Quote:I’ll give you a few genuine examples of how the media plays games with race, using my hometown paper of record, the L.A. Times (the paper with the fourth-largest circulation in the U.S.), as a case study. In July 2002, two Inglewood, Calif., cops were accused of roughing up a black gentleman. The Times trumpeted the story—two white cops beat an innocent black dude. Except that one of the cops, Bijan Darvish, was Persian. His LAPD file read “nonwhite/Persian.” Times ombudswoman Jamie Gold admitted to me that calling him white violated Times policy (“officers must be described as they are in their police file”), but she sent me several paragraphs of text arguing that Persians are white whether they admit it or not. Essentially, her argument was “we violated our policy, but we didn’t lie.”

Quote:Another example is a front-page Times story from 2002 about a plague of black and Hispanic pedestrian deaths. Blacks and Hispanics were being run over at “disproportional” rates. Were racist L.A. drivers targeting people of color? As enticing a plotline for a 1970s blaxploitation film as that may be, there was a problem: In the article, the figures of black and Hispanic pedestrian deaths were shown individually, while the white and Asian figures were lumped together. When I requested the complete figures from Times writer Hugo Martin, it turned out that whites were not being spared pedestrian hit-and-run deaths, but Asians were hit by cars at such an abnormally low rate that by combining the Asian stats with the white stats it gave the impression that both races were mysteriously safe from being struck while crossing a street (yet another example of Asians throwing off a curve). Again, a ginned-up “blacks and Hispanics are being victimized” story, but not as the result of an outright lie. Rather, just a crafty combination of otherwise accurate figures. Pure artistry.

Quote:For the Times editors, this was a disaster. Thompson was black; Happe was not just white but blond. There’d be no finagling their way out of telling the story of an unimaginably brutal black-on-white crime that involved rape and torture. Unless, of course, they simply decided not to tell it.

And that’s exactly what they did. They sat on the story. The front page of the metro section the day after police released the details to the press was devoted to a whimsical human-interest story about people in Altadena who keep llamas as pets. The Happe murder and the clear and present threat to every woman in L.A. went completely unmentioned. I called ombudswoman Gold to ask why the story was being suppressed. Even Gold, the ever-obedient cog in the Times machinery, was dumbfounded by the omission, calling the story “such a huge thing that would’ve been in the public’s interest to have published” (you can hear her voicemail message here).

(10-31-2015 05:40 PM)HeartOfDixie Wrote:  And here a lot of us were thinking that yellow journalism at the turn of the last century was bad.

(11-01-2015 10:36 AM)bullet Wrote:  I still remember this from my freshman year of college. TA asked us what our major was and why we chose it. The girl who was a journalism major said without any sense of morality, "I want to be a journalism major so I can manipulate people's opinions."

(11-01-2015 05:50 PM)olliebaba Wrote:  

(11-01-2015 10:36 AM)bullet Wrote:  I still remember this from my freshman year of college. TA asked us what our major was and why we chose it. The girl who was a journalism major said without any sense of morality, "I want to be a journalism major so I can manipulate people's opinions."

My brother was a columnist for the local fish wrap and sometimes he would write falsehoods and when I would question him he would call it "writers right."

(11-02-2015 08:28 AM)miko33 Wrote:  

(11-01-2015 05:50 PM)olliebaba Wrote:  

(11-01-2015 10:36 AM)bullet Wrote:  I still remember this from my freshman year of college. TA asked us what our major was and why we chose it. The girl who was a journalism major said without any sense of morality, "I want to be a journalism major so I can manipulate people's opinions."

My brother was a columnist for the local fish wrap and sometimes he would write falsehoods and when I would question him he would call it "writers right."

With all the information available from the web, news outlets can no longer control the news to the extent that they used to. Most people think of the LA Times as a worthless newspaper.

Quote:Many people are already familiar with the concept of confirmation bias, which is the tendency for people to seek out arguments that support their existing opinions. It turns out that we’re not only addicted to seeking information that confirms our biases, we’re also willing to tolerate really weak arguments to support our opinions. So weak, in fact, that if we’re tricked into thinking our own arguments come from a stranger, we’re likely to reject them.

A recent paper in the journal Cognitive Science explored this “selective laziness of reasoning,” finding that people really are quite sloppy with their own arguments. The laziness is selective, though—when we’re assessing the arguments of other people, we’re actually inclined to be pretty tough, especially when we disagree with their conclusions.