "change the world" by hammering out spam on Twitter.
Actual organizing is hard, voting requires consistent effort year after year.
I'm becoming increasingly persuaded by "many/most online leftists are mentally ill and using Twitter and shared doomist sentiment to substitute for friendships, social ties, real-world achievements, and good therapy" as the best explanation for why they are the way they are.
It's true that ownership is, in the aggregate, much more conservative than reporters. But it mostly doesn't matter because they don't have the personnel to operationalize their preferences, a manifestation of the trend Tracing Woodgrains wrote about in "The Republican Party is Doomed" (https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed).
[Addendum, some follow-up, below: https://www.slowboring.com/p/bidens-media-problem/comment/47857026]
"...they don't have the personnel to operationalize their preferences...."
Owners fire journalists all the time. Ask Dave Weigel, of this parish. Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, ask Tucker Carlson -- he was not a journalist, but the dynamic is the same. Owners have no problem selecting their preferred journalists, and firing the ones who stray.
I do think this illustrates a key underlying element of Matt’s article: it isn’t the high profile stuff that is key. Instead, it’s the drip, drip, drip of articles that choose to focus certain things that highlight divisions in the left and negatives of our society without any interest in successes or issues on which left of center is largely undivided. Those things don’t get anyone fired and aren’t the types of editorial decisions that management would usually get involved with.
"Mostly doesn't matter" was a little hyperbolic. But the power to say "no" is less significant when your only choices are Coke and Pepsi. (Not to say it's that extreme, I'm just trying to make a point about the structural dynamic.)
Are they really just Coke and Pepsi? This made me wonder, like maybe they could hire student journalists from The O'Colly, the newspaper of Oklahoma State University, so I repaired to its website just now to see what kind of journalism they produce, and the featured story is, um, this:
https://www.ocolly.com/news/4-students-charged-for-dumping-dead-longhorn-outside-farmhouse-fraternity/article_69431f18-b71a-11ee-a80e-2351b49f276e.html
Assuming they got the particulars right (names, dates & times, locations, charges), what’s wrong with that story?
Ken, you're a better man than I, a snooty coastal person.
I know Matt refers to "the media" a couple of times, but in reading the piece, I thought it was fairly clear that, overall, he was referring to the composition of individual journalists and not necessarily making a point about "the media" as an overall institution
You said it much better than I tried to in my own meandering post. Matt not distinguishing between younger reporters and older centrist editors and owners is a real flaw in his column.
Also, the older reporters are clearly the ones with more influence and power. We all know the name Maggie Habberman. And I rant rail about Peter Baker all the time. These two alone have way more power than any super lefty reporter. The most famous is probably Taylor Lorenz. And she’s famous in part from lots of people dunking on her precisely for being the doomerist on Covid that Matt describes. Honestly, how much of the agenda at large on anything is Taylor Lorenz influencing at all?
"the older reporters are clearly the ones with more influence and power"
Can you elaborate on this?
I can see how people who have been around for a while are going to have more name recognition than someone who is new, but how and does that translate into power and influence - and for whom do they have more power and influence over?
I said it in my own (again more meandering) post but see the Claudine Gay coverage. This was 'front page" coverage for basically a month. Multiple stories, multiple news analysis pieces, multiple op-eds for weeks on end. There is no way that story gets that sort of coverage if the young super lefty writers Yglesias describes have as much power as he says they do.
Maggie Habberman clearly has sources close to Trump in some capacity. Her news stories were lead articles all the time. Peter Baker is a consistent guest on MTP. He heads the New York Times political desk, his news analysis articles are given "front page" prominence on the actual pages and website most of which are basically a byword for "extremists on both sides" garbage.
Young reporters just out of college basically by definition are not getting plum "above the fold" stories that drive news cycles except on one of basis. Taylor Lorenz articles were almost never given place of prominence on WaPo with the exception that proves the rule when she uncovered who was behind LibsofTikTock. She's also a good example of someone who has lots of name recognition among people like Matt as a paradigm example of these super lefty reporters. In fact, she may be the most famous. Which again serves my point. How much influence does she have? As far as I can tell, she still wants 2020 style Covid restrictions. I don't think there is anywhere in the country that has any meaningful Covid restrictions.
As I understand, you're saying that their articles get better positioning in the paper and on the website and they get better stories because they have had time to develop more sources and contacts.
I guess that makes sense, though I suspect those are heavily related. I vehemently disagree about the Claudine Gay coverage and suspect that if newspapers were full of old school blue collar reporters, it would have barely made the paper. Its only because they are full of Ivy grads that they spend so much time talking about them.
Oh we are actually in huge agreement on the Claudine Gay coverage. Reporters being disproportionately from the ranks of elite schools has been a reality for decades now. I mean Matt after all is himself a Harvard grad. My point isn't in tension with yours. The amount of coverage this story got is definitely (at least in part) reflective of the fact that so many reporter are elite school graduates. The tenor of the coverage (and most important how it drove news cycles) is result of the fact that the older more centrist reporters have more clout.
My view of the MSM coverage of the Gay story was that it was in no way hyper critical of her in the way that most centrists were. The MSM coverage was largely in defense of her and focused heavily on where the accusations were coming from (RIGHT WING AGITATORS!) rather than doing real reporting to determine how problematic her behavior really was. The volume of coverage was driven by the outrage machinery on the right, so the left-wing response needed to be proportional but opposite in tone and tenor.
"The tenor of the coverage (and most important how it drove news cycles) is result of the fact that the older more centrist reporters have more clout."
I went more into length in another response, but I think "more" is doing a lot of work in that "more centrist" descriptor. I'd also like to see some evidence of them having the influence you think they do on "tenor."
I certainly recognize Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker. I'd be very hard pressed to name five prominent young journalists at the New York Times. And the ones I can -- like Jane Coasten, Sarah Kliff and Brad Plumer -- are pretty darn good and don't fit Matt's stereotype. (You might say that Plumer represents an overemphasis (?) on climate change, but he was hired to report that beat; he didn't force himself on the Times.)
What does the fact that you recognize the names mean? Do you ascribe more accuracy to their articles than you do for articles written by people you don't recognize?
Accuracy? Maybe no; I wouldn't know. Prominence and influence? Definitely.
"Prominence and influence"
Again I ask, what does that mean? Do you think others are ascribing more importance or accuracy to their articles beyond their ability to do more sourced reporting?
This is not particularly germane to the main point of discussion we're having here, but is it actually true that the owners of NYT are "much further right" than their employees? I was under the impression Sulzberger is something of a true believer, maybe mildly more moderate than his journalists but certainly no centrist
There’s something to this and in general there’s a way in which bosses, for lack of a better word, often escape any criticism in many fields.
It may be mistaken to say “the media” as a whole is “left”, but there are systematic biases you get from the structure of who gets hired as reporters, and there are systematic biases you get from the structure of who goes into ownership and management, and those systematic biases are not precisely diametrically opposed but instead align in several ways (even if there are some ways that they might cancel).
"...those systematic biases are not precisely diametrically opposed...."
That sounds right.
My intended point was not really about canceling out, in any case, but just about the non-equivalence of "journalists" with "the media." It makes sense to say "journalists are predominantly young, educated, urban, etc."; it makes no sense to say "the media are predominantly young, educated, urban, etc.". They are just different kinds of things: to start with, journalists are people whereas the media -- newspapers, networks, and so on -- are corporations. "The media" don't have demographics characteristics, although some of the owners of the corporations do.
But my point got interpreted as a claim that reporting skews right because the ownership skews right, and then it was off to the races with refuting something I had not said. Ah, well. At least I got my normal day's wages for commenting here.
I'm not sure how substantive this comment's edits were* and how much of my original top-level response was a product of my own tunnel-vision but I'll cop to being excessively focused on the terms "NYT" and "WSJ" and only thinking about text-first center-left journalism.
Half a day later, the conversation is ranging over several different subjects - and people aren't always talking about the same thing.
As you imply and other commenters note more explicitly, television doesn't fit as neatly into the paradigm Matt laid out in the article. What's more, internet successors like TikTok and YouTube have even more complicated relationships between "owners" and "journalists". YouTube is often in the exact opposite position of the NYT/WSJ: the "owners" are often appalled by the right-wing slant of the "journalists". Of course, I'm stretching the terminology. But it seemed to me that Matt was talking about Journalism with a capital J, for which I think his critique is quite accurate.
It's another thing entirely to try to comprehend the role of text-first, center-left Journalism in a world dominated by MEDIA: the local television news, TikToks, and YouTube, among others. And I appreciate the reminder that the landscape doesn't begin and end with the NYT.
* Not implying anything sinister!
"I'm not sure how substantive this comment's edits were...."
I deleted two periods that had crept in between words, due to my fat fingers on a phone.
Sometimes I do make more extensive edits, though. Usually when I think a punch-line didn't land.
It’s not just or even mainly a matter of getting fired for ideology; that’s not all that common as far as I can tell. It’s a matter of what content gets run in the first place. Some rogue Oberlin grad at Fox News isn’t going to be able to sneak some global warming is real content onto Fox News; the ship they run there is too tight.
The right-wing media is reporting on widely unexpected temperature and range constraints to EVs, ensuring the industry will both adapt and inform consumers how to mitigate this drawback while enjoying their CO2-reducing sedans. That's good for CO2-reducing sedans in the long run; just because media is adversarial or ideological doesn't mean it cannot helpfully induce others to solve real problems.
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/right-wing-media-use-tesla-strandings-chicago-bash-electric-vehicles
I promise I wasn't trying to get into an argument about ideological media on the merits. I was using a hypothetical example to show how "does right-wing ownership influence the media" cannot be answered just with reference to who gets fired for what, but also has to consider coverage/programming decisions. No one's getting fired from Fox News but that's not because management there gives reporters maximum leeway.
It’s not just that Fox News is genetically right-wing. They enforce message discipline; they make some GOP candidates look reasonable and others foolish; they boot people like Carlson who wander off the reservation. But also, I don’t think I understand the distinction between “the owner influences the output of the outlet” and “the owner establishes an explicitly ideological outlet.” Why isn’t that influence?
But fine, you don’t like Fox as an example. What about Sinclair? Those stations *aren’t* explicitly right-wing but the owners make sure their content is consistently right-wing.
62% of Americans watch local news on a regular basis. Much higher than I thought!
https://corporate.charter.com/newsroom/spectrum-news-morning-consult-poll-finds-83-percent-of-americans-trust-local-news#:~:text=news%20coverage%20provided.-,More%20than%20half%20of%20Americans%20(62%25)%20watch%20local%20news,15%25%20seek%20printed%20national%20newspapers.
Tapping the sign:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-median-voter-is-a-50-something
I watch local news every morning. Yes, some of it may be a bit too focused on crime, but I also find out about things like local events of interest, human interest stories, and even mundane things like a boil water advisory. And the weather, omg, the weather - every 10-15 minutes.
Love getting that tv weather when filling up the gas tank. In addition, there are always offers for discounts on monster drinks.
As part of the 38 percent who don't watch television of any kind, I would like to add that I do read the local news. Does that count? It really helps to know what's going on in the 25 - 30 mile radius around me. Also - working in two counties, and those news stories are of interest as well.
I've known multiple journalists who work for outlets like WaPo and CNN- literally none of them have ever talked about ownership input on topics as being some sort of balancing force between the left wing staff and the right wing corporate class. All of them talk about newsrooms heavily focused on left wing agenda setting. To claim, without evidence, that the owners are somehow preventing mainstream media from swinging significantly to the left strikes me as bizarre wishful thinking.
I mean there’s good evidence that some media owners being right wing has had a substantial effect on coverage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group?wprov=sfti1#Political_views
Where you’re right is that there’s a kind of polarization: there are some carriers like Sinclair that force a right-wing perspective, but moderate to center-right owners at other media are not forcing a center-right perspective; they’re basically allowing the journalists to be left-wing.
Talking about "right wing media ownership" is the standard predictable liberal response to the overwhelmingly left wing slant of print and TV journalists.
Because it’s an important factor! Some times arguments are predictable because they’re relevant and worthwhile
"Some owners potentialy being right-wing has had virtually zero evidence on journalistic output...."
Do you mean this claim to apply to the output of Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcasting network? Because it seems to me that the preferences of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, as well as the preferences of the Sinclair owners who dictate the content of TV editorials from their main office, have had more than zero effect on their journalistic output.
Maybe you wanted to restrict the "zero evidence" claim to the NYT, WaPo, and CNN?
the first two don't even have right wing owners, so the response barely makes sense on those terms
Your point on RCP 8-5 hits close to home. So many things from EPA and the White House still rely on this model when they write about climate change and no action scenarios.
It’s frustrating. Part of me thinks it’s selection effects (I am an economist. I strive to be accurate and look for data to inform rather than confirm my opinions on lots of stuff.) Lots of people who go into politics and law look to win an argument and thus seek positions that give them the strongest rhetorical positions. I think lots of people take a shortcut and just assert things they find convenient rather than do the hard work of knowing and learning.
Even when learning and knowing more would actually make them feel better about the world! It seems like some people just want to feel as bad as possible and are willing to shut out any evidence that might prompt a reevaluation.
The number of times climate doomers on Reddit get angry when I link “OurWorldInData” or cite the IPCC is far too high. Heck you got people asserting RCP 8-5 is a lie because it isn’t bad enough.
Bringing this back to media, you got common phrases like “climate crisis” and framing climate change as an existential struggle all the time. It’s a debasement of language that both overstates and understates the real material challenges of climate change.
The number of hurricanes is unchanged over the past 150 years. But every hurricane story references climate change these days.
https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/pastdec.shtml
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/blogs/beyond-data/can-we-detect-change-atlantic-hurricanes-today-due-human-caused
I think the generally window in which hurricanes occur has broadened. There is still work being done on severity and frequency. The biggest problem is low N so you cannot easily use statistical methods to identify causality. We know mechanically if you add more energy into the system that hurricanes will get more intense and will be more likely to occur (unless our models are wrong.) Heck the IPCC describes the cyclone intensity and frequency relationship as a likely hypothesis, not an established relationship with a bounds of confidence.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_SYR_LongerReport.pdf
Of course most journalists don't care because they opted out of taking math and statistics in college... they just care about 'maximizing attention.'
Unless you had countervailing factors which, given that hurricane formation is complex, isn’t out of the question. The key is for the assertions not to get ahead of the science.
Which makes the period we have to plan for disruptions and damage broader which increases the economic cost of hurricanes. It isn't existential. Though maybe the storm surge is existential for places like Miami?
FWIW -- It's not just warm water. It's also the pressure system that creates vertical wind shear. Just look at what happened during the 2023 season:
"Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures were at record warm levels during the peak of the 2023 hurricane season. These anomalously warm waters and associated low pressures in the tropical Atlantic were likely the reason why El Niño did not have its normal teleconnection to above-normal shear across the tropical Atlantic. Model output included in our forecast methodology was helpful in predicting this anomalous behavior in advance."
Come on, man. Get real. It's raining in Los Angeles right now and I just realized my roof has developed a leak. If that's not powerful evidence of climate change, I don't know what is.
I posted this last time the topic came up - but the industry I currently work in relies on hurricane forecasts. We work with Phil Klotzbach out of CSU: (1) he's awesome and (2) I'm just going to "trust science" here that we don't know what effect climate change will have on hurricanes in the US. If anyone tells you differently - they have an agenda.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3184/a-force-of-nature-hurricanes-in-a-changing-climate/
https://tropical.colostate.edu/Forecast/2023-11.pdf
I have a number of family members who listen to way too much NPR and still think that 8.5 is a likely temp rise. I've had them freak out over a very low quality paper that implied that something was being mismeasured and so all our models are off and anything can happen. A lot of the doomerism is obviously absurd and clearly contradicted by the things that are happening right now, but they swallow it because NPR is supposed to be a reliable news source. It's not good for their mental health to listen to this constant doomerism, which sometimes crosses into misinformation (don't get me started on the whole gas stove thing) but NPR is so ingrained in people's brains as something that educated liberals listen to that they're never going to give it up.
I was reading your comment and thinking Yeah and also the gas stove thing! and then you said it. After that flurry of fear-mongering articles, I actually had neighbors ask me how I liked my electric stove bc they heard gas stoves were bad. Plenty of people just believe what the “trusted” Doomer News tells them.
(Not sure what my overall point is except the gas stove thing is like Exhibit A for shit reporting driven by left wing journalists.)
Wait, is it misinformation that gas stoves contribute more to climate change than electric?
No, it’s misinformation that gas stoves make you much more likely to become asthmatic and develop COPD (though it’s probably not misinformation that they do contribute slightly to those things).
Yes. I think this claim was being pushed by climate activists who want to get rid of gas appliances for climate reasons but the claim was that they were a major health risk - and my understanding is the evidence for that is weak.
Counterpoint: contra Will Stancil it's not because of Twitter bad vibes and lack of attention to the "great" Biden economy people are unhappy.
Liberals over my adult lifetime have succeeded in building the more hyper individualistic, secular, irreligious society they always wanted where people are free from traditional natural attachments such as to family members they don't like, "heteronormativity", to the gender they were "assigned" at birth but now feel uncomfortable with...this kind of society doesn't actually make most people happy.
You could forget the meaninglessness when Obama was president and social media and the possibilities of great "online communities" were still a new and exciting thing or later when joining the anti Trump "resistance" made an otherwise pointless life meaningful and purpose driven.
But in the Biden years ennui has set in. It's all so pointless. Talking about all the wonderful improvements Biden has given on Medicare and the low unemployment rates or hard fought gains in carbon emissions just doesn't scratch where most people... including left wing people... itch. Something is just not right. Something seems missing.
And I will gently suggest the traditional things that make most people happy... getting married, watching your kids grow up are hard to replace with politics and online entertainments. It's a sad world where fewer and fewer people get married and have families. My $.02.
The supposed link between persecution of outliers and the happiness of the many was wrong when you were using it to justify persecution, and it’s still wrong now that you’re trying to blame contemporary unhappiness on the absence of persecution.
Nobody on “the left” made it so you can’t get married or watch your kids grow up. We might have made it so that people who were already never going to do that, don’t have to get beaten into a pulp by you for their deviance.
Social pressure to conform rarely rises to the level of "persecution".
It very very commonly does and that’s what the liberals Mr Pete is complaining about were fighting, persecution to make people conform.
Exactly. It’s a strange world we live in where being more accepting of your neighbors means being less likely to talk to your neighbors. Why can’t we try to have both at the same time?
Conservatives blame godless liberals for something that is only Steve Jobs fault.
republicans are still more likely to be married but marriage is an increasingly "elite" milestone where highly educated people are more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced so IDK.
The ones who do report higher levels of happiness I think. There were lots of successful center left people in Obama years too. But now marriage, kids and owning a home to build your life around seem to a lot of people like luxury goods they may never attain.
So your theory is that, rather than this being a hangover from inflation of a kind we’ve seen before, the way polls measure people’s happiness and satisfaction has totally changed in the last 15-20 years? I will take the other side of that action.
Can you point to one person who supports "the free market idea that if you’re poor you should just get sick and die?"
Because I don't believe anyone who supports open markets in heathcare has ever embraced that position.
Well, the Republican Study Committee doesn't say it such explicit terms. But their 2024 budget includes steeeeep per-capita cuts to Medicaid that would likely kick millions off health insurance. That means people with disabilities and low-income parents forgoing healthcare because they can't pay for it.
Right, that's exactly my point. Nobody believes in letting people without health insurance die, yet the liberty has been taken to claim as much based on a surmise.
And I'm not sure how such needless hyberbole really adds credence to the argument.
People absolutely can die when they lose access to health insurance. I don't necessarily know what Kevin Hern believes or doesn't believe, so just judging the policies he and the GOP are putting out there.
This is from 2009, but a Harvard study found 45,000 annual deaths due to lack of insurance: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE58G6W5/
I'm generally in support of a government funded universal health care service. That being said, I'm hesitant to describe not covering people with government insurance as wanting them to die. By that perspective - if someone dies because they freeze to death or overheat to death its because the government doesn't provide heating and cooling for people.
I think helping people avoid preventable death is a basic function of government, yes.
I don't think the claim is that conservatives on health care want people to die. I think the claim is that they don't care enough about not having poor people die to pay for their health care. If you are poor and dying, the motives or enthusiasm of folks for you death isn't that material.
An actually randomized study found that expanding Medicaid in Oregon had no effect on physical health (but a small positive effect on mental health and finances): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Medicaid_health_experiment
When people use the term "free market" you believe they're generally referring to ideas from the RSC, Kevin Hern, or a typical Republican?
Because I don't think anyone associates free markets with that person or those people.
A stronger argument would be to show how some like Michael Cannon, who does openly advocate for free markets, wants people without insurance to get sick and die.
Or, even better yet, you could drop the hyberbole and discuss whether the market solutions he advocates for leads to better healthcare outcomes or not.
That would be a more sensible thing to do instead of just lazily making blanket generalizations about people's positions.
It's an election year, so Matt's writing sometimes includes these types of rhetorical flourishes. Best to just read past them to his usually spot-on analyses.
Personally I wouldn't consider a mischaracterization as a rhetorical flourish but I understand your point.
You forgot the Republican debate where the audience yelled, “Let ‘em die!”?
Eh, I'm a lower-case "L" libertarian and I think that's a fair characterization of the free market position on health care. I mean, yes, health care should become cheaper, and, yes, we can presume there will be charities to help cover health care expenses for low-income people, but there's ultimately nothing backstopping that for anyone who can't find sufficient charitable support.
Paul Ryan
This is the effective position of any person who does not believe in government provision of healthcare to the poor.
That they hope charity will backfill the need is essentially the same thing as progressives who believe in radically reducing the production of hydrocarbons to reduce climate change and just hope that the costs are born by corporations and not median consumers.
I'd bet Hanania does, but I don't read him frequently enough to know that with certainty. He's libertarian enough to support "If I don't lose X pounds you can legally kill me" contracts, and he's at minimum social darwinist-adjacent, so it doesn't seem out of character. I suspect a whopping 0.5-2% of the country would unironically endorse "If you're poor you should just get sick and die."
>Can you point to one person who supports "the free market idea that if you’re poor you should just get sick and die?"<
Grover Norquist, one of the father's of contemporary, libertarian-hued Movement Conservatism in the US, wants to shrink the public sector to a size small enough to drown in a bathtub. Now, not being an idiot, he's not going to *openly* call for the premature deaths of uninsured Americans; he's just pushing for policies that would nonetheless achieve such an end. I call that "support."
Needless to say even the mere repeal of the Affordable Care Act (never mind deep cuts in Medicaid/Medicare)—one of Trump's public positions—would result in an increase in deaths. You can't slash healthcare problems and not expect at least *some* years of lost life.
Anyway, I think you're conflating the support of policies that result in more deaths with the "open" support of the *result* of such policies. But the two are distinct, and most politicians—and most conservative policy analysts—aren't stupid enough to say the quiet part (the results of their preferred policies) out loud.
should hospitals be forced to treat people who cannot pay because that is what we have and it is essentially universal health insurance, just done very shittily and financed by safety net hospitals.
All those GOP politicians that refused Medicaid expansion and the parity payments to state hospitals effectively endorsed the "if you’re poor you should just get sick and die?"
I don't believe the "free market" framing because information asymmetries and the acuteness of much medical care prohibit/limit the existence of a "free market" in healthcare.
I chose to interpret that as the "theoretical free market idea", which Democrats care _more_ about pushing against than Republicans, and are willing to give up more to get.
Priorities and tradeoffs, not goals and values.
Me. I think if we had a free market in healthcare this would be as common a problem as is “people who cannot afford food would starve” because costs would come down and most of the big spending is marginal anyways, but yes I think the free market opinion entails that if you cannot pay for care or receive it as charity you will not get care.
Obviously “then poor will be dying from percentage illnesses all the time due to fiscal constraint” is a prediction I do not think is accurate and the quotes frame g is maximally uncharitable, but it’s not really a slander of the libertarian view IMO.
It was 2015 or 16 so I can’t find the link but there was that group of Trump supporters who confronted a terminally ill silent protester outside a Trump rally (I think), and afterwards were shaken to realize they had mockingly told him it wasn’t their job to keep him alive.
There are definitely Republican voters who are gleeful at the idea of kicking people off government health care that they otherwise have no means of affording.
Healthcare is like the one policy area where campaign donations and interest group desires actually have an effect on Republican politicians. Conservative policy wonks at like AEI never discuss things like lifetime limits (they focus on how to make America's healthcare system more like those found in Singapore and Switzerland), but insurance companies would surely love the world to come back where lifetime limits are allowed. And that is the world Republican politicians most advocate for, even implicitly.
I gotta be honest, this is kind of a strange column to me. I truly don’t know how you can look at absolutely insane amount of coverage (multiple banner headlines on New York Times and absurd number of op-eds) for weeks on end about Claudine Gay and Harvard and conclude that young left wing journalist are setting the agenda at left of center publications.
I say strange because your personal annoyance at young super lefties (will get to that in a second) is overshadowing what I think is a very correct take of yours; the particular incentives of left of center media and right wing media is putting Biden and Democrats at a huge propaganda disadvantage. Right wing media is partisan in a way (most) mainstream media is not which means they exercise message discipline in ways that left of center media doesn’t. But then I think you made what is actually a pretty profound point; there is very particular incentives (especially financial) for left of center news to emphasize issues that divide the Democratic coalition.
Weirdly, you don’t take the next step to tie the incentives that cause left of center media and MSM to focus on issues that divide the Democratic coalition to why so much of young far left media figures seemed to be committed to “doomerism”. Because I think you’re completely correct that doomerism is bad strategy to both win elections and get your preferred policies enacted. Something your old enemy and now frenemy Will Stancil agrees with you on which is why you two are no longer enemies. The doomers are not trying to convince hardcore Fox watchers or Fox News hosts. They are trying to fight with…well you. And it’s clearly not working. But it this fight also stems from the incentives you describe that lead to issues that divide the Democratic coalition being emphasized.
Which brings me lastly to your conflict with young lefty reporters. Because this is clearly what this is about. Reality is I can agree with you that a lot of stories seem to have some unnecessarily lefty bent (more than once I’ve read stories that emphasize how a particular policy is harmful to POC. And my first thought is often “this is like the 5th most important reason this story is a story. Why is this being emphasized”?). But because a lot of these reporters clearly don’t like you personally it’s lead you to overemphasize their power. Because it’s very clear the reporters (and probably most importantly editors) who drive the biggest stories are NOT these reporters, at least not yet. Again, please see that absolute amount of coverage* (and most important it’s slant) the Claudine gay story got.
*The DEI Times story was so revealing. Like Times at its best getting a great scoop. But also no acknowledgment of their role in helping disseminate right wing propagandists. Oh and also, can’t emphasize enough how unsurprising it is that Heather Macdonald appears to be an absolute bigot.
Because the Claudine Gay issue, like Israel and academic issues more broadly is, like climate change a fissure on the left that people and reporters on the left can argue about with people on 'their side' and therefore a perfect illustration of what he's talking about.
This is not a new thing. For years it was a pre internet rw meme, that basically every NYT article no matter the topic had the headline "women and minorities hit hardest.".
It made me laugh that even non right wing folks are getting bored with the race marxism.
Yes, the Dobbs decision was particularly devastating to transwomen, as I recall the reporting.
To be fair, I believe the reporting was that it was particularly devastating to LGBTQ individuals: https://msmagazine.com/2022/08/15/abortion-lgbtq-rights-gay-marriage-dobbs-supreme-court/ (Although it seems to me like if you have an unwanted pregnancy, and you're not a specific sub-category of "B" or "Q," then you're LGBTQ'ing wrong.)
Lesbians and trans men can still be victims of assaults that result in pregnancy. And anyone with a uterus can have a wanted pregnancy that they should not continue due to health complications.
"Lesbians and trans men can still be victims of assaults that result in pregnancy."
Yes, that's true. However, the majority of pregnancies are not the result of sexual assault.
"And anyone with a uterus can have a wanted pregnancy that they should not continue due to health complications."
Also true, but one would again expect that in a population where the overwhelming majority of pregnancies are, by definition, planned (since they can't happen naturally), that would be less likely than in a population where pregnancies can happen accidentally.
"one would again expect that in a population where the overwhelming majority of pregnancies are, by definition, planned (since they can't happen naturally), that would be less likely than in a population where pregnancies can happen accidentally." Why would that be the case, though? Planned pregnancies are more likely to be at "advanced maternal age", which is when you're more likely to see various complications for both the fetus and the pregnant person.
I guess as a queer I think it's a little much for anyone to say that needing an abortion is doing homosexuality wrong. I did IVF and I knew lesbians in the same clinic who had miscarriages and high-risk pregnancies because there are many blockers to getting pregnant as a lesbian at an earlier, less-risky age.
Also tells you that Matt's sort of unstated claim that reporters being educated and super lefty is some new phenomenon is probably wrong. Yes back in the 50s, reporting was more of a working class pursuit. But journalism being dominated by left or left of center college graduates has been a truism for quite a while now. I mean, Matt was one of those people who middle aged reporters dunked on for being bloggers as losers who didn't leave their parents basement.
Matt's not making that claim. What's new is that as newsrooms have shrunk, the smaller, younger workforce is more exclusively educated and lefty than before. Not that it never has been those things to some degree
I think you should pause and re-examine where you think the center is for the median American. Your argument sounds to me like saying that Matt as a center leftist has more power and influence than the average member of the DSA and therefore isn't really slanted left. But Matt is significantly to the left compared to the median American!
I'm not actually sure this is true. I mean given that Matt has staked his views on an enormous number of issues, yes there are probably some where he has views to the left of the median voter. The social issues that exploded into consciousness in 2020 and 2021 and where public is likely against the policies of the far left are issues that Matt is also against too. He's been pretty big proponent that hiring more cops cops is good. He's called out Robin DeAngelo and Tema Okun as hucksters. Then there's what got him trouble at Vox. But other issues? Expansion of Child income tax credit, support for Obamacare, more spending on green energy etc.. These are all issues that have majority support*. As Matt has noted, it's not majority of public is against tackling climate change, most are actually supportive of tackling climate change. The problem is that support is an inch deep.
Which actually gets at the real median voter position...status quo bias. Which is categorically different than where you stand on the issues. I will continue to repeat one of my favorite anecdotes from the 2010 town halls. A man (supposedly) got up to tell his Congressman "Keep government out of my Medicare". I mean chef's kiss perfect encapsulation of median voter brain. But to give this guy some credit, if you really were to interrogate his views I suspect what's he's really saying is "I like thing just the way they are. Don't things up".
*depending on question wording of course. Which is also party of the problem trying to gauge how the public feels about a particular issue or policy. See GOP mistake in thinking overturning Roe vs. Wade would be a political winner for them.
I agree with your point about status quo bias, but if you don't think Matt is left of center... I would be willing to bet that Matt is to the left of the median Democrat, much less the median American. 47% of people voted for Trump in 2020 and a majority might do so in 2024! Is he getting a ton of left leaning voters?
"Whig Men and Tory measures" Google this phrase and the first thing comes up is an Atlantic blog post from someone we know. But it describes really what I'm getting at. Namely there appears to be a lot of voters who vote Republican but don't actually agree with a lot of the GOP platform.
In fact there seems to be real evidence that focus groups don't actually believe GOP plans, especially economic measures and essentially are incredulous they could be real. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/focus-groups-show-voters-often-question-facts-gop-plans-rcna99228
I think maybe the ultimate example of this phenomenon is recent referendums on minimum wage and abortion restrictions. Over and over again, voters even in pretty red states have voted against measures severely restricting abortion and also raise minimum wage. And yet continue to vote for far right reps who continue to try to ban all abortion and in places like Missouri literally try to ignore voter referendum.
I mean there is a flip side to this. Until quite recently there were more registered Democrats than Republicans in West Virginia. And it's pretty clear in the 80s and 90s there were still tons of people voting Democrat without actually agreeing with much of the platform almost out historical habit and history as much as anything.
But what I'm getting at is I think I'm on pretty firm ground in saying 47% of voters voting for Mitt Romney in 2012 is not actually indicative of 47% voters agreeing with Paul Ryan's budget plans that undergirded is campaign.
What defines left or right is often pretty jumbled - see for example free trade and immigration. It also spans across multiple quadrants to say the least. That being said, Matt was more supportive of Sanders in 2020 than Biden. Does that sound like someone to the right of the average Democrat much less American?
Matt's case for Bernie Sanders was that despite his rhetoric Bernie has shown himself to be much more pragmatic in his past. He was pretty anti-gun control for a long time. And he worked with the police union when mayor of Burlington. It was also clearly a bit of a tongue in cheek "O'Malley would have won" argument; Bernie clearly reaches a subset of voters that may not be inclined to vote normally.
In a way, Matt's endorsement serves my point. He was supporting (or least made the case for Bernie. I think Matt noted that it was basically an assignment from Vox that one writer had to make the case for each viable Presidential candidate on the Democratic side) Bernie while not actually being all that supportive or enthusiastic about Bernie's policies in part because he knew that a) Bernie is a lot more talk than action b) Veto points being what they are, very unlikely Bernie's full agenda gets close to being fully enacted. In other words, supporting a candidate despite not actually being in support (or at least full support) of that candidate's preferred policy preferences.
To me since local newspapers are basically dead there has been a big shift in the basic focus of media coverage. The purpose of the local newspaper was to inform people of what's going on in the community. In some cases this would involve uncovering scandals but in other cases this was like covering what's going on with local industry, sports, etc.
Now the bent of like every news outlet seems like it's some version of attempting to speak truth to power. This means basically negative coverage of the US government, the Democratic and Republican parties, the technology and finance industries, etc. etc. All these entities clearly have flaws but if you read like Pro Publica it is constantly skewering the tech industry but does it actually help you understand the tech industry? https://www.propublica.org/topics/technology I don't think any of the pieces here or the collection of them together shows an understanding of the benefits and dilemmas posed by big tech.
I think if you reading a trade publication like The Information which does not shy away from critical coverage of Google gives you a much better picture of what is actually going on and what the stakes are precisely because it is connected and broadly sympathetic to the people in power in the tech industry. You see a lot of analysis of who's in charge of what, what companies are working on and focusing on, etc. etc. So the thesis of the coverage is we will be critical of the tech industry when warranted because it has tremendous potential.
The way political coverage has been trending seems fairly nihilistic by comparison, where speaking truth to power is done just via rampant negativity without a thesis of why people in power are acting the way they are or what citizens should do about it. I think this essentially causes folks to tune out any media they disagree with...
But this is the downside of the media essentially operating by and for donors. People who donate and subscribe to publications essentially for political validation are not really looking for boosterism about their local economy or industry or whatever. They are wanting "impact" journalism even though the very fact that they (partisans/billionaires/people with specific agendas, whatever) are sponsoring it means it will not be all that impactful outside their peer group.
Academia is also very bought into the "truth-to-power-is-the-only-truth-worth-speaking" mode of thinking. I wonder if there's a common source or if the latter is causing the former
I think writing in terms of power analysis essentially allows you to launder opinion into what would otherwise be a straight news piece. The idea that "punching up" is OK is so well accepted at this point as long as your article can be remotely framed as "punching up" it's not even considered to have a thesis, it's just neutral.
Seems like a core problem of political hobbyism. I’m actually not that interested in the price of insulin except as a specific example of the quite interesting question of how to organize a health care system in big picture terms.
I can get super into something like this when it’s personally effecting me or is part of my job but it’s a lot to expect people to be excited enough to spend time sharing it and risk confrontation with rl people.
We clearly have a segment of people on the left - and many of them seem to have actual power- who are addicted to stirring up messy drama essentially for social media clout. I was listening to the 538 podcast this morning and they were discussing the incredible PITA the New Hampshire Democratic primary has turned into - for entirely self- inflected reasons. For those who blessedly have tuned this drama out- someone at the DNC got it in their heads that it was bad white supremacy something something that the first primary in the country is New Hampshire because it is a virtually all-white state and a place more diverse (like South Carolina or Nevada) should be first instead. So the DNC tried to get New Hampshire to move their primary later, but it turns out that New Hampshire actually has it in their constitution that they have to be first so they wouldn’t / couldn’t do it. So the DNC retaliates by saying that any delegates won in NH won’t count at the convention. The DNC thinks that should be the final nail, but Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson (the only Dems challenging Biden) realize that even if they don’t get delegates, they WILL get media attention if the do well in NH so they still stay in. Belatedly, the Biden campaign realizes this too, but it’s too late to get on the ballot, so now they have to organize a last ditch WRITE-IN campaign for the SITTING PRESIDENT and fly in people like Ro Khanna to campaign for it so he won’t be humiliated.
And all for what? Yes, if non-white voters are being disenfranchised in the Democratic primary system that would be bad and we should fix it. But that’s clearly not the case - recall that it was the largely non-white voters of South Carolina who basically picked Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee, over the preferences of the mostly white voters of Iowa and NH. (For the record, I’m glad they did- I don’t think Buttigieg, Sanders or Warren would have beaten Trump in the general). The issue should be power, not which state goes first, and at least in the Democratic primary system, non white voters appear to have plenty of power - and thank God they do!
When it’s all said and done I guess it isn’t that big a deal but Biden has enough real problems he has to deal with - why are we generating additional drama for no reason?
"someone at the DNC got it in their heads that it was bad white supremacy something something that the first primary in the country is New Hampshire because it is a virtually all-white state"
Or maybe it's that the DNC is in the business of winning elections and needs to highlight primaries that help it select candidates that best increases the chances of that happening.
The smart move would be to order primaries by competitiveness - start with Georgia, Arizona, Michigan and end with California and Wyoming. You could keep the small-state bias by sorting by absolute vote margin rather than % margin.
But in either case NH would be way before SC based on 2016 and 2020 votes. NH was much more competitive than SC in both of those elections, so I'm not sure why you'd move it from a tossup state that you need to win to a state that Democrats are almost certain to lose (at least if the election is close).
A couple big problems with this idea:
States have to agree to move their primaries. Not sure many states would agree when it comes to this idea.
Constantly moving when your elections are is bad for turnout levels/democracy as a whole. Low-info voters at least kind of know "election day is in March" but if it moves every few years? Unhelpful
Many states want to have their presidential and congressional primaries at the same time, and so they do not want to go super early in the election cycle
I guess it might be impractical for various reasons and I hadn't considered the turnout issue.
But I still think it's a good idea in theory. The pros, ie selecting a candidate who will be competetive in swing states seem to outweigh the cons you mentioned, imho. I don't know how many people know their usual primary day, for example, and it's not uncommon for states to change their order now, but ymmv.
Maybe it could be tried with a pool of states that would be willing to agree to it? The current order had to be negotiated somehow, and reorderings continue to occur and get negotiated for, so why not tilt things in this direction if the DNC can?
Instead they seem to be prioritize "blocks" of voters - so SC's selling point is that "it will tell you what Black voters think". But that assumes SC Black voters are identical to Michigan or Arizona Black voters, and I'm sure they're not. If you're in the business of winning elections, you want to know what swing voters think wherever and whoever they happen to be. So just start with the swing states (if you can)
One other problem with your idea (and to be clear, I'm not trying to criticize in particular...I don't think it's the worst idea, I'm just not sure how much better it is than status quo) is that there's no real evidence swing *states* have a disproportionate number of swing *voters* so I don't know what this accomplishes.
Prioritizing states with large numbers of swing voters, I see the case for, but that would include (for example) North Dakota which had a massive swing in 2016, while excluding Georgia where there are fewer swing votes than average, and much just comes down to racial turnout discrepancies.
Swing voters tend to be non-college, non-evangelical, and non-Black so the best idea would probably be to have the lower-education non-Southern states go first under that idea. Places like...Iowa!
What it accomplishes is allowing the states that will decide the "real" election to decide the primary. I'm not really thinking about this in terms of swing voters - I don't how you would count them before the election begins and marginal, low-turnout voters are also important
What I am saying us that we can reasonably predict which states will be competitive battlegrounds in 2024, and a simple way to ballpark that is to look at which states were close in 2020 and those should be the priority. If the general election is most likely to be decided in Nevada, Georgia and Michigan and Arizona, then why not have the key primaries in those key states rather than trying to find piece together their profiles from similar states
I looked it up, I think a good First Four based on having states from different regions that also have a lot of swing voters could be:
West Virginia
Nevada (lots of swing voters, and pretty diverse)
Indiana (Midwest appeal...can substitute Michigan easily if you prefer a purple state)
Delaware (you can't have no states with a decent number of Black voters or it looks bad, and this also gets you a blue state)
What exactly is the problem they are trying to solve? In 2020 Iowa was the first contest, New Hampshire was the first primary and both were ultimately irrelevant. The state with the real power was South Carolina, which made a different choice and the Democrats won. What is the problem here? Why are we doing this?
The problem is that it puts an incredibly idiotic amount of pressure on primary candidates to please voters in two largely irrelevant states. The media coverage of those two states is just stupid, but impactful. So we have truly idiotic policies like ethanol subsidies that wouldn’t exist otherwise.
Ethanol is a very good point, but that wasn’t how the latest push to delay New Hampshire was sold- it was all about racial representation (because that’s what gets the clicks!) Your other point about candidates being forced to spend time in unrepresentative states is also good, but if we keep having situations where places like South Carolina overturn the earlier states it may resolve itself with candidates minimizing the time they spend in Iowa/New Hampshire or skipping them completely.
Counterpoint: it's a kind-of-fun tradition? And I can't imagine ethanol subsidies persist solely because of the Iowa caucuses.
I’m from Iowa. It is a tradition every election cycle to extract ethanol guarantees from all the candidates for president. Even died in the wool opponents of that kind of subsidy always agree. It’s viewed as essential to being competitive in Iowa, which is viewed as essential to being competitive in the primaries at all.
Now that Iowa is deep red and unlikely to matter to a national election again in my lifetime, I’d prefer it be ignored entirely in the primaries. But the nature of our primary system coupled with the way media and donors treat it means it is hugely impactful.
Good news for you. Trump might have just killed the caucuses. He essentially did nothing to compete and won handily.
Yes, this is basically the question that I've brought up over and over again when anyone complains about the primary calendar going back literally decades: who do you contend would have been the BETTER final nominee that would have resulted with a different primary calendar for any election going back to 1972? And no one will even begin to engage with that question even though literally the only case for changing the primary calendar is wanting to try to get candidates nominated who are more likely to win the general election than the candidates getting nominated under the current primary schedule.
Personally, the only Democratic primaries where I think changing the schedule would likely have changed the final nominees were: 1988 (I think Jesse Jackson could have been the nominee if Iowa and NH weren't first) and 2008 (Clinton would have been more likely to be the nominee if primary states were front-loaded). But nominating Jesse Jackson in 1988 probably results in the Democrats losing at least as badly in the general election as with Dukakis and arguably even worse (I think you would have seen something approaching a Reagan '84 scale win for Bush). And while Clinton would probably have defeated McCain in 2008, I don't know that it would be by any bigger margin than Obama did.
If the goal of each party is to win in swing states, the obvious way to order the primary is to simply sort all 50 states from smallest to largest margin of victory in the prior general election. For 2024, that would mean Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin get to first, while Wyoming and West Virginia go last.
But, of course, instead of doing it the logical way, they have to look at it through a mixture of tradition and checking the box on all the ethnic groups. But the irony is that the purported purpose of starting with South Carolina (giving black voters more influence) would happen anyway if you start with Georgia, but with the voter organization done for the primary being in a state that will actually matter in the general.
Yes, but would be a complete mess. Unless you had ranked choice voting.
Agree with the points of this column re left-wing vibes... But I think it is worth noting that there IS symmetry in both sides pushing super-negative world views. The entire media industry unfortunately benefits from tales of "omg the world is in danger - tune in tomorrow to see what happens next."
Also I think Ukraine getting attention is better for Biden (unlike student loans). First of all it is the most important issue right now, even if people are "bored". Secondly, aiding Ukraine is pretty popular compared to a lot of left-wing priorities. Thirdly, Ukraine getting more attention is better than Israel-Palestine because it is an issue that mostly unites rather than divides Dems. Finally, and most importantly, the gap between the Dem position and MAGA position is very stark on this issue and it divides Republicans, which is an electoral benefit for Biden. Both lefties and Trump can't defend their anti-Ukraine position coherently, so they look foolish, and anything that makes Trump look like a wimp is a benefit. I kind of wish Biden and Ukraine defenders would emphasize the practical danger that a total Russian victory would bring over the "democracy vs. authoritarian" rhetoric (it would still be bad if Ukraine was the corrupt dictatorship its detractors call it!) but maybe that rhetoric does play better, idk.
This article makes some sense, but I wonder about Matt's theory of effective propaganda.
Matt's theory seems to be more or less about policy:
What the media is doing -- "Biden's student loan forgiveness plan is awesome and will reduce racial inequalities by X% blah blah blah"
What the media should do -- "Biden's plans to reduce drug prices are awesome and will increase life expectancy by X% and lower healthcare costs by Y% blah blah blah"
I'd consider an alternative theory based on the visceral feeling people get from reading news:
What the media is doing -- "You're all terrible white supremacists unless you convert to full-on progressive zealotry. Also, we speak for Joe Biden and the Democratic party. Vote Biden!"
What the media should do -- "America is generally a good country and we like its populace. We believe the Democratic party will be better for the American people. Vote Biden!"
Which one is it? I'm torn.
Matt seems to consistently overrate the value of policy in the discourse, e.g., claiming that Trump won in 2016 because he said he wouldn't touch Medicare and Social Security. But as much as I wish it wasn't so, most people don't seem to pay much attention to the nuts and bolts of governing, and consistently reporting on it is probably a fast track for a media company to bankruptcy (or at least irrelevancy).
Yes, this is a particular conflict between Matt the policy wonk and Matt the Shorpill guy.
To be clear, when I say "should," I'm taking the perspective of someone who wants to be a propagandist for the Democrats (rather than taking my own perspective on how society should operate).
Unfortunately, the Democrats seem hung up on “saving democracy,” rather than focusing on their kitchen table accomplishments, including Medicare, infrastructure projects and student loans. And it doesn’t help when the mainstream media simply echo that nebulous approach.
Second thought of the day:
There is a reason the NYT pitchbot has salience. Matt nails it on the head.
The NYT Pitchbot's schtick is more arguing that the NYT excessively tries to bothsides issues too much, and that its columnists (and also non-NYT columnists--not even Matt can escape its wrath) aren't sufficiently left wing enough and often provide what it deems to be clueless and dumb takes that don't adhere to what it deems to be the clear and obviously correct left wing position.
My take from the pitchbot is that the NYT always undersells Democratic accomplishments or frames good things as bad.
Just took at look at it now, and the recent tweets continue to be plenty of "both sides" mockery, and a huge string of Old Takes Exposed style mockery at the NYT for taking Ron DeSantis seriously, which seems what I would expect.
Really interesting column. It denies my preferred interpretation, which is that most journalists are fools. Am I mistaken?
“Fools” is a bit off, I think. Miseducated may be closer to the mark.
Yeah, kinda harsh. I tend to overreact to the tone of arrogant condescension. I guess journalists are *supposed* to tell you stuff you don't know, so that tone is hard to avoid.
I liked Nassim Taleb's idea of the Noise Bottleneck (here is a short write up - https://fs.blog/noise-and-signal-nassim-taleb/). Basically, it is not so much the journalists as it is the fact that we are all fools and overconsuming information just makes us more foolish. It explains why some really intelligent people I know, who listen/read the news all day (on both the right and left) are often painfully misinformed.
Thanks, I'll take a look at it. Certainly true that we're bombarded with too much and nobody can process it all. However I agree with Matt that media bias is real, widespread, and flagrant, and while my irate comment that they're a bunch of fools is unhelpful and basically silly, I don't see how noise can explain a tendency toward monolithic reactions.
Most people are fools.
If you live long enough, wisdom may be visited upon you.
Most people can be foolish*
Everyone is foolish at many things, that's what makes us human.
Many, not most.
Interesting perspective. One I hadn't heard before.
The feeling I seem to get from Matt lately is that he thinks that the shortcomings of the progressive movement as well as the failings of Democratic Party at large are going to sink Biden's chances of victory in 2024, handing the election (at least the electoral college win) to Haley or worse, Trump.
If he is correct, then Democrats are probably going to spend some time in the wilderness. If that is the case, and assuming Trump & Co. aren't successful in instituting permanent authoritarian rule, then I really hope that this time in the wilderness brings progressive & moderate Democrats back to reality for when they cycle back into power in '32 or '36.
We Dems really need a new way to think about politics and who our constituency is; which is really similar to the older pre-Obama consensus. But mostly we need new leaders who understand this and are able to communicate in a way that doesn't alienate the progressive left or centrist swing voters.