A New Book Details the Damage Done by the Right-Wing Media in 2016

[Roland99]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-new-book-details-the-damage-done-by-the-right-wing-media-in-2016?mbid=social_facebook

The two sides are not, in fact, equal when it comes to evaluating “news” stories, or even in how they view reality. Liberals want facts; conservatives want their biases reinforced. Liberals embrace journalism; conservatives believe propaganda. In the more measured but still emphatic words of the authors, “the right-wing media ecosystem differs categorically from the rest of the media environment,” and has been much more susceptible to “disinformation, lies and half-truths.”

...

The core of the book is the study of how that right-wing ecosystem works. According to the authors, false stories are launched on a series of extreme Web sites, such as InfoWars (the home of Alex Jones), “none of which claim to follow the norms or processes of professional journalistic objectivity.” Those stories are then transmitted to outlets such as Fox News and the Daily Caller, which, according to the authors, “do claim to follow journalistic norms,” but often fail in that function when it comes to tales from the Web sites. Notably, the authors write, “this pattern is not mirrored on the left wing.” There are no significant Web sites on the left that parallel the chronic falsity of those on the right, and the upstream sources do follow traditional journalistic standards, and serve “as a consistent check on the dissemination and validation of the most extreme stories when they do emerge on the left, and have no parallels in the levels of visibility or trust that can perform the same function on the right.”

How do the authors prove their case? The most persuasive sections of the book concern case studies of stories that did, or did not, go viral in these politically disconnected universes. Consider two stories that emerged over the course of the 2016 Presidential campaign: in one, Bill and Hillary Clinton were involved in acts of pedophilia, which included the abuse of Haitian refugee children and visits to an orgy island—preposterous claims for which there was no shred of evidence. In the other, Donald Trump supposedly raped a thirteen-year-old girl, in 1994—something that he was accused of in a lawsuit filed in 2016. At first, there was great interest on the left in the Trump story. There were five times as many Facebook shares of the most widely shared article about it (1.25 million) as of the most widely shared story about the imagined Clinton pedophilia. But all that chatter was followed by near silence in the liberal and mainstream media, as the story failed to survive the most basic fact-checking scrutiny. (Trump denied the allegations; the lawsuit was subsequently dropped, refiled, and dropped again.) As the authors write, “the presence and attention of both journalists and readers to diverse sites was enough to enforce a hard constraint on the ability to disseminate politically affirming falsehoods.”

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Please add the name of the book to your post. Then people don't

Have to click to find it.

[Roland99]

2. Ah. Yes. Thank you.

a provocative new book by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts that will be published next month by Oxford University Press. The book’s title, “Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics,”